I don’t think you’re quite getting what OP is describing. I work in a similar way… I am aware of all the code being written. If Claude had an outage I could write it myself. It would just take longer.

You say “all that time” babysitting AIs but in my experience it isn’t that much time, if anything the back and forth at the planning stages is more productive than when I’m doing it by myself because I’m being asked questions and having to think things through from different angles.

If you only have one AI window open, you’re doing it wrong. You task swap to another window/agent, get it working on something, rinse and repeat. I can keep 4 busy most of the time. When I task swap I also check in on what the other agents are doing to make sure they’re on track, not blocked and not struggling.

As the AI is working, I am working - reviewing, regression testing, thinking about if the currently implementation is too complex and how to simplify it etc.. I totally review and understand everything the AI is generating and often push back, have it re-do something, or do it myself. In the end I feel like the quality of the work is at a v3 level in the time it took to do a v1. The productivity and quality increase is real.

Yes get a coffee. Being able to execute 5 things at once is amazing, but it's a recipe for burnout. We have to be more careful and explicit about how we spend our time, and that means more explicit time away. If this thing makes you 10x more effective (I truly believe it can), you can afford to spend 20% less time behind the desk and more time doing whatever it is that actually makes you happy. Hopefully your manager understands that calculus.

I’ll deal with that problem when it happens

It’s a fragile equilibrium and it depends on the kind of project you’re working on. If the knowledge debt is ok then yes, it’s just like a delivery job, if the truck has an engine problem I won’t continue to deliver the packages by walking or finding and setting up an other truck from where the vehicle breakdown happens. I’ll just wait because the wait is still faster than the other solution because of the knowledge debt it’s too long to pickup by hand and continue.

Now if it’s my job then I can’t have a knowledge debt and if Claude is down I’ll continue working manually because I know and understand and can continue without having to understand a lot of logic before continuing

Whenever Anthropic is down, I switch to my other alternative AI provider. If that is also unavailable, or no more tokens left, then I can switch to my local AI. Not the same in terms of quality and speed, but good enough for an experienced engineer to still be more productive than falling back to doing it by hand. For my principal activity I do not want to be dependent on a sole provider. Besides that, I expect that the pending token price increases are going to hurt a lot of people/companies.

We're already having coffee breaks when AWS and CloudFlare are down. What's another break in the mix? If anything, we might be lucky that they're down at the same time, so we can consolidate the breaks.

What do you do when your search engine goes down?

And then solar radiation permanently knocks out the electrical grid and you what... have coffee break until society finds a new equilibrium?

You can have multiple tasks running

why not?

then demand some lack-of-uptime compensation for a lack of uptime

"All that time babysitting the AIs just to be a little faster" doesn't seem like an accurate/unbiased portrayal of what they said: "The v1 feature feels more like a v3 given the amount of iteration it already went through."

Codex has 99.98% uptime

In Soviet Russia, the AI babysits you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia

Company I'm familiar with that went all in on Codex ran out of tokens for a week and wouldn't increase their spend.

I pretty significant number of their engineers flat out refused to work. Like publicly said so. "Increase our plan or I'm taking the week off."