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.

> 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.

> 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.

This joke is as old as typewriters.

There are still people who dictate their emails to a secretary.

Technology changes, people often don't.

Programmers will be around for a longer time than anyone realises because most people don't understand how the magic box works let alone the arcane magics that run on it.

Sure and there are still people who take a horse and buggy into town, but we are well past Peak Horse.

A closer analogy would be scribes and the printing press.

Except it doesn’t fit. For a while now we’ve had access to basically all the knowledge in the world and most people don’t use it.

Why would people make the effort to build a website using AI when they didn’t do so with any of the existing no-code options available.

They won’t.

Will dev be exactly the same in 10 years time? No.

Will there be more devs than there are now? 100%

Will experienced devs make bank? Yes.

Exactly. I know I’ll still be programming in 5 years. What I don’t know is whether anybody will be paying me.

"We can remove your programmers valued at millions per month for $100/month secure cloud agents"

Pretty easy sell.

Yes, it is an easy sell. But when that happens this sentence will also be viable - "We can remove the need for your company, valued at multiple millions a month" ... because after all, PMs and CEOs aren't harder to replace than programmers at that point.

Crazy how well that’s been working

The technology isn't there yet.

All signs point to it rapidly progressing towards this inflection.

Current agents are insanely good, every decent programmer using them knows this.

> The technology isn't there yet. Yes

> All signs point to it rapidly progressing towards this inflection. Not really

> Current agents are insanely good, every decent programmer using them knows this. Also not really

If you find them "insanely good" you were likely doing work that was already very repetitive or broadly implemented by others.

They have their uses, but it isn't as pervasive as people believe.

Used both, they're great for boilerplate. Anything more they breakdown.

Okay well I and many other experienced engineers disagree so the only remaining conclusion is that you're misusing the technology.

Argumentum ad populum. What kind of experience to those engineers? That matters. Another possible conclusion is that the parent was talking about use cases that are not simple web apps or marketing pages but real issues in large software.

Again you're taking your own circumstance or even patent inability and extending that to the entire technology.

You've set yourself up such that all I need to do is go "I'm developing complex veterinary software including integrations with laboratory equipment" and you're completely falsified. Why expose yourself like this instead of being intellectually humble?

You're the one who has extended their limited experience to all of software engineering.

The only reason that anyone has engaged with you here is because you're being intellectually arrogant.

Yes, exactly this.

Most of my day job is not about bashing out nextjs websites. In fact if I did that one day a year it would be a lot.

You could assign me a task from your job and I could trivially complete it using agents. However, I will charge consulting rates.

This degree of ignorance is why we don't let consultants near the actually important stuff.

What breaks down is developer patience faced with a new paradigm.