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
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.
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.
Sure. But could it be k8s config? Could it be Nvidia Bright Cluster? Could it be load balancing?
I'm not saying Anthropic isn't to blame for a system that is literally approaching one-nine uptime; they certainly are. I am saying that jumping to the "it must be vibe coding's fault" is an emotional confirmation-bias belief, not an evidence-based belief.
I'd expect that they're also managing their k8s config and other infra using LLMs (it's actually quite good at this, at least for my simple homelab use-cases).
> failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully
You mean like returning 529s and operating with reduced QoS?
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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah to those of us who are on the know, but maybe it can be spun as "Claude adoption breaks the internet" to the consumer
Except these models are not run prompt-to-prompt. The infra has to hold the entire context.
I'm not sure if that's really an Anthropic problem you're pointing to vs a problem that their infra layer handles (Amazon, Google, whatever hyperscaler). i.e, they might be scaling quickly but they are running on top of established infrastructure.
I wonder how they fix things when Claude is down.
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.
Based on this outage: not very well.
This is ( or will be in the future ) a surprisingly relevant issue
maybe they ask a secondary agentic system to fix it. will that be the future of “redundancy”?
"Gemini, fix my Claude infra"
lol probably use their dev or qa Claude environment to fix prod
On the other hand we are also willing to buy it, so reliability is arguably not as valued a good as people assumed.
Some of us are unsubscribing, what with the coming face scans/enshittification/downtime/throttling...
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're really committed to the "no difference between datacenter hardware engineering and claude code harness engineering, they must all use the same practices, anything true for one is true for the other" bit, fair enough. It seems fairly ideological to me.
It feels to me that you are really trying hard to brainstorm root causes for their failures.
Could be a hardware issue, could be a datacenter issue. Could be anything. So it could also be a software issue right?
This is not ideology. This is talking about root causes and I replied to someone that started saying this is not because of them promoting and using LLMs to the maximum. Could be it is not because of that. But it could be because of LLMs.
Keeping a company accountable when they try to sell a service that will replace engineers is not ideology. Ideology will be to not use any company that uses LLMs. But pointing out the disconnect between the public discourse and the status.claude.com is a simple idea.
Can you tell me that all those red lines there are infra?
But it is like that. You have zero insight into the infrastructure issue. And the person quoted above is a Claude Code developer. So because this guy uses Claude generously to build Claude Code, then Anthropic's API scaling issues must necessarily be caused by his agent loops even though scaling issues plague every tech company, no less often pre-AI.
The issue is that it's a thought-terminating cliche, and it would be nice to have one place on the internet that isn't just who can post one the fastest with the most glee to the giddy seal-clapping of the audience.
Engineering practices or best practices are much more than writing code.
So not sure what we are debating here: I see first hand companies jumping full on using LLM for _everything_ for the last 6 months (of course Anthropic longer) and without guardrails and good engineering practices the number of incidents, downtime is increasing.
Look at status.claude.com - Anthropic could at any point come out and say all those are due to third party providers.
I am also not saying here Anthropic is worse than other scaleups. But they do something different: they come in front of us and tell us they have better engineering practices.
> Anthropic could at any point come out and say all those are due to third party providers.
Why can't it be simply the case that Anthropic is struggling by their own accord? Infra scaling isn't a solved problem, much less with new, complicated, ever-changing, stateful LLM requests.
Pretty much every API-service-centric company I've worked at was in some constant state of either triaging or thinking about infrastructure health, often due to the familiar cascading problems of a necessarily distributed system.
But now with the AI scapegoat, we rewrite history to pretend us humans solved infra scaling, so any issues today must be caused by AI and any related superstitions we want to tack on.
> Why can't it be simply the case that Anthropic is struggling by their own accord?
They can and it is normal. I have said it is normal for scaleups specifically at a similarity growth rate.
What we (or at least I) critique here is coming out in the world and announcing that coding is done while having a product that has a status page full with red stripes. Yes, could be infrastructure, could be third party integrations could be a lot. But a lot of what is there is software. And yes, some parts is hardware. Unless the root cause is culture. In that case as I mentioned in another comment there I give them that: LLMs cannot solve culture.
Again the difference here is that the other scale-ups with similar _scaling_ issues are not talking about how we should all just use LLMs for everything and that learning to code is not required anymore.
So I am not saying the real issue is not infra or integration with third parties. What I am pointing at is: "don't talk that you don't need engineering while you - yourself - have engineering problems that need engineering solutions and still have not solve them".
Also you are getting out of your way to brainstorm possible root causes that will let them get away with this cognitive dissonance (or is there a better them in communication). Let them do the explanation and defend their position as they are the ones attacking the computer science engineering.
> Again the difference here is that the other scale-ups with similar _scaling_ issues are not talking about how we should all just use LLMs for everything and that learning to code is not required anymore.
> Let them do the explanation and defend their position as they are the ones attacking the computer science engineering.
This once again boils back down into: because they make claims about LLMs being good, I get to make any claim I want, and if if they didn't want me to make my claim, they shouldn't have made theirs.
It seems reactionary rather than earnest.
You've accused me and someone else of "brainstorming" reasons why they might have infra scaling issues, but I'm not. I'm pointing out that everyone has them especially pre-AI, and all of those reasons are on the table, not less likely. You have done the opposite: committed to a suspicion. That is the end result of the thought-terminating cliche.
Another data point: GitHub is extremely insistent its employees maximally use AI for internal development [0], and we’ve concomitantly seen its reliability fall off a cliff in the last year or so.
[0] https://github.com/resources/insights/ai-powered-workforce-p...
>GitHub is extremely insistent its employees maximally use AI for internal development
Or it could be that GitHub saw a 14x increase in commit volume last year[0], and we've concomitantly seen its reliability fall of a cliff in the last year or so. Given that Microsoft is leasing additional space on AWS(!)[1] to handle the additional commit volume, my personal money is on commit volume growth being a bigger issue than internal use of AI.
Internal use of AI may have been an issue. Commit volume growth may have been an issue. Unless one has direct knowledge of their infrastructure issues, claiming to know is quite literally making exactly the "they are vegan, their illness must be caused by their veganism" argument the GP commenter was talking about.
[0]https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/05/04/commits-on-gith...
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-amazon-ai-c...
There’s a difference between having normal levels of difficulty and bad luck, and having people blame those on the wrong thing, vs having extraordinarily miserable quality and having people find the obvious difference. Potentially yes, they might have terrible wiring in their office or a crippling fondness for vim. But if I were their PR department I’d be talking about that if it was the problem.
If you go around bragging that you use AI for everything as part of your marketing plan, then don't be surprised that people blame you heavy AI usage when you have a problem.
Ahem...
"Vegans and vegetarians may have higher stroke risk" - https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49579820
"Vegans had a 43% higher risk of fractures overall compared to nonvegetarians, as well as higher risks of hip, leg, and vertebral fractures." - https://sniglobal.org/plant-based-diets-and-fracture-risk/
"The Impact of a Vegan Diet on Many Aspects of Health: The Overlooked Side of Veganism" - https://www.cureus.com/articles/138315-the-impact-of-a-vegan...
"..people who followed a vegan diet had noticeably low levels of iodine in their bodies, an element that is essential for growth, bones, and brain function. In addition, vegans had lower bone health scores..." - https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/press-release/vegan-vegetarian-be...
There are a lot of nutritional blind spots in vegan diets. It is a diet that requires exceptional planning and intentionality to be at a baseline of health similar to a balanced omnivorous diet.
So indeed, the "it must be veganism" is not an unfounded concern when health complications arise, in a very similar way to "it must be the AI" is a valid concern when software issues arise.
This isn't really the place for this, nor does it matter to my analogy.
But I was more getting at, say, staying out of the sun or being skinnyfat as a vegan, and suddenly you look "sickly"/"frail" when you'd be given the grace of looking like most people otherwise.
A similar analogy would be someone saying "well, of course you do" if you have any malady while having been vaccinated. My point being to bring up the thought terminating cliche of it compared to doing the necessary further analysis to link the malady with the suspected cause.
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> "Vegans and vegetarians may have higher stroke risk"
It was a lump vegetarian + vegan group with a weak CI bounded at 1.02 for 3/1000 cases over a decade. The same group also had a more robust benefit of less heart disease than meat eaters. The stroke outcomes aren't replicated in other cohorts either, afaik. But the heart disease benefits are.
> "Vegans had a 43% higher risk of fractures overall compared to nonvegetarians, as well as higher risks of hip, leg, and vertebral fractures."
The study used a single baseline questionnaire for 17+ years and looked at vegans with correctable nutrition deficiencies to see +15/1000 hip fractures over 10 years. I'll grant that a poorly planned diet, especially 30 years ago with less nutritional understanding, has worse health outcomes. Just like I wouldn't use the average American's diet to lambast an omnivore diet (compared to, say, the "Mediterranean" diet).
> "vegans had lower iodine, bone health scores" (RBVD study)
On bones: p=0.02 in 72 people with 5% less QUS score in their heel bone (not DXA nor bone density tested). No body weight mediation nor data about health outcomes like fractures, osteoporosis, and no time dimension since it was just a snapshot (cross-sectional).
On iodine: It's a surrogate biomarker from a single pee test. Study didn't look at iodine-related health outcomes like thyroid dysfunction, goiter, or clinical consequences.
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