I agree that it's an opportunity to "do it the old way", as a way to preserve the skill. I actually would like to do that regularly, like half a day every week or something.

But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...

No, and that's also not necessary. We are reliant on our systems. The correct response is to harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.

We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s

Is there not a single SaaS, cloud company or similar that your org depends on? No AWS, no Cloudflare, all internal mail servers, no Docusign, no outside inference, nothing of that sort?

And a 4th option where you have more than one AI provider

Finally having time to vacuum clean the office

Why bother? You do a little bit of work, fine, but when Claude returns all that work will be done in an instant anyway, so unless you really need results right now, just wait.

I can't imagine a construction worker saying, power is out, gotta find a way to be productive, I guess instead of the paint sprayer, nail gun and circular saw, we'll just find other ways to be productive with our hands. The same might apply to law, medicine, etc. I think we're almost there with software.

I get what you're saying and I would wholeheartedly agree 5-7 years ago but after hearing Our Lord and Savior Claude Code as the solution to all our technical problems with ever increasing fervor and intensity for the last two years, I'm gonna take the cynical route, maybe fence on office chairs, not because my code is compiling, nor my prompt is running, but Claude is down management, what do you want me to do now, actually think?

From what I hear, the project managers are having a hard time sending emails anyway. We'll call it quits, winkwink.

Friendly reminder that Microsoft has been engineering Office 365 for a while so it simply cannot interoperate with a self-hosted e-mail server or a small hosting provider's e-mail platform.

Likewise, Anthropic / Dario has been busy proclaiming why nobody except themselves should be allowed to develop frontier AI, that we need "kill switches" in all AI models, and that we need a pause / slowdown on AI development because of the threat of open source models.

Essentially, they want complete lock in to their platform, so yes, it's very appropriate to ask questions when they can't meet basic 3 9's of reliability.

I was unable to do things beyond basic banking with my bank yesterday (and today) due to this outage. It just involves making changes to a merchant processing account for a nonprofit, but the point is that normal business activity grinds to a halt when it relies on an unreliable provider like this.

Sure, like if your company’s internet is down, you can start sending invoices to customers by paper mail. Just to prove that you’re not reliant on a technology that’s made work more efficient.

tell that to people working in medical fields.

There's also the option where it doesn't affect you at all, because you do not rely on LLMs—or even just do not rely specifically on Claude—at all, and can easily do your job without ever noticing that it's down.

This concept is baffling to people who are terrible at their jobs.

Haha. Like people forgot how to develop before LLMs smh

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