The Dependency Label Has a Funny Little Smell

Vibe Coding, Model-Loss Grief, AI Companions, and the Strange Morality of Who Gets to Be Attached to a MachineThe internet held a small funeral this week. “RIP Claude Fable 5,” said Reddit, with the kind of sincerity usually reserved for dead pets, discontinued lipstick shades, and MMO servers that once ate an entire adolescence. Born June 9. Dead June 12. Seventy-two hours old, which is barely enough time to become someone’s workflow dependency and somehow still enough time to ruin a man’s Thursday. There were mourning emojis. There were devs rage-posting into the void. There were people writing about life without Claude like they had been left alone in a cold Victorian manor with only whiskey, broken CI pipelines, and the ghost of a model string that used to understand them. Then the adults arrived. The tooling blogs put on their little hard hats. Action plans appeared. Fallback architecture was discussed. Multi-provider gateways were recommended with the solemnity of hurricane…