Claude in 2001: 100 dial-up searches, no GitHub, no npm, no git
kingslyj · x · 2026-10-19
A "you wake up in 2001 with a laptop, internet access and Claude — what do you build?" prompt spawned an entertaining thought experiment: @SebAaltonen imagines Claude instantly firing off 100 searches over slow 56k dial-up, burning hours yet failing to find GitHub, Stack Overflow or any of its usual programming sources. It tries to call NPM to install packages — nothing. No git either. The punchline: did anybody even teach it CVS? Beyond the joke, it's a sharp observation that today's coding agents are propped up entirely by modern internet infrastructure and ecosystems, and are nearly helpless without them.
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