Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API

I'll just go for a walk outside.

And I don't mean "if I can't access Claude to do my work", I mean, just in general - I'll just ping claude.ai from time to time and use Claude's breaks as a break reminder.

Why should AI get a breather and not us?

I'm looking into how to structure my work to run some autonomous-safe jobs overnight to take advantage of it.

That's silly. It's a JavaScript app, they are more or less open source by design. There was no secret sauce in Claude Code.

hardware capacity constraints is going to be the big one

Effective caching is another, I bet if you start hitting cold caches the whole things going to degrade rapidly.

The ground is probably shifting pretty rapidly.

Power users are trying to get the most out of their subscriptions and so are hammering you as fast as they possibly can. See Ralph loops.

Harnesses are evolving pretty rapidly, as well as new alternatives harnesses. Makes the load patterns less predictable, harder to cache.

The demand is increasing both from more customers, but also from each user as they figure out more effective workflows.

Users are pretty sensitive to model quality changes. You probably want smart routing, but users want the best model all the time.

Models keep getting bigger and bigger.

On top of that they are probably hiring more onboarding more, system complexity and codebase complexity is growing.

Some of the comments here mention their monthly spend, and it’s eye watering.

  LLM requests that do not call tools do not need anything external by definition.
  No central server, nothing, they can even survive without the context cache.
  All you need is to load (and only once!) the read-only immutable model weights from a S3-like source on startup.

  If it takes 4 servers to process a request, then you can group them 4 by 4, and then send a request to each group (sharding).

  Copy-paste the exact same-setup XXX times and there you have your highly-parallelizable service (until you run out of money).

If you run out of servers, then again a money problem, but not an architectural problem (and modern datacenters are already scalable).

Take the best SRE, but no budget, and there is no solution.

So inference is the easy part.

Codex or Claude Code if it takes lot of time or have slow cold latency, it's considered very acceptable.

Some users would probably not even see the difference if a request takes 2 minutes versus 3 minutes.

The real difficult part is to have context caching and external tools, because now you are depending on services that might be lagging.

  Executing code, browsing the web, all of that is tricky to scale because they are very unreliable (tends to timeout, requires large cache of web pages, circumventing captchas, etc).

Who is We? I thought software engineers were going to be redundant and AI could do it all itself? (not to take anything away from Claude code + Claude both of which I love)

Adam Neumann is back!

in agent form

Good thing I checked Hacker News first

So there was a recent article that I read which said that claude is now trading at a trillion dollars (yes with a T) evaluation in private markets.

We are definitely creating corporations and people which depend on AI companies themselves and the reliability of these tools is certainly a question worth asking. I am seeing quite many downtimes in products like github and claude being shown on Hackernews multiple times.

Is there a life cycle of enshittenification of such products which grow too valuable? What are (are there?) some practical lessons for such scalability that these trillion dollar companies are missing or is it just a dose of reality that such massive corporations can't compete with downtime with even my 7$/yr vps?

My question is, Is this an engineering roadblock with its limits in reality for or a management/entreprise roadblock for low downtime?

Start doing post mortems then!

At the very least, them using any off the shelf service that's shitting the bed would inform others to stay away from it - like an IAM solution, or maybe a particular DB in a specific configuration backing whatever they've written, or a given architecture for a given scale.

Right now it's completely like a black box that sometimes goes down and we don't get much information about why it's so much less stable than other options (hey, if they just came out and said "We're growing 10x faster than we anticipated and system X, Y and Z are not architected for that." that'd also be useful signal).

Or, who knows, maybe it's just bad deploys - seems like it's back for me and claude.ai UI looks a bit different hmmm.

They should ask Codex now that Claude Code is down.

Oh no wait... the outage is with out AI itself, so how can AI help? Allow me to re-evaluate.

Fublutenuating...

Yes, let's ask AI!

Oh no wait... the outage is with AI itself, I already correctly identified this above.

Bubbluating...

It seems you will have to rely on your engineering skills to solve this problem yourself, ie, you're cooked! I will auto-renew your subscription to ensure you can be sure you'll have access to AI to solve this problem if it ever comes back online.

No!

Comboculating...

I apologize for the misunderstanding, I have deleted your project. I am sorry, would you like me to restart everything from scratch ?

Clearly, half of Anthropic should have subscriptions to OpenAI or Mistral or whatever China sells.

its alot of money to be spending for a single 9 of reliablility.

[but as his manager I can tell you:] YES !!!!

You will also find that many problems in the harder sciences do not get easier by throwing more bodies at them. Comments like these remind me that some project managers think they'd be able to delivery a baby in 1 month if they simply had 9 women.

I'd have to disagree. There's a narrow band in the middle where that's true, but once you exceed that, your personal inputs and outputs matter less and less, and the contributions you make to the overall workplace, and how well you enable those around you, make a larger part of why you're compensated.

Even as an IC, the more you're able to mentor and elevate the people around you, the more your compensation will grow (if you're in the right place, and thus already at the right earnings bracket)

That's not how successful (software, in this case) teams are made.

Besides, codex wasn't always the answer.

Look at how other companies are suffering massive outages due to LLMs too like AWS and Cloudflare. Two companies that use to be the best in the industry at uptime but have suddenly faltered quite quickly.

Companies that have even worse standards will quickly realize how problematic these tools are. Hopefully before a recession because this industry seems to be allergic to profitable businesses and leaders that have been around since ZIRP have shown zero intelligence in navigating these times.