4 ms·

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny, head of Claude

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code Reliability is a direct reflection of the quality of the underlying infrastructural code. If even Anthropic, the company with the world's best agentic vibecoders, has horribly unreliable infrastructure, it really says something about the quality of the world's best agentically produced code.

dsmurrell 3mo ago
I wonder how they fix things when Claude is down.
- wsatb 3mo ago
  Based on this outage: not very well.
- blensor 3mo ago
  This is ( or will be in the future ) a surprisingly relevant issue
- AlexB138 3mo ago
  I would bet that they have inference setup for internal use on a separate system from the customer-facing production environment. The same way telemetry infrastructure needs to be run separate from normal production systems, so you aren't "blind" when you need it most.
- mysterydip 3mo ago
  maybe they ask a secondary agentic system to fix it. will that be the future of “redundancy”?
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
  lol probably use their dev or qa Claude environment to fix prod
- rdtsc 3mo ago
  "Gemini, fix my Claude infra"
hombre_fatal 3mo ago
Meh, this is the "must be the veganism" fallacy: if someone knows you're vegan, then any ailment you might have, no matter how ubiquitous in the population, must be somehow due to your vegan diet and no more details are required. Except now it's the "AI did it" fallacy where if you know a company uses AI, even infra scaling issues must be due to AI, and if you had just used less or no AI, you would have been spared even though that has never been true. The usual response to this goes something like "well they made claims that AI is good" therefore anything short of perfection supposedly debunks the claim.
- gls2ro 3mo ago
  This is not like that. This is literally they saying they are letting their LLM run wild(ish) and seeing the status.claude.com we can see the result. This is a case where the outcome is the direct result of the engineering practices like the ones they describe. PS: Yes I use Claude, Coded, Amp and Cursor agents every day so I am not saying here LLMs are not valuable. LE: They did not made claims that "AI is good" they made claims that developers/computer engineers are not needed anymore in the near future. Thats is a stronger claim and has a direct relation with a product they have which needs computer engineering (yes infra counts too) and which seems to be down more than we expect as a good quality bar.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    You just said "it's not the 'must be veganism' thing, it's the 'must be veganism thing'" Unless you have inside knowledge of their infra ops and management tools, it is just guessing and blaming veganism. For all we know it could be tools from Nvidia or anyone else failing under massive load. It could be the veganism. Some things are. Leaping to it as the only possible explanation for every ailment is exactly the fallacy.
    - gls2ro 3mo ago
      No. We dont need metaphors like that with veganism (which touches ideologies also) when talking about engineering and a company that promotes out loud that engineering is done. I have not stated anything. I just replied to a metaphor which is not needed cause here we talk about engineering problems handled by engineers in a tech company. I give you something else where this line of thought could be wrong: culture beats (and destroys) engineering practices unless regulated by law. In this case yes this is not because of LLMs but because of company culture. Still hard to know where the line draws because Anthropic talks about solving computer science for good as in humans need not apply.
MattGaiser 3mo ago
On the other hand we are also willing to buy it, so reliability is arguably not as valued a good as people assumed.
- matltc 3mo ago
  Some of us are unsubscribing, what with the coming face scans/enshittification/downtime/throttling...
brookst 3mo ago
Is there any indication these errors are related to Anthropic-written code as opposed to operational issues from the fastest-growing infra buildout ever? Layer-wise, the app is pretty far removed from request routing to GPU pools.
- organsnyder 3mo ago
  This is almost certainly a software issue, though. Even if it's due to scaling, they still built a system that failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully.
  - MontyCarloHall 3mo ago
    Right. If this were truly a pure scaling issue, I’d expect the interface would offer an archive.is-esque “Claude is at capacity; your prompt is #XXX/YYY in the queue; estimated time remaining: ZZZ seconds” Instead, the whole system just shits the bed, catastrophically.
    - SoftTalker 3mo ago
      But such messages would suggest that Claude has engineered limits, which isn't what the market wants to hear. Completely falling over and being unavailable is just another Tuesday on the internet, will be forgotten by the weekend.
      - georgemcbay 3mo ago
        > being unavailable is just another Tuesday on the internet, will be forgotten by the weekend. This is true when you have like one failure a year, but Anthropic is starting to look a lot like github lately when it comes to uptime. After a certain point the reputation for unreliability starts sticking to you, especially when you position yourself as an indispensable tool for completing work people need done.
        matltc 3mo ago
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> If even Anthropic, the company with the world's best agentic vibecoders... But that's really not what they have. They have AI experts who are creating incredible LLMs. Everything else is more than meh: Claude Code is really bad. Such a turd would never have gained any traction if it wasn't for the LLMs behind it. I use LLMs to code daily (Claude Code still, mind you, for I didn't take the time to switch yet) and these modesl are both amazing and pathetic. If you don't verify everything they output, they do the absolute craziest thing imaginable. One example is I got an Anthropic model notice a "pattern" in range bound integer values. I had them range bound between, e.g., 0xCAFE0000 and 0xCAFEFFFF. And at some point a comparison/validation was needed and instead of doing an integer comparison the Anthropic model went ballistic: instead of doing an integer comparison it converted the numbers to a string, then started doing substring matching on "0xCAFE" and went even more "expert" by verifying at which position the match was happening. All that while explaining why it couldn't possibly fail. Why did it do that? Very likely because, in a comment, it saw "0xCAFE..." as a string. And the thing saw a pattern. Can you believe it? There's a pattern. So it must light up connections. We've got a pattern! Now amount of kludge, hidden pre-processing, hidden post-processing is fixing the "quality" of the code produced by something that, instead of doing an integer comparison, converts things to string and then does substring searches and indexes computation. There's no fixing that. Yesterday: had to use three guard clauses before pushing data... Two of the three "logic gates" (as the model would explain they were, which is kinda right) he got right. The third one: same thing... It was planning to go ballistic, introduce countless lines of code, insane abstractions, to make a test that was solved with a one line timestamp comparison. It's because it does things like that that the people who explain that they don't code anymore are delusional if they think this gives, as of today, quality code. It's like that other dude who was happy to produce 37 K LOC per day and counting. > ... it really says something about the quality of the world's best agentically produced code Oh it is totally shit code. But if you monitor everything and vet everything they do, it's helpful. I find these LLMs way more helpful at finding the source of bugs (not fixing them: finding them, which is 90% of the job anyway) and at acting like rubber-ducks then at writing code. Claude Code sucks. Claude Code CLI sucks. Their only "solutions" to all problems is to create VMs, headless browsers, and resort to incredible hacks (the infamous "game loop" that modifies the characters output by the LLM is just shameful) etc. to try to hide the misery. It's miserable kludges everywhere. And the only reason these miserable kludges are not entirely falling apart is because they rest on the shoulders of actual giants: projects like Linux, QEMU, etc. that were not vibe-coded. It's sad to have useful tools (the models) and to make such poor use of them. I'm pretty sure that, in the end, it's just like open-source powering the entire world by now: we'll have open-source projects like Pi and then newer ones that are going to come out and fix the mess we have now. And they're not going to be 100% vibe-coded by people whose jobs is "to write loops".
rvz 3mo ago
He is a salesman at this point and is not talking to you. He is talking to the investors who want to vibe code loops to waste tokens on building slop to get rid of you. Goes to show how fake this industry has become when VC dollars have flooded it. Somehow it is fine to vibe code infrastructure or security because someone (with a clear vested interest) wants you to spend more tokens at their casino because that is how they "win" at the casino (which they work at). Except in reality, this part of software is critical and irresponsible to 'write loops" and we all know that he doesn't believe what he is saying.
- nomel 3mo ago
  It's very very clear they're eating their own dog food, in a product space built on tech that didn't really exist publicly 5 years ago, to the success of billions, that people increasingly depend on. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I can't fathom the intense negativity or perspective of failure here. Don't use it. Maybe wait a few more years. If it's not valuable/useful, then not using it, while everything matures, will not be a problem.

dsmurrell 3mo ago

I wonder how they fix things when Claude is down.

wsatb 3mo ago
Based on this outage: not very well.
blensor 3mo ago
This is ( or will be in the future ) a surprisingly relevant issue
AlexB138 3mo ago
I would bet that they have inference setup for internal use on a separate system from the customer-facing production environment. The same way telemetry infrastructure needs to be run separate from normal production systems, so you aren't "blind" when you need it most.
mysterydip 3mo ago
maybe they ask a secondary agentic system to fix it. will that be the future of “redundancy”?
qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
lol probably use their dev or qa Claude environment to fix prod
rdtsc 3mo ago
"Gemini, fix my Claude infra"

hombre_fatal 3mo ago

Meh, this is the "must be the veganism" fallacy: if someone knows you're vegan, then any ailment you might have, no matter how ubiquitous in the population, must be somehow due to your vegan diet and no more details are required. Except now it's the "AI did it" fallacy where if you know a company uses AI, even infra scaling issues must be due to AI, and if you had just used less or no AI, you would have been spared even though that has never been true. The usual response to this goes something like "well they made claims that AI is good" therefore anything short of perfection supposedly debunks the claim.

gls2ro 3mo ago
This is not like that. This is literally they saying they are letting their LLM run wild(ish) and seeing the status.claude.com we can see the result. This is a case where the outcome is the direct result of the engineering practices like the ones they describe. PS: Yes I use Claude, Coded, Amp and Cursor agents every day so I am not saying here LLMs are not valuable. LE: They did not made claims that "AI is good" they made claims that developers/computer engineers are not needed anymore in the near future. Thats is a stronger claim and has a direct relation with a product they have which needs computer engineering (yes infra counts too) and which seems to be down more than we expect as a good quality bar.
- brookst 3mo ago
  You just said "it's not the 'must be veganism' thing, it's the 'must be veganism thing'" Unless you have inside knowledge of their infra ops and management tools, it is just guessing and blaming veganism. For all we know it could be tools from Nvidia or anyone else failing under massive load. It could be the veganism. Some things are. Leaping to it as the only possible explanation for every ailment is exactly the fallacy.
  - gls2ro 3mo ago
    No. We dont need metaphors like that with veganism (which touches ideologies also) when talking about engineering and a company that promotes out loud that engineering is done. I have not stated anything. I just replied to a metaphor which is not needed cause here we talk about engineering problems handled by engineers in a tech company. I give you something else where this line of thought could be wrong: culture beats (and destroys) engineering practices unless regulated by law. In this case yes this is not because of LLMs but because of company culture. Still hard to know where the line draws because Anthropic talks about solving computer science for good as in humans need not apply.

MattGaiser 3mo ago

On the other hand we are also willing to buy it, so reliability is arguably not as valued a good as people assumed.

matltc 3mo ago
Some of us are unsubscribing, what with the coming face scans/enshittification/downtime/throttling...

brookst 3mo ago

Is there any indication these errors are related to Anthropic-written code as opposed to operational issues from the fastest-growing infra buildout ever? Layer-wise, the app is pretty far removed from request routing to GPU pools.

organsnyder 3mo ago
This is almost certainly a software issue, though. Even if it's due to scaling, they still built a system that failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully.
- MontyCarloHall 3mo ago
  Right. If this were truly a pure scaling issue, I’d expect the interface would offer an archive.is-esque “Claude is at capacity; your prompt is #XXX/YYY in the queue; estimated time remaining: ZZZ seconds” Instead, the whole system just shits the bed, catastrophically.
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    But such messages would suggest that Claude has engineered limits, which isn't what the market wants to hear. Completely falling over and being unavailable is just another Tuesday on the internet, will be forgotten by the weekend.
    - georgemcbay 3mo ago
      > being unavailable is just another Tuesday on the internet, will be forgotten by the weekend. This is true when you have like one failure a year, but Anthropic is starting to look a lot like github lately when it comes to uptime. After a certain point the reputation for unreliability starts sticking to you, especially when you position yourself as an indispensable tool for completing work people need done.
      - matltc 3mo ago

TacticalCoder 3mo ago

> If even Anthropic, the company with the world's best agentic vibecoders... But that's really not what they have. They have AI experts who are creating incredible LLMs. Everything else is more than meh: Claude Code is really bad. Such a turd would never have gained any traction if it wasn't for the LLMs behind it. I use LLMs to code daily (Claude Code still, mind you, for I didn't take the time to switch yet) and these modesl are both amazing and pathetic. If you don't verify everything they output, they do the absolute craziest thing imaginable. One example is I got an Anthropic model notice a "pattern" in range bound integer values. I had them range bound between, e.g., 0xCAFE0000 and 0xCAFEFFFF. And at some point a comparison/validation was needed and instead of doing an integer comparison the Anthropic model went ballistic: instead of doing an integer comparison it converted the numbers to a string, then started doing substring matching on "0xCAFE" and went even more "expert" by verifying at which position the match was happening. All that while explaining why it couldn't possibly fail. Why did it do that? Very likely because, in a comment, it saw "0xCAFE..." as a string. And the thing saw a pattern. Can you believe it? There's a pattern. So it must light up connections. We've got a pattern! Now amount of kludge, hidden pre-processing, hidden post-processing is fixing the "quality" of the code produced by something that, instead of doing an integer comparison, converts things to string and then does substring searches and indexes computation. There's no fixing that. Yesterday: had to use three guard clauses before pushing data... Two of the three "logic gates" (as the model would explain they were, which is kinda right) he got right. The third one: same thing... It was planning to go ballistic, introduce countless lines of code, insane abstractions, to make a test that was solved with a one line timestamp comparison. It's because it does things like that that the people who explain that they don't code anymore are delusional if they think this gives, as of today, quality code. It's like that other dude who was happy to produce 37 K LOC per day and counting. > ... it really says something about the quality of the world's best agentically produced code Oh it is totally shit code. But if you monitor everything and vet everything they do, it's helpful. I find these LLMs way more helpful at finding the source of bugs (not fixing them: finding them, which is 90% of the job anyway) and at acting like rubber-ducks then at writing code. Claude Code sucks. Claude Code CLI sucks. Their only "solutions" to all problems is to create VMs, headless browsers, and resort to incredible hacks (the infamous "game loop" that modifies the characters output by the LLM is just shameful) etc. to try to hide the misery. It's miserable kludges everywhere. And the only reason these miserable kludges are not entirely falling apart is because they rest on the shoulders of actual giants: projects like Linux, QEMU, etc. that were not vibe-coded. It's sad to have useful tools (the models) and to make such poor use of them. I'm pretty sure that, in the end, it's just like open-source powering the entire world by now: we'll have open-source projects like Pi and then newer ones that are going to come out and fix the mess we have now. And they're not going to be 100% vibe-coded by people whose jobs is "to write loops".

rvz 3mo ago

He is a salesman at this point and is not talking to you. He is talking to the investors who want to vibe code loops to waste tokens on building slop to get rid of you. Goes to show how fake this industry has become when VC dollars have flooded it. Somehow it is fine to vibe code infrastructure or security because someone (with a clear vested interest) wants you to spend more tokens at their casino because that is how they "win" at the casino (which they work at). Except in reality, this part of software is critical and irresponsible to 'write loops" and we all know that he doesn't believe what he is saying.

nomel 3mo ago
It's very very clear they're eating their own dog food, in a product space built on tech that didn't really exist publicly 5 years ago, to the success of billions, that people increasingly depend on. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I can't fathom the intense negativity or perspective of failure here. Don't use it. Maybe wait a few more years. If it's not valuable/useful, then not using it, while everything matures, will not be a problem.