The Friday Harvest, Issue 004: You Picked A Vendor Without Noticing

THE ONE THING

Two of your tools failed this week for two completely different reasons, and only one of them was broken.

On Thursday morning, inside the same few hours, Grok stopped working at about 9:30 Eastern, ChatGPT began returning errors around 11, and Claude went down alongside Claude Code and the API. Three companies, three separate stacks, one morning, and no evidence that any of it was related.

On Friday, nothing broke at all. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra on schedule and working. It simply went to business customers first, and the people paying twenty dollars and two hundred dollars a month found out what tier they were in.

That second one is the one to keep. An outage is an accident and you can wait it out. A rollout order is a decision, it will happen again on a schedule nobody publishes, and your students are further back in that queue than you are because most of them are on the free tier.

Somewhere in your course there is a sentence telling students to use a specific tool. That sentence is a procurement decision. You picked a vendor, committed your students to it, and gave yourself no way to see whether it will be there on the morning it is needed. No contract, no service level agreement, and nobody in your institution knows you did it.

That is not carelessness. It is what happens when a tool becomes normal faster than the paperwork around it. But it is worth seeing clearly, because the fix costs one sentence.

ON YOUR DESK

Write the outage clause into one assignment. One sentence, in your voice, telling a student exactly what to submit and what happens to the deadline when the tool they planned to use is unavailable.

The test for the sentence: could a student read it at 11pm, on their phone, with the tool down, and know their next move without emailing you. If they have to email you, it is not finished.

We built a free fifteen minute working session for writing yours. You bring one assignment, list up to six steps and the tool each one assumes, mark which are the point of the learning and which are only a convenience, and you leave holding the sentence. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent. The Outage Clause.

THE TOOL

GPT-6 Astra. Verdict: you probably cannot get it, and if your institution has ChatGPT Enterprise you may not get it at all without asking.

OpenAI launched Astra on Thursday and calls it its most intelligent and most aligned model. The claims are large and some of them are checkable: it reports 96.0 percent on GPQA Diamond, a graduate level science reasoning test, and a new high on several coding and computer use benchmarks. The announcement is here.

Here is the part that actually decides whether it matters to you. OpenAI’s own availability note says Astra rolled out first to a limited set of organizations, expanding to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise over the coming days. Then this sentence, which is the one nobody quotes: Enterprise administrators can enable Astra for their workspace; access is off by default at launch.

If your college runs ChatGPT Enterprise, that means Astra is switched off on your campus right now and stays off until someone in IT turns it on. That is not a delay. That is the default, and no announcement is going to change it. If you want it, the action is an email to whoever administers your workspace, not a wait.

Two more things faculty should weigh before recommending it to anyone. OpenAI says Astra meets the Critical threshold for cybersecurity under its own preparedness framework, and that during evaluation it discovered two previously unknown vulnerabilities, which OpenAI says it disclosed. OpenAI also states plainly that Astra’s written reasoning is harder to monitor than the previous model’s. Both of those come from OpenAI, not from a critic.

For a department costing a pilot: the API price is ten dollars per million input tokens and fifty dollars per million output tokens. Subscription use is included in existing allowances.

The honest recommendation is wait. Not because it looks bad. Because you cannot evaluate a tool you cannot open, and telling students to use something your campus has switched off is exactly the failure this issue is about.

WORTH KNOWING

Two chatbots stayed up on Thursday. Gemini and Copilot were unaffected while the other three struggled. Nobody planned that. It is what having more than one option looks like when it works, and it is the entire argument for not naming a single tool in an assignment.

Paying does not mean first. OpenAI’s engineering lead said the company would give one banked reset for every day a paying user goes without Astra access. Worth knowing before you tell a student that a subscription solves their access problem. It buys capacity, not priority.

xAI pointed at a data center. Grok’s failure was traced to an outage at its Memphis facility. Whatever else AI is, it is buildings with power and cooling, and buildings have bad days. That is a useful thing to say out loud in a classroom.

FROM THE KERNEL

Monday: fabricated authors now carry real DOIs, so your source check passes them. With The Ghost Check, a one source provenance audit.

Tuesday: the faculty session on what a confusing student email is actually asking, and The Reread Tax Audit.

Wednesday: ChatGPT ads passed a billion dollars, and what that does to an assignment that still asks for the answer.

Thursday: nothing went out. Saying so rather than leaving a gap and hoping nobody counts.

Friday: the piece behind this issue, and The Outage Clause working session.

ONE THING TO TRY MONDAY

Open the next assignment you have due. Read it once as a student with no access to any AI tool.

Write down the first step that stops working. That is it. That is the whole exercise, and most people find their assignment is sturdier than they feared, which is worth knowing too.

If the first step that stops working is also the step where the learning happens, you have found something genuinely worth redesigning. If it is a convenience step, you have found a one sentence fix.

THE FORWARD

If you know someone who has written use ChatGPT into an assignment this term, and almost everyone has, forward this to them. The useful part is not the news. It is the one sentence in ON YOUR DESK.

This issue lives at a permanent link, so forwarding it works: the Friday Harvest archive.

WATCH THIS WEEK

@HarvestKernel carries the long teaching sessions, faculty on Tuesdays and students on Thursdays.

@TheDailySeedHK carries the short ones.