Thoughts on AI, the tech stack, and the indie hacker journey.
After five years, Cal.com killed its open-source license, citing AI-powered vulnerability scanning. Discourse published a sharp rebuttal the next day. If your solo stack depends on "self-hostable open source," this is the first big domino — and you should audit what's behind it this weekend.
Matthew Gallagher built Medvi with $20K and AI tools. It did $401M in 2025 and is on track for $1.8B in 2026, with two employees. Sam Altman's one-person billion-dollar prediction just came true. What the NYT profile didn't lead with is the FDA warning letter that was already on file.
AGENTS.md quietly became the README for AI. It's a cross-vendor standard, stewarded by the Linux Foundation, supported by every major coding agent. But a recent reassessment suggests it doesn't help as much as the vendors claim. Here's what actually belongs in one, and when it's worth the effort.
The hosting decision in 2026 isn't about DX anymore. It's about blast radius. What happens to your bill when you get HN-front-paged, or DDoSed, or just unexpectedly popular. Here's an honest comparison of Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, and Netlify through that specific lens — and what I actually run where.
Tesla's AI5 chip taped out two years late. Intel joined the Terafab project to handle manufacturing. That means Tesla's "we'll build our own fab" pitch is now basically "we'll rent one from Intel." If even Musk can't pull off vertical integration, your side project definitely can't either.
OpenAI is scaling its Trusted Access for Cyber Defense program to thousands of verified individual defenders, with a fine-tuned GPT-5.4-Cyber model for defensive security work. If you're a solo operator who's also your own security team, this might be a genuine unlock — if the verification bar is reachable.
Evan Spiegel sent a memo saying AI now generates over 65% of Snap's new code — and used that number to justify cutting 16% of the company. Stock jumped 7%. This is the first Fortune 500 CEO to openly price a headcount line against an AI output percentage. For solo operators, the theory just shipped.
PwC surveyed 1,217 executives and found most companies get zero financial benefit from AI. The winners aren't spending more — they're using AI for growth instead of cost-cutting. That sounds a lot like how solo operators already work.
Amazon is buying Globalstar to build a satellite internet network that competes with SpaceX. When trillion-dollar companies go to war over infrastructure, the downstream effects on pricing and connectivity are where solo builders should pay attention.