Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
Google patched an actively-exploited V8 zero-day on June 8. You updated Chrome and moved on. But VS Code, Slack, Discord, and your AI desktop apps all bundle their own Chromium — and they update on a lag.
Gemini 3.5 Pro is arriving with a 2M-token context and a Deep Think reasoning mode gated to the $250/month Ultra tier. The frontier just grew a velvet rope — and the right response for a solo builder is to get honest about whether your task is reasoning-bound at all.
Everyone posts MRR. Almost nobody posts margin. The gap between a $10K product at 85% margin and the same product at 45% is the difference between a business and a job that pays in revenue you don't keep.
Vercel raised max function duration to 30 minutes. The billing model is gentler than the naive math suggests, but a 30-minute serverless window is a worker queue wearing a serverless costume, and that's the part that bites.
Lost under the Siri-catch-up noise at WWDC 2026: cross-developer App Store Bundles and Suites. Independent developers can now package their subscriptions with other developers' apps and sell them together. That's a distribution lever, not a press-release feature.
Cloudflare shipped a Next.js reimplementation written almost entirely by Claude in about a week. Vercel went through it and found 2 critical, 2 high, 2 medium, and 1 low. The lesson isn't 'stop using AI to code' — it's where the model reliably whiffs.
Z.ai dropped GLM-5.2 under MIT — 753B params, 1M context, genuinely strong. Then everyone tried to self-host it and hit the wall: about 753GB of VRAM. Here's what open weights actually buy a solo operator, and it isn't a home-lab project.
Upwork's productivity index found human-plus-agent teams finish up to 70% faster than agents working alone. A separate 2026 report pegs the average enterprise at about 12 agents with roughly half running unsupervised. Both point at the same opening for solo consultants.
The npm supply-chain attacks keep coming, but this one picked a sharper target — the AI agent framework solo builders use to ship agents. Here's what happened and the 15-minute check to run before you npm install anything this week.