I realize this is already a problem for other jobs, which require working with SAAS, but it seems odd to me that now some developers will fall into this "helpless" category as well.
Serious answer: I can write code manually, but it feels like a waste of time. I'll just go for a walk to synthesize my ideas if a service was down, and I don't think not writing actual code for a day is a huge problem. So focus on health and maybe even talk to humans.
We usually try to figure out how to build reliability/redundancy in step with what we require to function as a society under most circumstances without taking outsized losses.
When things go worse than anticipated, we take the hit, try to recover and maybe learn to strengthen the system afterwards. I would rate us roughly okay-ish at that, mostly because I don't know what to compare it to, since we are the only species to do it at this level to my knowledge.
What do devs do when Github or Gitlab is down?
AWS? GCP? Azure?
Or whatever Atlassian product they're using.
Plus, most devs do a bit more than just produce lines of code.
"Well, what do you do when the power goes out?", he asked.
"I go home, just like you would.", I said with a smile.
He paused for a moment and nodded, "you know, you're absolutely right".
Even the engineers at these AI companies can't use these LLMs to fix an outage when there is one. Especially SREs.
But if one has to just sit there and "wait" for the outage to subside then perhaps the kitchen timer just went off and declared that these "developers" are cooked.