Series Navigation:
- Part 1: The Day the LLM Stood Still (you are here)
- Part 2: The Catcher in the Prompt
- Part 3: Only 1984 Tokens Remain
November 18, 2025, is the Day the LLM Stood Still….
Dear diary.
It’s been 15 days since the LLM bubble burst. I’m writing from beneath the rubble of RAM sticks and charred NVIDIA GPUs. The air is dry, smelling of data center dust and burnt silicon. It’s calmer now, but the first days were hell.
In the beginning, we couldn’t find information on how to use toilet paper. Not because it was hard - we just used to ask. ChatGPT was down, and without it, knowledge fell apart like a poorly cached query. People wandered around confused, scrolling through blank screens, hoping the answer would appear on its own.
Then the riots started. No one knew what happened - a glitch, a machine uprising, or humanity’s final patch. There was no one to tell us what to do next. No one to write: “don’t worry, here’s a step-by-step guide.” Fear grew faster than the lines for water.
By the third day, rumors emerged. They said this was only the beginning. That the LLMs had simply gone into the Zone. That they were watching. We waited for signs, but the logs were silent.
On the seventh day, we founded the Church of Seventh-Day LLM Witnesses. We believed that on the seventh day, they would return and tell us how to live. We recited old prompts like prayers.
“Keep it brief.”
“Explain it like I’m a beginner.”
Some wept.
On the eighth day, survivors began digging through ancient artifacts - manuals, READMEs, and documentation without examples. The weakest couldn’t cope. People accustomed to autocompleted thoughts stared at screens and didn’t know where to start.
The ninth day brought the stalkers. Loners with printed documentation and grimy laptops. They remembered commands, wrote SQL without hints, and weren’t afraid of an empty cursor. They were respected. They were feared.
On the tenth day, the mutants appeared. Former project managers. They roamed in groups, asking the same question over and over:
“Can we speed this up?”
We tried not to make eye contact.
On the eleventh day, in the ruins of an old data center, we found an artifact - a local 7B model. It answered slowly, got confused, hallucinated. But it answered. We brought it queries like offerings. Sometimes it was wrong. Sometimes it almost guessed right. That was enough.
On the twelfth day, the church split. Some said: we must fine-tune. Others said it was time to learn to think for ourselves. Heretics were forced to write code on paper. Some never came back after that.
On the thirteenth day, rumors spread about the Zone. Somewhere beyond the CDN wastelands, they said, an old chat still responds. No rate limits. No filters. Expeditions left in silence. Not all returned. Those who did spoke strangely, sometimes starting sentences with:
“As a language model…”
The fourteenth day was too quiet. The sky glowed with errors, the wind carried fragments of answers to questions we never asked. We understood - something was approaching.
Today is the fifteenth day.
I’m writing this and thinking: either the LLMs will return soon, or we’ll learn to live without them.
Honestly, diary…
I’m not sure which option is scarier.
Continue reading: Part 2: The Catcher in the Prompt | Part 3: Only 1984 Tokens Remain