[ben_w]

> How can Claude work reliably if Claude keeps going on vacation for several hours?

Not that I wish to anthropomorphise it in this answer, but businesses have managed just fine when humans do this for "lunch breaks" and "going home for the evening to sleep".

(And even mandatory meetings which should have been emails).

[sassymuffinz]

Thing is, if Dave the programmer goes on vacation or calls in sick for the day, hopefully you have a larger team to fall back on and your business doesn't grind to a halt.

No one is apparently noticing that if they build their entire business model around AI being a certain price and availability they're essentially building one giant point of failure into their productivity.

What if the price shoots up 10x or Claude goes down for a day, or what if he's occasionally drunk (hallucinating). Reliability is sometimes a more important facet of business than ultra speed and productivity.

[ben_w]

Aye, correlated failure is not something to be overlooked. Mistaking correlated risk for uncorrelated risk was a big part of the global financial crisis.

There are fallback mechanisms when the risk is per model provider (as in, "What if the price shoots up 10x or Claude goes down for a day" is a manageable concern), but I'd be more worried about the way all models regardless of provider have similar failure modes, i.e. that some tasks fail in similar ways for all models. In some ways, LLMs are collectively like Star Trek's Borg: you've met one, you've met all of them.