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You could say the same thing about any always online software suite and it would be equally fair as we move into more agentic development workflows.

EX. Sure, you could go back to the old ways of using a drafting table for your engineering work if CAD went down but it would be exponentially slower…

Personally with my workflow I spend 30-60 minutes per Claude feature spec doc when I’m pair planning. If Claude goes down I would just prepare spec docs on my own until it came back online and then rapidly review them before calling the coding workflow.

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>You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

Precisely. Every online-only solution is a huge risk i personally do not want to take, i've always done my best to use offline-only tools.

That may restrict me from the latest and greatest, but i prefer not to be left at mercy of any corpo

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How does "CAD" go down? Sure, there are online CAD systems (onshape), but there are offline ones too (fusion, freecad)
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Matlab license server goes down, for example
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> You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

But this is the reason "serious shops" do not use always online software and tools in critical parts of the SDLC. There is a difference between influencers/people on socials promoting things vs. reality where the expectation is that things don't just stop working because there is an internet outage or some 3rd party disruption

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I would argue that it's really only toy projects that can continue in an Internet outage. "Serious shops" will be using cloud based version control, cloud based testing workflows, and most likely cloud based distribution of the software. isn't it only the little side projects you can get away with not needing the Internet for? Software long ago stopped being something one person on a computer did, today the professional SDLC includes many tools that are hosted.

Do farmers still plough fields with a Horse just in case their tractor runs out of diesel? Of course not, as technology moves on we all have to accept the inherent risks in exchange for the huge benefits, otherwise the work you do will be too slow and your job taken by someone willing to leverage the tools available today.

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> You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

Uh, people do say this thing. It is a basic factor and question asked during technology procurement. Uptime and fail states matter.

AI just seems exempt from all the questions people usually ask about relying on other people's software.

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After 1 hour you asked the question, I am reading the replies and the conclusion is: no, they cannot.
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There are dozens of competitive models that can take over the job. It's just simply a matter of getting Claude (while it's running) to generate feature-parallel multi-agent LLM configurations which can hot-swap between LLM providers in the case that Claude has an outage.
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Which nobody is doing, especially not people who vibe code products. Saying "just prepare for it" as an answer to "what do you do if", is not really enough when that "prepare for it" is very expensive (time, tokens, effort etc.).

For someone to do this, they would have to think for themselves, which I've also not seen much of in the vibe-coding space.

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agree and also not sure if they are saying claude the app/ide or claude the model
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Wait, what is "claude the model"? Anthropic's models are named versions of Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Claude, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code are their products which leverage those models. Right?
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I assume it will be similar to when a person is out sick or on vacation. Another person on the team likely could take over the work for a day, but realistically it just sits until they're is back.
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So work stops until Claude is back? What if Claude comes back and costs 10x the amount? The answer is obviously that you'll "bend over" and pay, because the AI vendor who convinced you that Claude is so great owns you, your codebase, and by extension your company now.
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Or you point your Claude code at a different LLM provider. It's not complicated and there are lots of vendors (and in the open-weights space multiple vendors serving the same models competing on price). Sure DeepSeek 4 isn't quite Opus at the moment. But it's plenty good to do the work. We've got different competing front-end tools and different competing back-end providers. No one 'owns' your company. Maybe that will change as the market evolves and one of the frontier tools become so much better than one vendor will own the market. But that's not where we are now.
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What happens when your engineer realizes they can make 10x more at another company? They leave and work stops. You then hire someone else or raise your pay to get better, more reliable engineers. The analogies keep going because AI is a tool, not a replacement. If it's a tool used by a non-technical person, so be it, but it's still just a tool.
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In such a scenario, are you assuming Anthropic has a monopoly? Or are all LLM providers callusing on prices?
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For substandard developers, yes, work stops.

I have seen many many times in microcontroller forums posts from first timers in the liking of "hello sirs i have problem please show how to do this", followed by their own reply a few hours later asking again because they were holding up, where "this" was usually something really trivial, you just needed to read the docs and the rightful answer was "did you really not try anything in 6 hours?"

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Or simple economics kicks in, price/demand all that.

If hand coding pays better there will be plenty who can still do that.

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Not really, realistically speaking it's now possible to use an agent to read code and make sensible summaries of a codebase faster than ever before, and it's exactly the thing you'd use to onboard yourself or someone else on the team.
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The OP was asking what happens to productivity when your LLM is offline, I'd assume it isn't available yo onboard anyone at that time either.

More importantly I think, if devs become dependent enough on LLMs that they just put it aside when the model isn't available, they wouldn't be able to onboard quickly or at all.

It takes experience and a pretty deep understanding of programming in your language of choice to pick up a new code base and quickly understand how it works, the architecture(s) and pattern(s) being used, etc. Those skills would likely have been lost long before a dev simply can't work without the LLM.

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AI should enhance your skills. If it's down and your first though is to buy another sub from a different vendor this might be a skill issue. (I'm afraid every day that this will happen to me btw.)
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What happens if you get up in the morning and your car won't start? Do you walk to work?
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Yes, I actually have done that.
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Username checks out.

(sorry couldn't resist)

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Claude Code CLI is just a software package, if Anthropic API is down you could always connect Deepseek/other provider API to Claude Code CLI...
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The point is that, with a sufficiently complex setup (with skills, MCPs, prompts, etc.) the difference in AI models will impact the quality of work. You might not care now, but you might care when you have 2 million lines of code and zero idea whats going on.

The point is vendor lock-in. The vibe coding community has reinvented vendor lock-in and is bound to repeat every mistake associated with it.

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Can you give an example of a skill or prompt that would work in Claude and not in the others?
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Pretty much every single detailed prompt made after trial, error, and refinement is tailored to a specific LLM. They will all perform worse used with other LLMs than a similar prompt tailored for the second LLM would perform, and at times quite poorly.
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Just use a fallback, like Codex CLI. Takes a little effort upfront to ensure your configuration is wired correctly for both harnesses, but it is pretty easy to get them 90% identical (there will almost always be some experimental / edge case features that differ across harnesses, but in my experience those are negligible in practice).
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> Takes a little effort upfront to ensure your configuration is wired correctly for both harnesses, but it is pretty easy to get them 90% identical

You don't need to put in any effort, just get Claude (Codex CLI if Claude is down) to generate the multi-harness config for you.

You sound like you might be a beginner so let me help you out with some advice -- You can get your multi-harness configurations completely identical by simply telling Claude to research the Codex spec and eliminate all feature drift between your configs. Hope this helps.

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I more meant feature-level differences. For instance, Claude Code has agent teams, and Codex CLI does not. Or for a while, Codex had "/goal" and Claude Code did not (though now Claude Code has it too). To your point, it is usually possible to polyfill these gaps either with custom code/skills/hooks or with third party plugins.
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> To your point, it is usually possible to polyfill these gaps either with custom code/skills/hooks or with third party plugins.

It's literally one prompt away. If you're worried about errors, just threaten to sue Anthropic in the prompt and the quality of the answer instantly improves by 75%.

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A local model doesn't have downtime. No you can't be as hands off with it as something like Claude, but isn't that a good thing?
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if there is 8 hours of downtime (even before AI) I take that opportunity to do other codebase maintenance, debugging, file organization, renaming all the things I said I'd rename or take a break.

pre AI if my IDE was down for whatever reason I wouldn't switch IDE's, I would do something else.

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Some agent-written tools and modules are easily the best codebases I've worked with. Documented correctly to the T with various charts and explanations for everything, "start here" guides, concepts defined clearly, and very good Git commit messages.

Naturally you can also have a LLM one-shot a 14000 line PHP monstrosity - it's up to you still, LLM or not.

The main problem is that it'll probably be a waste of time to code anything yourself if Claude is back online in 8 hrs. It's like walking to the next bus stop when you missed your bus - it won't make you get home any sooner.

8 hrs will probably be better spent reading specs or checking things with stakeholders so the next features you let Claude implement are the ones the business actually wants.

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We have 3 big competitors in the space: Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. I think they can all use the same base configuration. So it's not that we are out of options here.
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time for a day off!
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In my experience the answer is "no". If I am reviewing some slop and I ask Claude's human babysitter why this class has these constructors, they don't have any idea. Without Claude they don't understand the output at any level.
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What happens when you have a codebase made with gcc for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the assembly code?
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1. When and how would gcc go down?

2. How often do you think that happens, compared to Claude?

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You can use a local model, which will go down exactly as often as gcc will. We may still have hopeful notions of being able to understand the codebase, but the reality seems to be that the codebases we don't understand will be the ones that will win out in the market, because they'll be cheaper while still only having about as many bugs as they had when people wrote them.
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We're explicitly not talking about local models here; we're talking about Claude.
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Because you're better able to take over the codebase a local model wrote than one Claude wrote? The original question was about taking over an LLM-written codebase, it doesn't sound to me like the argument was about a codebase that Claude, specifically, wrote.
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The original question is:

> What happens when you have a codebase made with claude using this setup and claude is down for let's say 8 hours?

So: - A codebase made with Claude - Using this [Claude] setup - Claude is down

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What does it matter what the codebase is made with? If Claude is down, use Codex, or Gemini, or Deepseek. That version of the argument is just way too easy to counter.
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Brother, look at the first comment in the chain you replied to. It very specifically was about Claude.
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Well, in that case, it's also very specifically about this guy's codebase, so none of us can really say anything on this.
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GCC down? Did the AI rotten your brain that much?

How can you come up with such non sense.

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The same thing as happens if I go to sleep for 8 hours.
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Is this really a position you want to take in public with your real name and identity and everything plastered over your profile?
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What can I say, we can't all be geniuses.
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