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by danielbln 265 days ago
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.
2 comments
thw_9a83c 265 days ago
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.

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danielbln 265 days ago
> 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.

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bongodongobob 265 days ago
They exist, but you can't do serious work with them.
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