I had some mundane refactoring work that I would have happily led Claude handle this morning. I shrugged and did it myself and it was fine.

If a team is so dependent on Claude that they’re paralyzed when it goes down, I’d worry that they’re in over their heads. Opus 4.6 is amazing but still has limits. You need to know what you’re looking at and how to send it in the right direction, as well as when to reject its output.

I sadly think that's where we are headed.

Try going a day or two without being in any way connected to the internet.

I honestly recommend doing so at least once per year. It's genuinely useful to notice which dependency you have and, if you want, find fallbacks.

Sounds like a dream tbh.

This is roughly like saying -

"It's weird how when internal cloud goes down, no one can function until it's back."

Any dependency is like this, it's not the first, it won't be the last.

This is true in many industries. Try to build a house without tools.

That's why AI isn't really a tool here. You can buy a new drill. If you replace all your house builders with a house factory then you're utterly reliant on the company that makes the factory.

AI coding assistants haven’t been available for very long. If someone forgot how to write code manually already then they have bigger problems.

I don’t think the house factory analogy makes sense for multiple reasons. I subscribe to multiple LLM providers and switch between them all day. I could sign up for a dozen more to provide GLM 5.1 if I wanted to as well. I can even run lesser models locally on my machine.

This is nothing like a single factory because I can switch to a new provider in minutes with a credit card.

Or you can code without AI you know? If the company that makes the factory goes down you can fall back to the previous method.

The claim is that some people have deskilled so rapidly that they actually can't. Or maybe they're new and never learned the old way.

Yeah, completely analogous. Physical tools aren't subscription-based and prone to outages. Except when they are, but that's – luckily – still something that people feel strongly negative about.

And if my IDE or compiler (or computer!) stopped working because it requires a connection to the mothership I'd be livid. But I guess the cloud-everything, subscription-everything model has successfully made people accept an objectively worse world.

Even stranger when they arguably don't function reliably even when it's "normal".

Is that really the case though?

I am pretty sure most people deep in AI tool use various LLM providers anyway.

Sounds incredible to me if that's actually the case somewhere.

Strange how whenever there is an outage in these tools a forum devoted to people better than them lights up immediately.

>It's strange to think how dependent people have become on these tools to the point where they can't function until they're back to normal.

I'm doing the work of an entire team now. I can still do the work of one person by hand, but that's not acceptable anymore.

Speak for yourself, myself and plenty of others have not made themselves reliant on third party subscriptions in order to do our jobs.