Open Source

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. $200 a month for Claude Code’s Max plan buys you a phenomenal coding agent. It also buys you vendor lock-in, Anthropic-only models, and code that lives on Anthropic’s servers. I’ve been testing Goose — a free, open-source alternative built by Block and now governed by the Linux Foundation — and the gap between “free” and “$200/month” is smaller than you’d think. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Something shifted in AI last week, and most people missed it. On June 17, Z.ai, a Beijing company spun out of Tsinghua University, released an open-source model called GLM-5.2. It beat GPT-5.5 on multiple coding benchmarks at roughly one-sixth the cost: 62.1 vs 58.6 on SWE-bench Pro, and 74.4% vs 72.6% on FrontierSWE, while shipping under the MIT license with a 1 million token context window. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Last week a friend of mine — a wedding photographer, not a developer — built a booking app for her clients using nothing but AI coding tools and a lot of patience. Her total software budget: $20. The problem is that the good tools keep getting more expensive, and the free ones keep getting worse at exactly the things solo builders need. That’s why a release you’ve probably never heard of matters. Nous Research, a small AI lab, just published NousCoder-14B, a free open-source coding model that anyone can download, run, and build on. No subscription. No API bill that surprises you at the end of the month. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve spent the last few months building video automation tools for clients, and the question I get asked most isn’t “how does it work?” It’s “is Remotion open source?” The answer matters because it determines whether you can actually use it in production without unexpected licensing headaches. Yes, Remotion is open source under the MIT license. You can use it commercially, modify it, and self-host the rendering process. That single fact changes the economics of video production for anyone who needs to generate more than a handful of videos. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve tested a lot of social media scheduling tools. Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Publer — they all do roughly the same thing: you write posts, schedule them across platforms, and pay a monthly fee for the privilege. Then I found AiToEarn, and it broke the pattern completely. It’s free, it’s open-source, and it pays you to post. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. White-label this open-source tool and sell it for $200/month Last week I was paying $12/month for Calendly. Then I found Cal.com — an open-source alternative that does everything Calendly does, plus more, for free. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the business model hiding inside this repo. White-label it. Sell it to professionals who’ll never find it themselves. $200/month per client. No coding required. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Every year someone publishes an “AI trends” list that reads like a press release. Quantum computing. AGI timelines. The singularity. This isn’t that. These are five shifts I’m actually seeing change how regular people build things in 2026, with tools that work today on hardware you probably already own. ...

I used CapCut for months. Then I read the privacy policy. Then I stopped. If you’ve been looking for a free video editor that doesn’t spy on you, doesn’t watermark your exports, and doesn’t lock features behind a subscription — I found one. It’s called Kimu. And it has an AI copilot. What is Kimu? Kimu is a free, open-source video editor. Think CapCut, but without ByteDance’s data collection, without the forced watermarks, and without the subscription paywall. ...