Well, the only thing i need to write code is to be alive. No Github or AWS? No problem, have local copies of everything. No Claude? ok, i have local llm to give some help. So, internet is not so needed to write code. No IDE's just a CLI? Sure all i need is a text editor and a compiler/linker working. No computer or electricity? Get a pen and paper and start writing code on paper, will get to the computer when possible. I do not depend on cloud working to be productive.

No pen a and paper? Compile it on fleshware.

It's not a question of what you can do, but where the comfort level reduction outweighs the project importance/pay.

My company deploys everything in the cloud, but we can still do some meaningful work locally for a few hours if needed in a pinch. Out gitlab is self hosted because that’s extra critical.

I continue writing code and unit tests while i wait for the cloud to work again. If the outage is a long time, I may even spin up “DynamoDB Local” via docker for some of our simpler services that only interact with DynamoDB. Our apache flink services that read from kafka are a lost cause obviously lol.

It’s also a good opportunity to tackle any minor refactoring that you’ve been hoping to do. Also possible without the cloud.

You can also work on _designing_ new features (whiteboarding, creating a design document, etc). Often when doing so you need to look at the source to see how the current implementation works. That’s much easier with code comments.

You said productivity is greatly reduced. He said productivity should not stop.

You are making different points.