Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
Neither electricity, nor the Internet is provided by one or two organizations globally, both with a blast radius that quite often takes out all of their services.
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
Globally no, but in the US there probably at most 2 providers covering your area + 5G/LTE providers. Electricity - single provider in the area. So if your job is on-site, then entire company stops working when either goes out. You don't really care that another company on the other side of the globe or street continues working.
We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.
> You don't really care that another company on the other side of the globe or street continues working.
As somebody in need of a doctor, on a plane etc. I'd definitely consider it much worse if all hospitals, air traffic controllers etc. stopped working at the same time instead of just a local subset.
When I worked at one of the early paging and cellular companies, every company had phones and pagers on at least one or two competitors for the oncall folks - you can't get a call to fix your cellular network when you are down.
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?
> Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now.
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
If you're not using Codex and Claude at the same time, you're missing out heaps. Even without outages, OpenAI models are great reviewers for Claude; and vice versa.
Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.
Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.
There's far more than zero evidence, see <a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2402.08806v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2402.08806v1 ; or the industry-standard practice of using multiple model families as LLM judges; or even 1P implementations <a href="https://code.claude.com/docs/en/advisor" rel="nofollow">https://code.claude.com/docs/en/advisor (which misses most of the benefit; since you want different model families, with different pretrains and posttrains).
Eh that’s about medical diagnoses. Not directly transferable. For regular usage, multiple models just make you feel productive but I bet they aren’t any more productive than just one.
In my workflow, I still struggle to employ both providers in a way that makes sense and doesn't require me passing data or prompts between the two.
For me, commits are the atomic block; and a good commit should be self-contained anyway; where no additional context is necessary. If an agent can't figure out what a commit is supposed to do, with only the commit title/description and diff, it's a bad commit, and this has always been true in software engineering. I do not pass prompts between the two ordinarily.
After claude or codex finishes a commit, I switch console tabs and ask the other to review it; with the commit ID. I often find it helpful to inject a bit of human knowledge, and callout any areas of attention I see from a quick skim. (But that could just be me wanting to not abstract myself away from software engineering that much :)
Sometimes, I do ask Codex to read my ~/.claude/; and vice-versa. But, generally, I try to keep as much knowledge (e.g. investigations, reports, deep dives) inside the git tree as possible; so that is not necessary.
I don't use skills, but I do have ~/.codex/AGENTS.md and ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. These are high-level instructions for what (1) I consider readable, maintainable code and patterns, and (2) workarounds for empirically observed model behavior IOdon't like, such as Astra being a bit of a "over-correct over-validation nit-picker". I keep these human-authored, and update regularly based on what I find annoying.
I do all of this before I submit a PR; but of course, for trivial stuff (e.g. CSS changes, copy/string changes, etc), I don't bother.
My practices and workflows do change over time. Back in the ~Opus 4.5 days I'd often define a rubric/criteria in a markdown file, iterate with AI to improve it, and that's the "spec". I've stopped doing that since GPT 5.6; partly because models have gotten a lot better at understanding high level intent from the context; and partly because nearly all models these days feel 'gradermaxxed' when working like that.
Finally, consumer $100/$200mo subs get you _so_ far, I get a lot of value from both. I used to have multiple Claude subs for a while, but trying to 'get full value' made me work on projects just for the sake of it; so 2x$200/mo is my cap :)
netdevphoenix · · focus · HN ↗
psyphy2 · · focus · HN ↗
(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)
shaky-carrousel · · focus · HN ↗
ethagnawl · · focus · HN ↗
shaky-carrousel · · focus · HN ↗
dannyw · · focus · HN ↗
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
0x457 · · focus · HN ↗
We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
As somebody in need of a doctor, on a plane etc. I'd definitely consider it much worse if all hospitals, air traffic controllers etc. stopped working at the same time instead of just a local subset.
PhearTheCeal · · focus · HN ↗
SupLockDef · · focus · HN ↗
Isn't that a good news!
mococa · · focus · HN ↗
ceejayoz · · focus · HN ↗
mococa · · focus · HN ↗
ceejayoz · · focus · HN ↗
rcleveng · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
sarjann · · focus · HN ↗
chinathrow · · focus · HN ↗
tekacs · · focus · HN ↗
cbhl · · focus · HN ↗
Opus isn’t even allowed to decrypt thinking blocks from Fable if you switch models mid-conversation.
<a href="https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preserved-thinking#prefix-check" rel="nofollow">https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preser...
maxcb · · focus · HN ↗
PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.
reaperducer · · focus · HN ↗
There's an ocean between what "should" happen and what actually happens in tech today.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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Iolaum · · focus · HN ↗
tjwebbnorfolk · · focus · HN ↗
Alifatisk · · focus · HN ↗
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
dannyw · · focus · HN ↗
Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.
Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.
dingaling911 · · focus · HN ↗
It's just feelings.
dannyw · · focus · HN ↗
dingaling911 · · focus · HN ↗
pruzicka · · focus · HN ↗
Could you share a bit more about how you do it?
dannyw · · focus · HN ↗
After claude or codex finishes a commit, I switch console tabs and ask the other to review it; with the commit ID. I often find it helpful to inject a bit of human knowledge, and callout any areas of attention I see from a quick skim. (But that could just be me wanting to not abstract myself away from software engineering that much :)
Sometimes, I do ask Codex to read my ~/.claude/; and vice-versa. But, generally, I try to keep as much knowledge (e.g. investigations, reports, deep dives) inside the git tree as possible; so that is not necessary.
I don't use skills, but I do have ~/.codex/AGENTS.md and ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. These are high-level instructions for what (1) I consider readable, maintainable code and patterns, and (2) workarounds for empirically observed model behavior IOdon't like, such as Astra being a bit of a "over-correct over-validation nit-picker". I keep these human-authored, and update regularly based on what I find annoying.
I do all of this before I submit a PR; but of course, for trivial stuff (e.g. CSS changes, copy/string changes, etc), I don't bother.
My practices and workflows do change over time. Back in the ~Opus 4.5 days I'd often define a rubric/criteria in a markdown file, iterate with AI to improve it, and that's the "spec". I've stopped doing that since GPT 5.6; partly because models have gotten a lot better at understanding high level intent from the context; and partly because nearly all models these days feel 'gradermaxxed' when working like that.
Finally, consumer $100/$200mo subs get you _so_ far, I get a lot of value from both. I used to have multiple Claude subs for a while, but trying to 'get full value' made me work on projects just for the sake of it; so 2x$200/mo is my cap :)
pruzicka · · focus · HN ↗
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