All SOTA model providers are losing money. When users run Opus, they are essentially renting a GPU cluster worth half a million dollars for a $100/$200 subscription. If they want to IPO, they need to show a projection toward profit.
For that reason, they want to discourage power users and attract normies.
At lot of advice for solo founders is from people with survivalship bias, vocal sales biz dev and people that had right connections. I think tech solo founder path is different and in today market is very difficult. I can give advice on things that I did wrong so far. Avoid direct stripe integration and complex subscriptions models this would be time sink, use merchant of record and as simple as possible subscription model. Ignore everything non essential for product like usage charts, account management etc. Get decent designer but limit his scope to product features say NO to design system and custom components, use off the shelf UI toolkit with minimal customisation. If you want to raise wait for more traction and avoid startup conferences, better to go for your industry conference instead.
I recently tested Claude code, opencode, codex on same frontend feature and codex with 5.4 with high effort was the best but most expensive. For me in Europe, Claude Code with 90$ max subscription is the best value for money.
My thinking is:
codex - best harness
opencode - best ux/dx
claude - best value for money
Adding postinstall should require approval from NPM.
NPM clients should not install freshly published packages.
NPM packages should be scanned after publishing.
High profile packages should verify upstream git hash signature.
NPM install should run in sandbox and detect any attempt to install outside project directory.
But npm being part of multi trillion company cannot be bothered to fix any of these. Instead they push for tighter integration with GitHub with UX that suck.
> NPM clients should not install freshly published packages.
That would be a beautiful example of Cobra effect: what about updates that fix vulnerabilities? You're gonna force users to wait couple days or a week before they can get malware removed?
In cases like this that isn’t an issue, NPM takes the malicious package down and you roll back to the previous version.
The problem would be new versions that fix security issues though, and because this is all open source as soon as you publish the fix everyone knows the vulnerability. You wouldn’t want everyone to stay on the insecure version with a basically public vulnerability for a week.
This could be controlled by npm. Client ask for available versions anyway. If package is security fix then it can be made available instantly. But this delay gives time for security scanners and time to notify maintainers that package was published.
Main producers actually reduced dram output in 2026. When you have few players with very high capital cost you will end up with cartels like light bulb cartel.
Someone will come in when the price goes up enough. It will take time, but it will happen. What people are complaining about is that the time for this to happen is too long.
Oh look, there is a player coming into the market it seems:
Reminder the whole world is not the United States of America. While you make the choice of voting for someone who thinks tariffs are good for the local market, no other country joined your bandwagon.
Maybe they will. However people often claim that there won't be anyone to want to enter the market to take advantage of high DRAM prices when if they spent two minutes doing a web search they would discover that isn't true.
Because native fetch lack retries, error handling is verbose, search and body serialization create ton of boilerplate. I use KY http client, small lib on top of fetch with great UX and trusted maintainer.
This leak and looking into source code gave me an impulse to try OpenCode with codex models. I am very impressed with how well it works, and the UI is beautiful.
No, they made many wrong architecture decisions that made it fringe project rather than mainstream. You could glimpse on how things could played out by looking into bun.js adoption.
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