Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
The merchant-of-record layer — the thing that handles global sales tax so a one-person SaaS doesn't have to — consolidated hard. Stripe owns Lemon Squeezy, Polar undercuts everyone at 4% + 40¢, and a support mishap put the operational risk in plain view. A decision framework with an actual pick per situation.
Next.js 16 ships Turbopack as the stable default for dev and build, with Vercel claiming 2-5x faster builds, and replaces the experimental PPR flag with Cache Components. Most solo devs are still on 15 asking one question: upgrade now or wait? The answer comes down to two things about your project.
Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 on June 1 at a reported ~$965B valuation, with a listing window pointed at October. If your product runs on Claude, your core dependency is about to acquire public-market quarterly pressure. Here's the hedge.
The latest @cloudflare/think release adds on-demand Agent Skills, declarative scheduled tasks, a Telegram messenger, and durable reasoning inside Workflows — on top of April's sandbox tunnels. For a one-person team, some of this deletes a weekend of glue code and some of it is lock-in you'll regret. A triage rubric.
On June 1, over 30 @redhat-cloud-services packages shipped a credential-stealing worm. The attackers didn't steal an npm token. They rode a compromised CI pipeline through GitHub Actions OIDC — the exact mechanism the industry told you to adopt instead of tokens.
On June 2, Microsoft put a 5B in-house coding model inside every paid Copilot tier, trained on its own harnesses instead of OpenAI's. The benchmark isn't the story. The story is what it tells you about where your Copilot bill is heading now that it's metered.
The June 2 executive order is voluntary and bans mandatory licensing. But it asks model vendors for up to 30 days of prerelease federal access, then 'trusted partners,' then everyone else. If you build on the public API, you just became the last tier.
Nvidia delivered its first Vera CPUs to Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle, and SpaceX's AI unit. It's not a GPU — it's silicon built to stop agents stalling between tool calls. The only question a solo builder should ask: does my agent get cheaper or faster, and when?
GitHub Copilot moves every plan to usage-based billing on June 1, and OpenAI's $100 Codex Pro tier drops from 10x back to 5x usage after May 31. Same 24 hours, same lesson: a coding-agent subscription is metered infrastructure now, not a fixed cost.