When Claude Goes Down, You Go Down: Why Reliability Is the Real Cost of Running AI at Scale Everyone talks about Claude API pricing. Token costs, rate limits, billing surprises — there's a whole genre of blog posts about it. Nobody talks about downtime. Which is strange, because for anyone running Claude in production — powering a Nexus stack, serving clients, running automated agents — an hour of downtime costs more than a week of tokens. This post is about that. About the real cost of unreliable AI infrastructure, how most setups fail silently, and how ShadoClaw was built specifically to solve the reliability problem — not just the pricing one. The Hidden Assumption in Every Claude Setup When you set up Claude — whether through the direct Anthropic API, a DIY proxy, or a managed service — you're making an implicit assumption: it'll be there when you need it. For casual use, that assumption is fine. Claude goes down, you wait five minutes, you move on. For production use? That assumption is a liability.…