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Comment by corentin88 | Hacker News Reader

Same as GitHub or Slack downtimes severely impact productivity.

I would argue that dependency on GitHub and Slack is not the same as dependency on AI coding agents. GitHub/Slack are just straightforward tools. You can run them locally or have similar emergency backup tools ready to run locally. But depending on AI agents is like relying on external brains that have knowledge you suddenly don't have if they disappear. Moreover, how many companies could afford to run these models locally? Some of those models aren't even open.

There are plenty of open weight agentic coding models out there. Small ones you can run on a Macbook, big heavy ones you can run on some rented cloud instance. Also, if Anthropic is down, there is still Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Deepseek and so on. This seems like not much of an issue, honestly.

The small ones that you can run on a MacBook are quite useless for programming. Once you have access to a state-of-the-art model, it's difficult to accept any downgrade. That's why I think AI-driven programming will always rely on data centers and the best models.

> if Anthropic is down, there is still Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Deepseek and so on

No company is going to pay for subscriptions to all of them. Either way, we'll see a new layer of fragility caused by overdependence on AI. Surely, though, we will adapt by learning from every major event related to this.

> The small ones that you can run on a MacBook are quite useless for programming.

That really depends on your Macbook :). If you throw enough RAM at it, something like a qwen3-coder will be pretty good. It won't stack up to Claude, or Gemini or GPT, of course, but it's certainly better than nothing and better than useless.

> No company is going to pay for subscriptions to all of them.

They don't have to, every lab offers API based pricing. If Anthropic is down, I can hop straight into Codex and use GPT-5 via API, or Gemini via Vertex, or just hop onto AWS Bedrock and continue to use Claude etc.

I don't think this is an issue in practice, honestly.

They exist, but you can't do serious work with them.

How exactly can you run GitHub or Slack locally? Their entire purpose is being a place where people can communicate, they need to be centrally available on a network to have any function at all.

> How exactly can you run GitHub or Slack locally?

I meant locally as a company.

How does that solve the downtime issue? In my experience company-run instances tend to go down just as often, if not more often.

The experience may differ from company to company, but I was talking about the backup system.

> or have similar emergency backup tools ready to run locally

Developers used to share code through version control before there were websites to serve the "upstream", and they used to communicate without bespoke messenger apps.

Their former ways of doing so still work just fine.

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