I’ve been using ChatGPT and Codex for a while and I’m starting to evaluate Claude. No conclusions yet. Getting started was rough. The desktop app would look like it was working and then throw “unable to connect,” and when I tried to subscribe the Stripe payment page wouldn’t load at all. Claude also had an outage around the same time, which didn’t help, but even after recovery things were still inconsistent. The real issue turned out to be my Pi-hole.
For anyone not familiar, Pi-hole is a DNS-level blocker. It sits in front of your devices and blocks ads, trackers, and a lot of third-party domains by default. That’s the point, but it also means anything that depends on those domains can partially or completely break.
Claude depends on more than just claude.ai. It pulls in additional domains for payments, telemetry, and chat, and Pi-hole blocks a lot of that in ways that fail silently. Quick way to confirm: disable Pi-hole for 30 seconds and reload. If everything suddenly works, that’s your cause.
Instead of chasing domains one at a time, I built a working allow list and published it here: https://github.com/J8k3/blog-code/blob/main/pi-hole/claude.txt. Add it and move on.
The outage and the Pi-hole blocking overlapped just enough to make debugging harder than it should have been. Separately, the status dashboard shows a steady stream of incidents. For something positioning itself as a serious productivity tool, that reliability signal matters, and right now it is not great. By comparison, ChatGPT comes across as more polished in this setup. In practice it appears to rely less on scattered third-party dependencies, so it behaves more predictably in a filtered network.
More once I’ve actually used it.