Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
Next.js 16.3 shipped Instant Navigations: a partial prefetching system that swaps per-link prefetch spam for one reusable shell per route, plus dev tooling that turns a slow navigation into a build-time error instead of a support ticket. I flipped the flags on a side project to see what it actually costs.
Stripe's own Atlas numbers show solo founders hit an all-time high in Q2 2026, and the same report shows the gap between median and top-decile solo revenue nearly doubling in four years. I read past the headline so you don't have to.
AWS grew 37% last quarter and Amazon raised its capex plan to $220B, partly on rising memory costs. The company building a lot of solo operators' infrastructure just told investors it can't build fast enough — here's what that does and doesn't mean for what you pay.
August 31 is when Google removes every dormant Manifest V2 extension from the Chrome Web Store. The runtime deadline already passed a year ago — this one is about whether your listing still exists to be found.
DeepSeek pushed V4-Flash out of preview on July 31 and it scored higher on Terminal-Bench 2.1 than DeepSeek's own, pricier Pro-Preview model. For solo operators routing agent tasks by price, the cheap tier just stopped being the compromise option.
Lovable crossed a $500M revenue run rate with 146 people, and it's reportedly raising $300M at a $13.2B valuation. The $3.4M-ARR-per-employee stat is real. The story solo operators tell themselves about it mostly isn't.
Alex Karp renewed his attack on frontier AI labs on Palantir's Q2 2026 earnings call, backed by 93% revenue growth and Palantir's first-ever billion-dollar profit quarter. Strip the theater and there's a real dependency check for anyone building on a single model API.
AMD and Anthropic announced a deal to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450-series GPUs for Claude, with AMD investing up to $5B in Anthropic alongside it. Nothing changes for your API bill today — the first gigawatt doesn't even ship until H1 2027 — but it's a real signal that Claude's compute stack is now genuinely multi-vendor.
AI datacenters are on pace to consume roughly 70% of the world's high-end DRAM in 2026, and HP says memory now eats 35% of a laptop's bill of materials, up from 15-18% one quarter earlier. Here's what that does to your next dev-machine purchase and possibly your cloud bill.