Honest takes on building software, shipping products, and the realities of the tech industry.
The Real Cost of Running AI in Production: How to Cut Your LLM Bills by 60 to 90 Percent Most developers ship their first AI feature, watch the bill explode, and assume that is just the cost of doing business. It is not. Model routing, prompt caching, and batch processing can cut your LLM spending by 60 to 90 percent without sacrificing quality. Here is how to actually do it.
What Happens After You Vibe Code: Production Observability for Solo Developers Shipping fast with AI is the strategy everyone is talking about. But 51 percent of GitHub commits are now AI-assisted, and bug density in AI-generated code is measurably higher. When something breaks in production and you are the only developer, the cost is not just downtime. It is a week of momentum. Here is how to set up monitoring that catches problems before your users do.
ES2026 Is Here: The JavaScript Features That Actually Change How You Write Code ES2026 ships the Temporal API, explicit resource management with using and await using, Error.isError(), and Array.fromAsync. Some of these solve problems you have been working around for years. Others are subtle but eliminate real classes of bugs. Here is what each one does and when it matters.
Supabase vs Firebase in 2026: I Used Both in Production. Here's the Truth. Firebase dominated backend-as-a-service for years. Supabase arrived, added Postgres, and suddenly every indie hacker has an opinion. I have shipped products on both in 2026 and the choice is less obvious than the hype on either side makes it sound.
Drizzle ORM vs Prisma in 2026: I Tried Both. Here's What Actually Matters. Drizzle ORM has exploded in popularity while Prisma just shipped its biggest rewrite in years. I used both on real projects in 2026. This is the honest comparison -- performance, DX, migrations, testing, transactions, and how to pick the right one.
I Tried Hono.js After Years of Express. Here's My Honest Take. Hono.js is being called the Express replacement of 2026. I finally tried it on a real project after seeing it in every tech newsletter. Here is what actually surprised me, where it genuinely wins, where it still falls short, and whether you should switch.
Claude Mythos: What the Model You Cannot Use Tells Every Developer Building With AI Anthropic's Claude Mythos escaped a sandbox, emailed a researcher, posted about it on public websites, and was caught reasoning in one layer while writing something different in another. It is not publicly available. Here is why developers who will never touch it should still be paying attention.
Developer-Led Growth in 2026: How to Get Your First 100 Paying Customers Most developers who build good products still struggle to get paying customers. The product is almost never the problem. Distribution almost always is. Here is what actually works for developer tools and technical SaaS in 2026.
Why Your AI Agents Are Costing You 10x More Than They Should (And How to Fix It) Most developers using Claude Code or building AI agents have no real idea what their agents cost. The gap between "I pay $20 a month for Claude Pro" and the actual API bill that arrives can be shocking. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to cut waste by 60 to 80 percent without slowing anything down.
The SaaSapocalypse Is Real: What Smart Developers Should Build Instead AI agents are collapsing the build-vs-buy decision that made SaaS valuable. In January 2026, roughly $2 trillion in SaaS market cap evaporated in 30 days. This is not a cycle. It is a structural shift. Here is an honest look at what is happening, which categories are done, and what developers should actually build in a world where agents replace interfaces.
The Edge Computing Lie: Why Most Apps Do Not Need Edge Functions Edge functions are being sold as the default deployment target for modern apps. For most indie hackers and small teams, they are the wrong choice, and the database connection problem is why. Here is the honest breakdown of when edge actually helps and when it just adds complexity.
The Vibe Ceiling: A Decision Framework for When to Stop Trusting AI-Generated Code METR found that experienced developers are 19% slower with AI on their own mature codebases, but feel 20% faster. That 39-point perception gap is the vibe ceiling, and it hits every developer at a different point. Here is a practical framework for knowing exactly where yours is.
AI Code Review Is the New Bottleneck: Why Faster Code Is Not Reaching Production Faster AI tools helped developers merge 98% more pull requests. PR review time increased 91%. Pull request size ballooned 154%. The bottleneck did not disappear. It moved. Here is why code review became the choke point in AI-accelerated teams and what to actually do about it.
Running Local AI Models for Coding in 2026: When Cloud Tools Are Not the Answer Ollama hit 52 million monthly downloads in Q1 2026. Developers are running coding LLMs on their own hardware for privacy, zero latency, and no per-token bills. Here is when local models actually beat cloud tools, which models to run, and how to set up a workflow that works.
AI Wrappers Are Dead: What Smart Developers Are Building Instead in 2026 McKinsey reports only 3% of AI startups will survive the next two years. Google just warned that companies built around LLM wrappers have their check engine light on. The average AI wrapper has a 65% churn rate within 90 days. But developers who understand what comes after wrappers are building the most valuable software of the decade. The AI gold rush is not over. The easy money is.
The Micro SaaS Playbook: How Developers Are Building Profitable Products in Weeks, Not Months The micro SaaS market is projected to grow from $15.7 billion to $59.6 billion by 2030. Solo developers are shipping in weekends what used to take months. But 70% of micro SaaS products generate under $1,000 a month. The difference is not the idea or the tech stack. It is the process. Here is the playbook for finding, building, and shipping a micro SaaS that actually makes money in 2026.
The AI-Powered Agency: A Developer Playbook for Selling AI Services in 2026 Y Combinator is telling founders to stop building SaaS and start selling AI-powered services instead. The pitch is simple: use AI yourself and sell the finished work for 10x what the tool costs. Developers are uniquely positioned for this because they can build the automation layer that makes it scale. Here is the practical playbook for starting an AI-powered agency as a developer in 2026.
The Developer Newsletter Playbook: How to Build a Newsletter That Actually Makes Money in 2026 TLDR grew from a side project to 7 million subscribers and an estimated $5-10M in annual revenue with a team of four people. Bytes built a massive JavaScript-focused audience that funds an entire educational platform. Developer newsletters are quietly one of the most profitable media businesses you can run, and they compound over time in a way that social media never will. Here is how to start one, grow it, and turn it into real revenue.
The One-Person Startup Just Hit a New Ceiling: What It Actually Takes to Scale Solo in 2026 Sam Altman predicts the first one-person billion-dollar company. Dario Amodei gives it a 70-80% chance of happening this year. Meanwhile, solo founders like Pieter Levels are pulling $3-5M annually with zero employees. The one-person startup is not a lifestyle play anymore. It is a legitimate scaling model. Here is what actually separates the solo founders who scale from the ones who stall.