What happens when you have a codebase made with claude using this setup and claude is down for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the codebase?
You could say the same thing about any always online software suite and it would be equally fair as we move into more agentic development workflows.
EX. Sure, you could go back to the old ways of using a drafting table for your engineering work if CAD went down but it would be exponentially slower…
Personally with my workflow I spend 30-60 minutes per Claude feature spec doc when I’m pair planning. If Claude goes down I would just prepare spec docs on my own until it came back online and then rapidly review them before calling the coding workflow.
> You could say the same thing about any always online software suite
But this is the reason "serious shops" do not use always online software and tools in critical parts of the SDLC. There is a difference between influencers/people on socials promoting things vs. reality where the expectation is that things don't just stop working because there is an internet outage or some 3rd party disruption
I would argue that it's really only toy projects that can continue in an Internet outage. "Serious shops" will be using cloud based version control, cloud based testing workflows, and most likely cloud based distribution of the software. isn't it only the little side projects you can get away with not needing the Internet for? Software long ago stopped being something one person on a computer did, today the professional SDLC includes many tools that are hosted.
Do farmers still plough fields with a Horse just in case their tractor runs out of diesel? Of course not, as technology moves on we all have to accept the inherent risks in exchange for the huge benefits, otherwise the work you do will be too slow and your job taken by someone willing to leverage the tools available today.
I assume it will be similar to when a person is out sick or on vacation. Another person on the team likely could take over the work for a day, but realistically it just sits until they're is back.
So work stops until Claude is back? What if Claude comes back and costs 10x the amount? The answer is obviously that you'll "bend over" and pay, because the AI vendor who convinced you that Claude is so great owns you, your codebase, and by extension your company now.
Or you point your Claude code at a different LLM provider. It's not complicated and there are lots of vendors (and in the open-weights space multiple vendors serving the same models competing on price). Sure DeepSeek 4 isn't quite Opus at the moment. But it's plenty good to do the work. We've got different competing front-end tools and different competing back-end providers. No one 'owns' your company. Maybe that will change as the market evolves and one of the frontier tools become so much better than one vendor will own the market. But that's not where we are now.
I didn't realize you could swap out the underlying model used by Claude Code. Aren't all of the Claude tools tied directly to Anthropics models, their authentication and billing, etc?
I have seen many many times in microcontroller forums posts from first timers in the liking of "hello sirs i have problem please show how to do this", followed by their own reply a few hours later asking again because they were holding up, where "this" was usually something really trivial, you just needed to read the docs and the rightful answer was "did you really not try anything in 6 hours?"
What happens when your engineer realizes they can make 10x more at another company? They leave and work stops. You then hire someone else or raise your pay to get better, more reliable engineers. The analogies keep going because AI is a tool, not a replacement. If it's a tool used by a non-technical person, so be it, but it's still just a tool.
Not really, realistically speaking it's now possible to use an agent to read code and make sensible summaries of a codebase faster than ever before, and it's exactly the thing you'd use to onboard yourself or someone else on the team.
The OP was asking what happens to productivity when your LLM is offline, I'd assume it isn't available yo onboard anyone at that time either.
More importantly I think, if devs become dependent enough on LLMs that they just put it aside when the model isn't available, they wouldn't be able to onboard quickly or at all.
It takes experience and a pretty deep understanding of programming in your language of choice to pick up a new code base and quickly understand how it works, the architecture(s) and pattern(s) being used, etc. Those skills would likely have been lost long before a dev simply can't work without the LLM.
AI should enhance your skills. If it's down and your first though is to buy another sub from a different vendor this might be a skill issue. (I'm afraid every day that this will happen to me btw.)
Please resist in future :) The guidelines ask us to avoid internet tropes, precisely because they're repetitive, and more apt to make us groan than smile.
The point is that, with a sufficiently complex setup (with skills, MCPs, prompts, etc.) the difference in AI models will impact the quality of work. You might not care now, but you might care when you have 2 million lines of code and zero idea whats going on.
The point is vendor lock-in. The vibe coding community has reinvented vendor lock-in and is bound to repeat every mistake associated with it.
Pretty much every single detailed prompt made after trial, error, and refinement is tailored to a specific LLM. They will all perform worse used with other LLMs than a similar prompt tailored for the second LLM would perform, and at times quite poorly.
How well would it work to ask the working LLM to rewrite the prompt to get the best results? Do the models understand enough about themselves to do that?
Claude has a /product-self-knowledge skill, and I am sure the others have something similar. So yes, it is possible if you work with care, as necessary with all things LLM related. There are hundreds if not thousands of skills on github that were created just this way.
It's not like you aim to do it, you are just in a feedback loop improving results for the tool you are using. It is inherent in any prompt developed through iteration.
Yes, but that's also a specific luxury I can choose for myself. Definitely a fun and interesting question. At some level of reliance, people would answer "no", but there's the large middle ground (assuming similarly-frontier models are down): having a weaker(?) AI model help you get up to speed ASAP by summarizing code pedagogically, and linearizing the code read order. Basically like an AI-assisted (but manual) code review to reorient yourself.
Just use a fallback, like Codex CLI. Takes a little effort upfront to ensure your configuration is wired correctly for both harnesses, but it is pretty easy to get them 90% identical (there will almost always be some experimental / edge case features that differ across harnesses, but in my experience those are negligible in practice).
We have 3 big competitors in the space: Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. I think they can all use the same base configuration. So it's not that we are out of options here.
if there is 8 hours of downtime (even before AI) I take that opportunity to do other codebase maintenance, debugging, file organization, renaming all the things I said I'd rename or take a break.
pre AI if my IDE was down for whatever reason I wouldn't switch IDE's, I would do something else.
Some agent-written tools and modules are easily the best codebases I've worked with. Documented correctly to the T with various charts and explanations for everything, "start here" guides, concepts defined clearly, and very good Git commit messages.
Naturally you can also have a LLM one-shot a 14000 line PHP monstrosity - it's up to you still, LLM or not.
The main problem is that it'll probably be a waste of time to code anything yourself if Claude is back online in 8 hrs. It's like walking to the next bus stop when you missed your bus - it won't make you get home any sooner.
8 hrs will probably be better spent reading specs or checking things with stakeholders so the next features you let Claude implement are the ones the business actually wants.
In my experience the answer is "no". If I am reviewing some slop and I ask Claude's human babysitter why this class has these constructors, they don't have any idea. Without Claude they don't understand the output at any level.
What happens when you have a codebase made with gcc for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the assembly code?
You can use a local model, which will go down exactly as often as gcc will. We may still have hopeful notions of being able to understand the codebase, but the reality seems to be that the codebases we don't understand will be the ones that will win out in the market, because they'll be cheaper while still only having about as many bugs as they had when people wrote them.
Because you're better able to take over the codebase a local model wrote than one Claude wrote? The original question was about taking over an LLM-written codebase, it doesn't sound to me like the argument was about a codebase that Claude, specifically, wrote.
EX. Sure, you could go back to the old ways of using a drafting table for your engineering work if CAD went down but it would be exponentially slower…
Personally with my workflow I spend 30-60 minutes per Claude feature spec doc when I’m pair planning. If Claude goes down I would just prepare spec docs on my own until it came back online and then rapidly review them before calling the coding workflow.