Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
Sierra — Bret Taylor's AI customer-service company serving 40% of the Fortune 50 — closed a $950M round in May 2026 and launched Ghostwriter, which lets anyone build production-grade AI agents in plain English. They're now targeting mid-market. The solo consultant charging $8K/month to configure the same workflows has an 18-month window.
At Google I/O 2026, Google restructured Veo pricing into Lite/Fast/Standard tiers. Veo 3.1 Lite starts at $0.05/second. A 60-second product demo video costs $3. A 3-minute explainer costs $9. This isn't enterprise pricing with a sales call attached: it's in the Gemini API, callable by any developer with an API key.
WebMCP is a proposed open web standard that lets websites expose structured tool definitions to browser-based AI agents: no screen-scraping required. Google started an experimental origin trial in Chrome 149. If this becomes the standard, the question for solo operators isn't whether to implement it. It's whether your competitor does it first.
Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25B a month (roughly $45B over three years) for compute on Colossus 1 and 2. The deal accounts for 76% of SpaceX's Q1 capex. If you ship anything on Claude, your unit economics now depend on a neocloud controlled by Musk.
Qualys disclosed CVE-2026-46333 on May 20 — a ptrace exit-race in the Linux kernel that lets any local user read /etc/shadow and execute commands as root on default Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The PoC is public. The fix is one apt-get away. The deeper question is which of your hosting choices was always sitting on a 9-year-old bug.
May 20: Intuit announced a 17% workforce cut (about 3,000 people) and same-day multi-year contracts with Anthropic and OpenAI to feed tax and financial data into Claude and ChatGPT. Intuit owns QuickBooks and TurboTax. The accounting and tax infrastructure under 30M small businesses is being agent-shaped this year. Here's the indie consulting opening, and the closing window.
May 22: OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC, targeting a $1 trillion valuation and a Q4 listing. The company lost $1.22 for every $1 of revenue in Q1 2026. Indie products on the API are now characters in a public-markets story they didn't audition for.
OpenAI's internal model produced a novel disproof of the planar unit-distance conjecture — a problem Erdős posed in 1946 and nobody cracked in 80 years. Timothy Gowers and Thomas Bloom verified it. The bar for 'AI can't do real research' just moved. If you sell your brain for a living, the timeline you assumed you had is shorter.
Anthropic told investors it expects $10.9B in Q2 2026 revenue (a 130% jump from Q1) and $559M in operating income. For solo operators who've staked their stack on Claude, platform profitability changes the calculation in ways that aren't obvious.