Do you ever get so fixated on fixing something that everything else gets pushed to the side?

This happened to me on Tuesday. I stayed up til 3am trying to fix one bug. I worked with ChatGPT to debug the situation and the AI told me that what I was trying to do wasn’t possible. I dismissed it, of course, because it’s just an AI after all – what does it really know!? I turned to Google, sifting through forums…

“How could no one have run into this problem before!?”

But ChatGPT was right. It wasn’t possible. And together we had to rethink a whole new solution to the problem. Then after we worked through the new solution and got to a successful result, I was completely underwhelmed by the end result. It was just done. Nothing marvelous. Just 5 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

So what did I learn…? Trust the AI? I’m still not sure 😔 I thought writing this note would help me figure it out. But I’m just left more befuddled than I was before.

Today 20% of all websites around the world failed to load for 3 hours. That means that people couldn’t use ChatGPT, X, Uber, Canva, Dunkin, transit websites, and government websites for 3 hours.

I just think the Dunkin one is funny, because, America runs on Dunkin…

But even though some Americans actually had to drive to Dunkin in order to place their order, there’s a lot of America that relies on Cloudflare, whether they realize it or not. And I think things like this are going to happen a lot more.

Why?

Because we are automating more of our world and letting those automations make decisions with sweeping effects. The crash today was caused by a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond the expected size of entries and this triggered a crash of their systems.

It’s really exciting to see where we can go next year (and beyond). For a long time, we thought we could build a company that grew modestly and served a few core clients, but we’ve discovered that we need to grow much bigger or we’ll be crushed by a rapidly shifting economy.

Some people think that the A.I. boom is a bubble, but it’s clear that the current models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others can do a lot. They don’t have to get that much better to extend people’s skills and capabilities significantly. Even now, the technology is moving faster than it can be adopted. And that’s why we believe the best way for Red Clay Creative to succeed is to expand how we are helping people. We need to be more than just a company that builds websites.

Stay tuned for what’s next…