Ironically, I also had a change window last night to make some configuration changes to improve site reliability. It was a little challenging to get customer approval for both the cost & downtime for this. Let's just say... this will be a much more fun conversation to have next week, and for the account manager to have. "Yes, we'e proactively improved your reliablity, and here's why you were very smart to approve it and pay for it."

You sound self-employed.

I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

You are also a system. And, if you, as a system, don't run with Claude, you're not sufficiently hardened. People have made all sorts of helpful suggestions, like de-risking with multiple providers or just getting yourself a better Mac to run a local model.

The idea that: "No, no, we must have Claude, b/c it's the same as having a pen and paper!" is woefully naive. It's hard to attack the supply chain of pen and paper if you have a few extra reams and a few extra sticks. It's pretty easy for our geopolitical enemies to attack computers located far away from you, especially those systems are designed like fragile Rube Goldberg machines; furthermore, if we build an entire society (a system) to be productive only when we have LLMs, our issue isn't "insufficient-hardening". It's that the design is wrong.

Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.

Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.

>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s

The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.

I'm not sure if this is your intent, but this paragraph reads like satire given current real world events.

The systems you mention in your second sentence are failing at the "right response" you mention in your third, which dictates that contrary to your first sentence alternative action is necessary.

You cannot harden systems you have no control over. Societal level assurances require law and goverment regulation and enforcement. It is juvenile to pretend otherwise. If we were talking about government services, then as a taxpayer you would have some avenue to enact change.

Your only option when dealing with private companies is to try and become anti-fragile as much as possible at a personal level or at the level of your own company.

I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.

Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.

Or maybe more prescient; machine operators going home on a cold day because they can’t get their loader started.

Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.

The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!

I never did find out how they see code, but I have to imagine the right verb for them was "deciphering" instead of "reading"...

But I'm sure in a few years AI will be so good we won't have to worry about any of that anymore. After all, it's not like those systems learn how to code by reading our code, is it?

People can and do still write code. Especially in regulated industries. The internet is just full con artists and hype followers not thinking about the future at all.

Is going back to just a couple of months ago. Jesus.

It's a culture thing, if it leans "engineering-heavy", you usually have contingencies, tests restoring backups and lots of other "goodies" that gets skipped if you don't lean that way. Microsoft and similar organizations been a sales-and-enterprise leaning organization for most of its life, so of course they're not gonna think about what happens when their "always online cloud tooling" goes offline when setting things up, it's much more important to finish things quickly and have a long list of features to be able to present to customers.

I get it, we had to sign separate HIPAA BAAs with Anthropic and OpenAI - but we did sign them both, if only to be able to have access to a wider array of models.

Why are you still employed? What do you bring to the table if you’ve off loaded so much to AI that you can no longer review a pull request…?

Some people have asked me, aren't you afraid you'll make a mistake if you fix your own car? Well, aren't they afraid their mechanic will make a mistake?

I think it's good to realize that AI (famously) also makes mistakes, and not to infantilize yourself to the level of not feeling "comfortable" trusting your own thinking.

Though, I do see younger people today whipping out their phone calculator to "double check" something like a 75% increase on 120.

So basically you start login on phone, keep page open. Open laptop, click on link on laptop and you'll get a code. You type that code on your phone and that's all.

After learning to use a calculator, did it promptly become laughable to do arithmetic by hand (or even in your head) if yours broke or otherwise became unavailable?