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Comment by ThunderBee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

Precisely. Every online-only solution is a huge risk i personally do not want to take, i've always done my best to use offline-only tools.

That may restrict me from the latest and greatest, but i prefer not to be left at mercy of any corpo

> 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.

How does "CAD" go down? Sure, there are online CAD systems (onshape), but there are offline ones too (fusion, freecad)

Matlab license server goes down, for example

> You could say the same thing about any always online software suite

Uh, people do say this thing. It is a basic factor and question asked during technology procurement. Uptime and fail states matter.

AI just seems exempt from all the questions people usually ask about relying on other people's software.

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