What happens when your entire day is depended on saas models? Anyone even considers using their locally hosted models in order to finish their work? Do you trust your local models to do any of you outstanding work? Do we even understand the code anymore to manually fix anything?
To any of the people unsure (because like so many people in tech they've probably never worked with or around an excavator) the answer is, "they do not."
A local model would be akin to a smaller and slower excavator, so yeah, grab the Basterd and grind that dirt.
No but seriously, local models can't replace them altogether, but in case of a complete outage and imminence of work that can't be postponed like resolving support tickets, then it'll have to make do without more capable models.
I was worried somewhat until it become really apparent that small models that run locally can handle 99% of technical computer crap when given a decent tool set harness and net access.
so, to answer your question more practically, during this outage a luna agent of mine fell back to a local bonsai 2 model hosted on my desktop, and the work still got done just fine, just took longer.
> What happens when your entire day is depended on saas models?
Grab a different one, unlike GitHub being down, there's far less of a moat and you can swap out Codex for Claude Code pretty easily. Or any other provider and yes including local models, though it depends on how good the ones you can run locally are.
> Do we even understand the code anymore to manually fix anything?
Assuming you are not 100% vibe coding, you should! If you are vibe coding, then you should still be able to read the code and understand it regardless. Same with making any changes, it's just code. Whether it's worth your time to do that and work manually or not, that's a different question.
If I was limited to just one cloud provider, I'd just take a few hours off and have a beverage or take a nap. Or if working in office, find other busywork.
It doesn't help that the error message was entirely incorrect, not an accurate reflection of the problem. In reality the user wasn't using any API key whatsoever.
This outage is not just Codex, right? I am just using GTP-6 Astra for some administrative prompts and it has been returning, "Error in message stream", for several minutes now.
It comes from my experience and from that of dozens of reporting users on Reddit. It's easy to dismiss one person but when dozens are reporting it, there could be something to it.
It also is no surprise that 6-Sol costs as much as 5.6-Terra. Is this mere coincidence or meant to reflect a certain computational cost? I fear the latter.
In any event, third party benchmarks (not conveyed by OpenaAI) should help. We know the joke of how OpenAI distorts the Y axis in plots to misrepresent model performance, although in this case the reality is likely worse.
No, outages is when you start experimenting with local models and catch up what's new since last outage. If you're a power user, you end up getting to play with local models every week!
unrelated but also chatgpt is super buggy, try generating an image, click stop, now wong be able to send another message until you reload, this issue has been there for months
I amusingly was doing a "cleanup" of my various harnesses when this happened. Claude Code has a /doctor command which was actually quite helpful, so I decided to swap over to Codex and ask it to do a self-analysis and give me some recommendations if there's something I need to clean up. The response was a connection issue. And so was the next. And the next.
Took me the past 20 minutes to finally check for a status page and realize I hadn't broken something. Not before I created a new project, checked the settings to see my usage numbers, closed and opened the desktop app a couple times, logged out and logged in, used my phone to see if it was a general ChatGPT outage, and generally messing around trying to figure out what I had done.
I mean, you never know... it could have been my prompt that took the whole service down. (Sorry if it was).
It easily took over 15 minutes of it being down for it to even register on the status page. The status page showed fake green for this long. This is as verified by myself and by many users on Reddit r/codex who have timed posts and comments. It is a scam.
If Reddit is more useful than a status page, then what good is a status page? A lie is a lie. 15 minutes can cause someone to reinstall their entire software stack as is documented on this page. For the sites I administer, I have immediate reporting, and I have never had a false alert.
Sounds like you've never worked in Ops. Having immediate triggers for outages will absolutely flood you with useless alerts. 15 minutes is pretty normal before alerting as there are a zillion unsolvable intermittent issues (and non issues) that can cause a loss of connection to things.
No but seriously, local models can't replace them altogether, but in case of a complete outage and imminence of work that can't be postponed like resolving support tickets, then it'll have to make do without more capable models.
Honestly an outage on a Friday is perfect. Clean up your inbox, get to the small tasks you’ve neglected and go home early.
so, to answer your question more practically, during this outage a luna agent of mine fell back to a local bonsai 2 model hosted on my desktop, and the work still got done just fine, just took longer.
Grab a different one, unlike GitHub being down, there's far less of a moat and you can swap out Codex for Claude Code pretty easily. Or any other provider and yes including local models, though it depends on how good the ones you can run locally are.
> Do we even understand the code anymore to manually fix anything?
Assuming you are not 100% vibe coding, you should! If you are vibe coding, then you should still be able to read the code and understand it regardless. Same with making any changes, it's just code. Whether it's worth your time to do that and work manually or not, that's a different question.
If I was limited to just one cloud provider, I'd just take a few hours off and have a beverage or take a nap. Or if working in office, find other busywork.
You?
I am not even excited about the expected reset because the model quality has been less than stellar.
It is documented by numerous users of r/codex and other subreddits, also it is what I see when working with it.
It also is no surprise that 6-Sol costs as much as 5.6-Terra. Is this mere coincidence or meant to reflect a certain computational cost? I fear the latter.
In any event, third party benchmarks (not conveyed by OpenaAI) should help. We know the joke of how OpenAI distorts the Y axis in plots to misrepresent model performance, although in this case the reality is likely worse.
Took me the past 20 minutes to finally check for a status page and realize I hadn't broken something. Not before I created a new project, checked the settings to see my usage numbers, closed and opened the desktop app a couple times, logged out and logged in, used my phone to see if it was a general ChatGPT outage, and generally messing around trying to figure out what I had done.
I mean, you never know... it could have been my prompt that took the whole service down. (Sorry if it was).
If Reddit is more useful than a status page, then what good is a status page? A lie is a lie. 15 minutes can cause someone to reinstall their entire software stack as is documented on this page. For the sites I administer, I have immediate reporting, and I have never had a false alert.
So much for status reporting from openai. Must have been vibe coded.