I have used a simple benchmark for productivity related personal workflow changes that has always served me very well and kept me feeling good about what i choose to use to do my job, and that's what i now call the airplane mode test. can i use this tool completely offline, isolated from the rest of the world? growing up wifi was not ubiquitous for me. i didn't live somewhere remote, i was just an early adopter of computers and carried a laptop in school when that was considered a rare piece of kit. learning programming i always kept the philosophy of can i do this on the train while going home in mind when selecting how i wrote code. i kept man pages handy and learned how to search them properly (man -k . | grep), learned how to access the gnu info pages on my machine, and even found the glibc manual tucked away safely in my /usr/share directory which i hadn't know was there. over the years i stayed away from stack overflow and google when i was writing code as much as possible, first looking at the resources available to me on my local machine.

i now have qwen3. it runs locally on my machine. it can vibe code, it can oneshot, it can reason about complex non code problems and give me tons of background information on the entire world. i used to keep a copy of wikipedia offline, only some few gigabytes for the text version and even if that is too much there's reduced selection versions available in kiwix.

i am fine with llms taking over a lot of that tedious work, because i am confident i will always have this tool the same as all my other tools and data that i backup and keep for myself. that means its ok for me to cheat a bit here and there and reach out to the higher power models in the cloud the same way i would sometimes google an error message before even reading it if i am doing work to pay my bills. i have these rungs of the ladder to climb down from and feel like i am not falling into oblivion.

i think the phrase that sums this up best is work smarter not harder. im ok with accepting a smarter way of doing things, as long as i can always depend on it being there for me in an adverse situation.