How-tos
Step by step, from real work.
Guide ·
Gemini 4 Argon Doubles in Price on December 1. Model Your Margins at $4 and $20, Not at the Launch Rate.
Google's pricing page lists Gemini 4 Argon at $2 and $10 per million tokens through November 30, then $4 and $20. Every tier doubles, so the promo is a trial, not a price.
Guide ·
OpenAI's 12-Hour Prompt Cache Costs 2.5x to Write. Here's the Three-Request Break-Even for Your Agent.
OpenAI now lets you keep a prompt cached for 12 hours, but the write costs 2.5 times the normal input rate. The arithmetic says it loses money on two calls and wins on three.
Guide ·
Vercel Stopped Accepting Node.js 20 Deployments on October 1. Your Next Deploy Is the One That Fails, and Here's the 10-Minute Audit.
Running functions keep running, which is why nobody noticed. The next push to a project pinned to Node 20 errors out, and GitHub Actions already dropped Node 20 on September 23.
Guide ·
Claude Haiku 5.5 Costs One Tenth of Haiku 4.5. Here's the Margin Math for Every AI Feature You Decided Was Too Expensive.
At $0.10 in and $0.50 out per million tokens, Haiku 5.5 turns a $165 monthly bill into $16.50. The interesting part is which features that unlocks.
Guide ·
A GitHub Actions Worm GitHub 'Fixed' in May Came Back Online in September and Reinfected Everyone Still Pinning by Tag
Two compromised GitHub Actions that were disabled in May got re-enabled on September 16 with the same malicious tags intact. Here's the ten-minute check before your next scheduled workflow run.
Guide ·
Researchers Just Scanned the Open Internet and Found 555,000 Exposed Database Ports. 501,000 of Them Are Redis With Zero Authentication.
A September 2026 internet scan found 555,000 exposed Redis, MySQL, and PostgreSQL ports. Here's the 10-minute check to make sure yours isn't one of them.
Guide ·
Node.js 26 Goes LTS in October. It Already Deleted writeHeader and Six Legacy Stream Modules.
Node.js 26 becomes Long-Term Support in October 2026, and it already removed APIs a lot of production code still calls. Here's the pre-flight check before it's the default target.
Guide ·
Supabase Killed Its logs.all Endpoint on September 23. If Your Monitoring Script Still Calls It, It's Already Broken.
Supabase removed the Management API's logs.all endpoint on September 23, 2026. Here's how to check if your dashboard or alerting script is already broken, and the fix.
Guide ·
Google Shipped Gemini 3.8 TTS With 2,000+ Voices. Here's What It Actually Costs to Add Voice to a Solo Product.
Gemini 3.8's new TTS models top the Hume AI Voice Design Benchmark and clone a voice from 30 seconds of audio. The API is live today. The pricing page is not.
Guide ·
Vercel's flat rate CDN caps a viral spike at a fixed price: the math solo builders should actually run
Vercel's Flat Rate CDN swaps metered CDN Requests and Fast Data Transfer for a fixed monthly price with built-in spike protection, but for most solo operators the real question isn't whether it works, it's whether you're paying for insurance you don't need.
Guide ·
September Patch Tuesday Broke RDS on Windows Server 2019, 2022, and 2025: A Playbook for Solo IT Consultants
KB5122876, KB5122882, and KB5122871 deadlock Remote Desktop Services a few hours after install, not immediately. If you manage RDS boxes for small-business clients, here's the exact check to run today and the out-of-band update that actually fixes it.
Guide ·
Vue 3.6's Vapor Mode Just Hit Feature-Complete. It Skips the Virtual DOM, and You Don't Have to Rewrite Anything to Try It.
Vue's new compilation mode compiles templates straight to DOM operations instead of diffing a virtual tree. Early benchmarks put it near Solid.js speed, and it's opt-in one component at a time.