Created from a single voice note with Agent Craft
Remote work abroad — the 5-minute prep (Hong Kong / Claude geoblock story)
The tool I do all my work in stopped working the day I landed abroad. Here's the 5-minute prep that would've saved me the scramble. Week one in Hong Kong, Claude wouldn't load. I do all my coding through Claude Code, so this wasn't a minor inconvenience. I assumed censorship, Great Firewall, the whole thing. I was wrong, and the real reason is dumber and more useful to know before you work from anywhere new. Four things nobody warned me about. "AI is blocked here" is three different problems, not one. Hong Kong's internet is wide open. No Great Firewall here. And Claude and ChatGPT still won't load, because Anthropic and OpenAI geoblock the city themselves. It's their commercial call, not the government's. Cross into mainland China and now you've got actual state blocking on top of that. Then there's the VPN catch: if your connection drops for even a second, your real location shows, and you can get cut off mid-task without warning. The 5-minute prep: before you fly, have your workaround already installed, not half-configured while you're staring at a dead screen. Mine is blunt: I run a VPN to keep using Claude Code directly when I'm here. Gemini's chat app went free in Hong Kong this March, but its API is still blocked here, so it's not a real coding backup either. DeepSeek is the one that's actually region-proof, API included, if you'd rather skip the VPN altogether. I just haven't made that switch. No fixed desk means no default answer for "where do I work today." Cityplaza and Goose Island became my go-tos: consistent wifi, a seat, and nobody rushing you out after one coffee. Scout two or three backups in your first week, not when you're desperate for a desk. The networking advice everyone gives you is backwards. Weekdays here are dead. Headphones on, nobody's looking to talk. People open up on weekends. So I stopped burning energy Monday to Friday and moved it to when the city's actually social. Every place has a rhythm like this. Worth finding it before you waste a week fighting it. Your VPN is a shield and a liability in the same week. I run Surfshark over any public wifi by default. But the exact tool keeping me safe on a cafe network is the one that flags my account when I point it at a service I'm not supposed to reach from here. Same tool. One direction it protects you, the other it burns you. A week in and the thing I keep coming back to is this: I'd assumed all of it would just work, and none of it did until I set it up. Getting online, a place to sit, people willing to talk, being reachable across three time zones. Back home you inherit all of that. Land somewhere new and you're building it from scratch, fast, usually the hard way. So build the fallback before you need it. That's the part I'd tell anyone about to do this. What's caught you out working somewhere new? Genuinely asking, I'm collecting these.
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