Thinking in Public
I just had an incident where I lost my credit card, so my Claude subscription was blocked. I was frozen. I couldn't make any changes, any updates to my platforms, anything. I was fucked.
If Anthropic blows up, so do I. This is not ok and I don't know how to feel about it yet. Think losing your phone. It's gone.
Then I paid, I got my membership started again, and I'm back. Bang bang bang, with action: do this, take this action, go forward like this, bang bang bang. I felt like the super transformer. I was listening to Jay-Z and I felt unbeatable.
But without it, fucked.
My Claude subscription ran on one card. When the card was gone, the subscription was blocked, and everything I run through it stopped. That is a single point of failure: one thing sits under the whole operation and nothing else carries the weight.
Picture a bakery with one oven. The oven breaks on a Monday and the shop is closed until it is fixed. The baker is fine and the shop is still closed.
A tool you use every day needs a backup before you need it. Put a second payment method on the account. Keep copies of your files, notes and prompts somewhere outside the tool. Write down the manual version of your most important task, so you know the first three steps without it.
The same worry shows up in another form in How do you go back to normal?, about what happens to my own skills once the tool is part of every day.