For the past 36 hours, I haven't been able to log into Claude Code. Most of my team hasn't either. We've been blocked by authentication issues, and it created a very real disruption to day-to-day work.
A few things became obvious very quickly.
It's Infrastructure Now
First, AI tools have already crossed the line from "interesting hobby" to mission-critical infrastructure. This wasn't just an engineering team inconvenience, people across the organization felt it. When a tool disappears and it impacts how multiple teams work, you realize it's gone from experimental to operational.
Switching Costs Are Surprisingly Low
After 15 to 30 minutes of waiting, I moved over to OpenAI Codex and was productive again pretty quickly. The workflow was similar enough that I could keep moving.
But I still miss working with Claude.
It feels like working with two excellent engineers who just have different personalities, strengths, and instincts. I know Claude really well. I know its tone, its edges, how it responds, and how to get the best out of it. That familiarity matters and it's still my preferred way of working.
But using Codex has been genuinely useful too, especially as a second set of eyes on projects I originally built with Claude Code. I've gotten some interesting refactoring ideas out of it already.
The Uptime Conversation
When you look at the status page and see an uptime number that would feel unacceptable in most enterprise software categories, it raises a question:
What happens when your product increasingly depends on cutting-edge AI providers that are still going through hypergrowth pains?
Our customers will continue to expect the uptime, resilience, reliability, and SLAs they count on from Hi Marley, and they should. That bar doesn't move because an upstream model provider has a rough week. It's our responsibility to architect for that reality, and we do.
Model choice, failover strategy, vendor diversification, and hosting decisions aren't side conversations. They're part of how we deliver enterprise-grade software.
I have a lot of empathy for the Anthropic team. Runaway success creates operational strain, and this is what scaling pressure looks like in public.
But as builders, especially those of us serving enterprise customers, we need to design for this reality.
Claude, get well soon. I'm looking forward to having you back.