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Anthropic has by far been the most unreliable provider I've ever seen. Daily incidents, and this one seems to have taken down all their services. Can't even log

Anthropic has by far been the most unreliable provider I've ever seen. Daily incidents, and this one seems to have taken down all their services. Can't even login to the Console.

boarush 1y ago
I wonder why they haven't invested a lot more in the inference stack? Is it really that different from Google, OpenAI and other open weight models?
Insanity 1y ago
Maybe they have vibe-coded their own stack! But less tongue-in-cheek, yeah Anthropic definitely has reliability issues. It might be part of trying to move fast to stay ahead of competitors.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  The tongue-in-cheek jokes are kind of obvious, but even without the snark I think it is worth asking why the supposed 100x productivity boost from Claude Code I keep hearing about hasn't actually resulted in reliability improvements, even from developers who presumably have effectively-unlimited token budgets to spend on improving their stack.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    AI gives you what you ask for. If you don't understand your true problems, and you ask it to solve the wrong problems, it doesn't matter how much compute you burn, you're still gonna fail.
  - Uehreka 1y ago
    I love how people like Simon Willison and Pete Steinberger spend all this effort trying to be skeptical of their own experiences and arrive at nuanced takes like “50% more productive, but that’s actually a pretty big deal, but the nature of the increase is complicated” and y’all just keep repeating the brainrotted “100x, juniors are cooked” quote you heard someone say on LinkedIn.
- adastra22 1y ago
  They have. Claude Code was their internal dev tool, and it shows.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    And yet even dogfooding their own product heavily, it's still a giant janky pile. The prompt work is solid, the focus on optimizing tools was a good insight, and the model makes a good agent, but the actual claude code software is pretty shameful to be the most viable product of a billion dollar company.
    - shuckles 1y ago
      What artifact are you evaluating to come to this conclusion? Is the implementation available?
      - CuriouslyC 1y ago
        A. I use it daily to take advantage of the plan inference discount. B. Let's just say I didn't write the most robust javascript decompilation/deminification engine in existence solely as an academic exercise :)
        mccoyb 1y ago
        Share, if you please.
        CuriouslyC 1y ago
        https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/arachne https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/arachne There are a lot more stuff (both released and still cooking) on my products page (https://sibylline.dev/products https://sibylline.dev/products), I will be doing a few drops this week, including hopefully something pretty huge (benchmark validation is killing me but I'm almost good to cut release).
      - rmonvfer 1y ago
ihaveajob 1y ago
Have you used Bitbucket?
- boarush 1y ago
  A core research library for MATLAB I used in a course project used to be on BitBucket, though thankfully didn't have to deal with a lot of collaboration there.
RobertLong 1y ago
All the AI labs are but Anthropic is the worst. Anyone serious about running Claude in prod is using Bedrock or Vertex. We've been pretty happy with Vertex.
cainxinth 1y ago
I've been paying for the $20/m plan from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for the past few months (to evaluate which one I want to keep and to have a backup for outages and overages). Gemini never goes down, OpenAI used to go down once in a while but is much more stable now, and Anthropic almost never goes a full week without throwing an error message or suffering downtime. It's a shame because I generally prefer Claude to the others.
- panarky 1y ago
  Same here, but for API access to the big three instead of their web/app products, and Gemini also shows greater uptime. But even when the API is up, all three have quite high API failure rates, such as tool calls not responding with valid JSON, or API calls timing out after five minutes with no response. Definitely need robust error handling and retries with exponential backoff because maybe one in twenty-five calls fails and then succeeds on retry.
  - boarush 1y ago
    Invalid JSON and other formatting issues is more towards the model behavior I would say since no model guarantees that level of conformance to the schema. I wouldn't necessarily club it with the downtime of the API.
- j45 1y ago
  A lot of people might be discovering their preference for Claude.
paulddraper 1y ago
OpenAI used to be just as bad if not worse. But they've stabilized the past 5 months.

Anthropic has by far been the most unreliable provider I've ever seen. Daily incidents, and this one seems to have taken down all their services. Can't even login to the Console.

boarush 1y ago

I wonder why they haven't invested a lot more in the inference stack? Is it really that different from Google, OpenAI and other open weight models?

Insanity 1y ago

Maybe they have vibe-coded their own stack! But less tongue-in-cheek, yeah Anthropic definitely has reliability issues. It might be part of trying to move fast to stay ahead of competitors.

Analemma_ 1y ago
The tongue-in-cheek jokes are kind of obvious, but even without the snark I think it is worth asking why the supposed 100x productivity boost from Claude Code I keep hearing about hasn't actually resulted in reliability improvements, even from developers who presumably have effectively-unlimited token budgets to spend on improving their stack.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  AI gives you what you ask for. If you don't understand your true problems, and you ask it to solve the wrong problems, it doesn't matter how much compute you burn, you're still gonna fail.
- Uehreka 1y ago
  I love how people like Simon Willison and Pete Steinberger spend all this effort trying to be skeptical of their own experiences and arrive at nuanced takes like “50% more productive, but that’s actually a pretty big deal, but the nature of the increase is complicated” and y’all just keep repeating the brainrotted “100x, juniors are cooked” quote you heard someone say on LinkedIn.
adastra22 1y ago
They have. Claude Code was their internal dev tool, and it shows.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  And yet even dogfooding their own product heavily, it's still a giant janky pile. The prompt work is solid, the focus on optimizing tools was a good insight, and the model makes a good agent, but the actual claude code software is pretty shameful to be the most viable product of a billion dollar company.
  - shuckles 1y ago
    What artifact are you evaluating to come to this conclusion? Is the implementation available?
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      A. I use it daily to take advantage of the plan inference discount. B. Let's just say I didn't write the most robust javascript decompilation/deminification engine in existence solely as an academic exercise :)
      - mccoyb 1y ago
        Share, if you please.
        CuriouslyC 1y ago
        https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/arachne https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/arachne There are a lot more stuff (both released and still cooking) on my products page (https://sibylline.dev/products https://sibylline.dev/products), I will be doing a few drops this week, including hopefully something pretty huge (benchmark validation is killing me but I'm almost good to cut release).
    - rmonvfer 1y ago

ihaveajob 1y ago

Have you used Bitbucket?

boarush 1y ago
A core research library for MATLAB I used in a course project used to be on BitBucket, though thankfully didn't have to deal with a lot of collaboration there.

RobertLong 1y ago

All the AI labs are but Anthropic is the worst. Anyone serious about running Claude in prod is using Bedrock or Vertex. We've been pretty happy with Vertex.

cainxinth 1y ago

I've been paying for the $20/m plan from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for the past few months (to evaluate which one I want to keep and to have a backup for outages and overages). Gemini never goes down, OpenAI used to go down once in a while but is much more stable now, and Anthropic almost never goes a full week without throwing an error message or suffering downtime. It's a shame because I generally prefer Claude to the others.

panarky 1y ago
Same here, but for API access to the big three instead of their web/app products, and Gemini also shows greater uptime. But even when the API is up, all three have quite high API failure rates, such as tool calls not responding with valid JSON, or API calls timing out after five minutes with no response. Definitely need robust error handling and retries with exponential backoff because maybe one in twenty-five calls fails and then succeeds on retry.
- boarush 1y ago
  Invalid JSON and other formatting issues is more towards the model behavior I would say since no model guarantees that level of conformance to the schema. I wouldn't necessarily club it with the downtime of the API.
j45 1y ago
A lot of people might be discovering their preference for Claude.

paulddraper 1y ago

OpenAI used to be just as bad if not worse. But they've stabilized the past 5 months.