This makes me wonder: what do developers, who completely rely on LLMs to write their code, do when the service is down?
I realize this is already a problem for other jobs, which require working with SAAS, but it seems odd to me that now some developers will fall into this "helpless" category as well.
Early in my career (which started in civil engineering) I was working with a man at the very end of his, which started in the 1950s. I was the young tech-focused intern who found a way to use a computer for everything even when printed and sometimes hand-drawn plans were the standard of the day. He asked me once if I knew how to use a slide rule, which I didn't.
"Well, what do you do when the power goes out?", he asked.
"I go home, just like you would.", I said with a smile.
He paused for a moment and nodded, "you know, you're absolutely right".
Nice story. I guess it can be looked at as some sort of parable. But if I take it literally: I never had a power outage at work, but SAAS downtime happens every year (probably multiple times).
Serious answer: I can write code manually, but it feels like a waste of time. I'll just go for a walk to synthesize my ideas if a service was down, and I don't think not writing actual code for a day is a huge problem. So focus on health and maybe even talk to humans.
> This makes me wonder: what do developers, who completely rely on LLMs to write their code, do when the service is down?
Even the engineers at these AI companies can't use these LLMs to fix an outage when there is one. Especially SREs.
But if one has to just sit there and "wait" for the outage to subside then perhaps the kitchen timer just went off and declared that these "developers" are cooked.
If they're smart, they just switch to ppq.ai or an openrouter provider where they can purchase prepaid tokens from various providers with many alternative models available.
We usually try to figure out how to build reliability/redundancy in step with what we require to function as a society under most circumstances without taking outsized losses.
When things go worse than anticipated, we take the hit, try to recover and maybe learn to strengthen the system afterwards. I would rate us roughly okay-ish at that, mostly because I don't know what to compare it to, since we are the only species to do it at this level to my knowledge.
I realize this is already a problem for other jobs, which require working with SAAS, but it seems odd to me that now some developers will fall into this "helpless" category as well.