I'll give a recent example: the past month I had been using Codex cloud and it was working great writing Rust modules. Suddenly last week they made a few changes and everything went to shit, couldn't get a single good result out of it. Same text box, same prompting, same model, totally different results because they changed the cloud tool's resource limits.

So whereas before my debugging time would have been spent in Rust docs looking up traits and such, these days I feel more like an AI therapist trying to figure out why it's not feeling up to task on any particular day. It can be anything from regular service outages to geopolitics that on any given day my workflow is fucked up.

In my before-AI workflow, I was never restricted from compiling Rust code because of concerns that Cargo is a national security threat. So you really have to broadly scope the notion of "reliability" with these AI tools; it's much larger than whether it can give a good output but whether it can do so consistently enough to depend on.