Solo Builders

Update July 2026: recent developments in anthropic may affect the information in this post — see details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Anthropic just announced it’s going to develop its own drugs. Not partner with pharma companies. Not license Claude to labs. Actually discover and develop treatments — starting with what it calls “neglected” diseases. If you’re a solo builder using Claude to run your business, this sounds like a headline from a different universe. But I think there’s something here that directly affects how you should be thinking about your tools. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Three major AI companies now offer agentic coding models within striking distance of each other on price. Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 launched at $1.25 per million input tokens. Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna are in the same ballpark. For the first time since AI coding tools went mainstream, you have real pricing competition — and that changes the math for solo builders. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Two weeks ago, OpenAI announced GPT 5.6. It’s not generally available. The U.S. government is approving its release customer by customer, and Anthropic’s Mythos has been stuck in the same limbo for months. If you built your business on the assumption that new AI models would keep shipping on schedule, that assumption just broke. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Two weeks ago, I was mid-project on a client deliverable when the model I was using vanished. Not a temporary outage — the government pulled it for review. The automation I’d built around that specific model stopped working. The client deadline didn’t care about regulatory politics. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Resumes are becoming relics. A Stockholm startup called Fika Jobs just raised $4 million to build a platform where AI agents conduct video interviews with job candidates — real 10-minute conversations, not screening forms. And they’re not alone. The entire hiring pipeline is shifting from text to video, from resumes to recorded conversations, from manual screening to AI evaluation. If you’re a solo builder, this trend affects you twice: once as someone who might hire (or be hired), and once as someone who could build in this space. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. A startup just raised $2.3 billion to train AI agents on Fortnite gameplay footage. General Intuition is building world models from 2 billion video game clips per year — teaching AI to understand space, time, and movement by watching how humans navigate dynamic environments. For solo builders, this shifts AI agents from text processors into visual operators that can see screens, navigate interfaces, and make spatial decisions. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been thinking about hiring a lot lately — not because I’m hiring, but because the entire process is getting weird. Last week, a Stockholm startup called Fika Jobs raised $4 million to build a platform where AI agents conduct video interviews with job candidates. Not screening calls. Not resume filters. Actual 10-minute conversations where an AI asks questions, records responses, and builds a video profile that employers browse. If you’re a solo builder who’s ever struggled to hire — or wondered how AI agents are going to change the job market — this one’s for you. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching developers post screenshots of their Claude Code bills lately, and the numbers are wild. Some people are spending $200 a month on a single AI coding tool. Others are running up bills they didn’t expect because agentic coding burns through tokens faster than regular chat. And then last month, a small research lab called Nous Research dropped a model that scores within striking distance of the best proprietary coding AIs — and gave it away for free. The economics of AI coding tools are about to shift, and if you’re building anything online, you should be paying attention. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I spent three hours last month screening resumes for a freelance project manager. Forty applications, eight shortlisted, and I still couldn’t tell which ones could hold a real conversation. That gap between what a resume says and what a person can actually do is exactly what a new wave of video-first AI hiring tools is trying to close. ...

🎧 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. ...