Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
Microsoft committed $2.5B and roughly 6,000 employees to a dedicated AI deployment unit. Anthropic has its $1.5B services JV. OpenAI has its deployment company. The 'I'll be the GPT consultant' play now competes with the vendor at enterprise scale — here's what's left for the rest of us.
In late June, Anthropic released the Claude apps gateway: SSO, spend caps, and per-user cost attribution for Claude Code, self-hosted in one container. That's the exact product a lot of indie consultants were about to charge for. Here's which AI-services businesses just lost their moat and which are still safe.
Cloudflare acquired the Astro team in January. Astro 6 is now in beta, and it stays open source. But 'your web framework and your host are the same company' is a real platform question — and since this blog runs on Astro, it's my question too. Here's the clear-eyed version of what changes and what I'd actually do about it.
Cursor's iOS app launches cloud agents in isolated VMs that grind toward merge-ready PRs and ping you when they're done. Vibe-coding from your phone is the headline. The workflow shift underneath it — where your job becomes reviewing and merging, not typing — is the part that actually changes how a solo operator spends the day.
Gumroad's direct-sale take lands around 12% once you count payment processing, and Discover marketplace sales run 30%. A widely-shared Indie Hackers post claimed a jump from $750 to $3,250 a month. The specific number is unverified; the math underneath it is not. Here's when the Merchant-of-Record tax is a bargain and when it's the most expensive line in your P&L.
For two years the 'which model vendor' conversation assumed OpenAI versus Anthropic. A European lab at $400M+ ARR heading toward $1B, with open weights and a new model in July early access, quietly turns it into a three-horse race. That's leverage for buyers — and it changes your costs whether or not you ever move a single API call.
The Economic Index found Claude handles tasks needing ~14.4 years of education against a ~13.2-year economy average: AI eats the skilled slices first, not the grunt work. And accounting for reliability drops the productivity boost from ~1.8 points to closer to ~1.2. Both numbers point at the same gap.
On July 1 Cloudflare shipped AI Crawl Control on every plan, splitting AI bots into Search, Agent, and Training. For new domains after September 15, Training and Agent get blocked by default on ad pages. Whether your words feed the models is now a toggle — and the default is changing under you.
Cato AI Labs found two flaws in Cursor — CVE-2026-50548 and CVE-2026-50549, both rated 9.8 — that let content your agent reads escape the sandbox and run OS-level commands with no click from you. Cursor patched it. Plenty of installs haven't updated.