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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

Incredible how we can claim productivity increases when its either Claude or Github shitting the bed every other day. It must even itself out to a net neutral gain in the long term.

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I don't understand this comment. At worst, we're just back to the baseline - working without AI help.

Yes, that's what the comment means.

We are back to the baseline. The availability of our tools isn't adding anything in the long term because the productivity increase we get from the tooling is negated by the time we're back to doing it the old fashioned way due to downtime, so there is no claimed productivity increase espoused by the pontificators of the tooling.

This is an argument for returning to living in caves and hunting mammoths for fear that our modern civilization becomes unavailable for a day or two.

I'm down

Dating was so much simpler back then, too ..

The bunch of MD files in the codebase is becoming "tech" debt. It's just English prose, sure, but thousands of lines of English prose. Terse. Succinct. Difficult (if not impossible) to maintain manually without LLMs. That's not "baseline"

Developers having a troubled relationship with documentation isn't new.

At some point it won't be true. Same with handwriting, nowadays I feel like a 7 y/o when I need to write something on a piece of paper...

With atrophy to our not-AI ability to do things

I don't buy it. Literacy rates have been increasing even after the invention of text to speech.

> Literacy rates have been increasing

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...

https://literacybuffalo.org/2025/01/23/adult-literacy-rates-...

Both articles use 2017 as the turning point date. TTS is a lot older than that. It's not difficult to find data to fit the desired point if you choose a narrow enough time range. Or location selectivity - both of those are just about the United States.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...

The baseline is forever gone. Good luck convincing people to contribute to StackOverflow v2 after this.

If that 0.07% downtime was holding me back I wouldn't publicly admit that.

When that downtime happens is way more important than the amount of it. Imagine if your payroll system was down for 8 hours a month, but it just so happened to be the day payroll do their calculations?

Totally. The uptime metrics are deceiving imo. A more useful measure for a productivity tool like Claude Code is uptime during work hours for a given time zone. I strongly suspect at least for the three US time zones, we would be looking at a single nine of uptime for that measure.

Imagine your boss complaining about your productivity in the same way you blame your tools.

Imagine you told your boss you slept 8 hours a day like everyone else, so your productivity is the same. Except you sleep during working hours and everyone else is awake!

Yeah, because sleep is the only unproductive thing you can do during working hours.

'Claude for Government' is the only one with 0.07% downtime, claude.ai has 0.89% downtime and claude code 0.74% - imo, that's a lot of downtime!

over a year, 0.89% is around 3 whole days of downtime

Works out at even more days when you consider working hours. And these downtime events never happen when I'm sleeping, always smack in the middle of the afternoon when I'm working.

Claude is 0.89% downtime. Getting close to one nine.

There aren't many tools that remain useful at that rate.

Business/Office productivity tools can be productive at that rate. Core systems like ERP or arguably CRM can't, but MS Teams is probably already that low, Figma, Canva and several others could absolutely afford to be one nine before it affects their churn materially. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic make most of their profit on business use cases rather than dev use cases (likely higher revenue but less profit) so this may be what sets the standard of uptime.

Heh, I’m 5x more productive 99 percent of the time. That is still a very, very useful tool.

That's two nines. One nine would be 10% downtime.

So 95% uptime / 5% downtime is two nines?

Gotta keep my 100x developer cred, that 0.07% is everything.

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