I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard…
Rather than guess at which percentage representation is more intuitive to people, the blog post suggests something more concrete:
instead of:
GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime.
We say something like:
GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).
I’ve been presenting numbers to people for a long time and I know they flip back and forth between “these percentages are abstract - what’s the actual total number?” and “how do I put these totals in perspective? What percentage is it?” The blog post suggests offering both, which is the right choice.
Also in addition 99 is interpreted in the brain very close to 100. That’s why we have prices like 99.99. Just an additional thing to your excellent reasoning about the 10x difference look.
More simply, replace uptime with downtime.
99% uptime and 99.9% uptime seem close.
1% downtime and 0.1% downtime is clearly a 10x difference.
That still isn’t as good as just saying the hours…
I dunno. As the article says, the people that use those numbers know what they mean.
The article is about how everyone uses status pages nowadays…
Rather than guess at which percentage representation is more intuitive to people, the blog post suggests something more concrete:
I’ve been presenting numbers to people for a long time and I know they flip back and forth between “these percentages are abstract - what’s the actual total number?” and “how do I put these totals in perspective? What percentage is it?” The blog post suggests offering both, which is the right choice.
Also in addition 99 is interpreted in the brain very close to 100. That’s why we have prices like 99.99. Just an additional thing to your excellent reasoning about the 10x difference look.