When Claude Code Goes Down: A Meditation on Modern Dependency

Let me paint you a picture. It’s this evening. I’m in the zone. Fingers flying across the keyboard, that beautiful flow state where you and your AI coding assistant are one harmonious bug-squashing machine. And then, without warning, without so much as a courtesy error message, Claude Code just... dies.

Not the graceful kind of death where systems send you helpful notifications. Well, okay, they had a status page. There was technically a “we’re experiencing technical difficulties” message somewhere on the internet if you went looking for it. But in the moment? When you’re mid-keystroke and suddenly your AI copilot just stops responding? It just felt gone. Vanished. Disappeared like my motivation to manually write boilerplate code.

For approximately thirty seconds, I experienced what I can only describe as the five stages of grief compressed into real-time panic. Denial: “It’s just my internet.” Anger: “ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?” Bargaining: “Maybe if I restart everything seventeen times...” Depression: “I guess I’m just not deploying tonight.” And finally, acceptance: “Well, I suppose I could try coding like it’s 2019.”

The outage lasted about five hours. Five. Entire. Hours. In developer time, that’s basically a geological epoch. I had bugs to fix. Tests to run. Production deployments waiting. And here I was, suddenly expected to do all of this using only my own fragile, fallible human brain.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do: I panicked for another minute, then reluctantly dusted off those ancient skills we used to call “programming without an AI safety net.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to admit: it wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was bad. Don’t get me wrong. It was slow and tedious and made me feel like I was debugging with mittens on. But I didn’t spontaneously combust. My IDE still worked. My fingers still remembered where the keys were. Muscle memory is apparently still a thing.

I fixed the bug. Eventually. It just took approximately three times longer than it should have because I had to do wild, archaic things like “read the documentation thoroughly” and “actually understand what my code was doing” instead of asking Claude Code to explain it to me like I’m five.

The testing phase was particularly brutal. Normally, I’d have Claude Code help me think through edge cases, generate test scenarios, and spot the stupid mistakes I’m invariably making. Instead, I had to use my own brain to think of test cases. My own brain! Like some kind of caveman! I had to actually remember what good test coverage looks like and implement it myself. The horror.

And deployment? Well, deployment was already sorted, thankfully. But the whole process of getting there—fixing the bug, testing it properly, making sure everything was ready to ship—felt like wading through molasses. Without my AI copilot catching my typos, suggesting optimizations, and helping me think through edge cases, every step just took longer than it should have.

But here’s where it gets really pathetic. After about two hours of this manual labor cosplay, I had a brilliant idea. Claude Code might be down, but wasn’t there Claude Code web? Like, the browser version? Different infrastructure, right? Surely that was still running?

So I did what any self-respecting, definitely-not-addicted developer would do: I pulled my entire git repo into Claude Code web and just... kept working there. Yes, you read that right. My solution to Claude Code being down was to use a different version of Claude Code. I replaced my broken AI dependency with a slightly different flavour of the exact same AI dependency.

The technical term for this is “problem-solving.” The accurate term for this is “I have a problem.”

It actually worked pretty well as an interim hack, which is either a testament to Anthropic’s redundancy planning or a damning indictment of my ability to function independently. Probably both. The web version was a bit clunkier for my workflow, sure, but it beat slowly dying inside while manually parsing error messages.

The whole experience gave me a weird kind of perspective. It’s like when your phone dies and you suddenly remember you have hands and can look at things in real life. Except instead of appreciating nature, I was appreciating how much faster AI makes me at my job.

I can technically code without Claude Code. I proved that tonight. It’s like how I can technically do math without a calculator—possible, legal, but why would I choose suffering? The old ways still work. They’re just... inefficient. Tedious. The kind of thing that makes you question your career choices around the third hour of manually debugging something that Claude Code would’ve spotted in thirty seconds.

But sitting there in the dark ages of 2019-style development, something struck me. It’s been barely any time at all since AI coding assistants became genuinely useful. A few years ago, we were all coding exactly like this—manually, slowly, relying entirely on our own pattern recognition and Stack Overflow. And we thought we were pretty damn efficient.

Now? Now a five-hour outage feels like a crisis. That’s how far we’ve come. That’s how quickly this technology went from “neat party trick” to “fundamental part of my workflow” to “how did I ever function without this.”

I spent those five hours slightly inconvenienced, moving slower than usual, but still shipping code to production. A decade ago, this was just called “having a normal day at work.” Today, it felt like working with a handicap. That shift happened so fast we barely noticed it occurring.

We’re living through one of those rare moments where technology isn’t just improving incrementally—it’s fundamentally changing how we work. And tonight, in the brief absence of that technology, I got a glimpse of both where we’ve been and how far we’ve traveled.

The tools came back online. I went back to my normal pace. But I won’t forget that brief window of forced perspective, that reminder that we’re experiencing something genuinely transformative in real-time. Even if it did feel painfully slow while it was happening.