Your Business Might Be Built on Quicksand
And the $1M mistake you don't want to make.
Been seeing a lot of flashy AI demos lately. It’s easy to get caught up in the magic, but today we’re starting with a story that brings it all back down to earth, hard.
💬 The $1M AI Dream That Vanished Overnight
A solo founder shared a brutal, honest story on Reddit about how his AI platform, which hit $1M in annual recurring revenue and had 6 million users, went to zero overnight. The culprit? Building his entire business on top of a third-party API that changed its tune.
Why I'm excited: I'm not. Full stop. but I'm glad the story is being told. It’s the most important, grounding piece I’ve read all month because it's a real-life cautionary tale that cuts through the AI hype and gets to the heart of a massive, unspoken risk many are taking right now.
Who should care: If you’re a founder, an indie hacker, or a developer building anything that relies on someone else's platform (which is almost everyone), you need to read this. This is your wake-up call.
Reality check: This isn't a hypothetical 'what if'. This is a real-world receipt for what happens when you don't own your core infrastructure. The temptation to build a thin wrapper on a powerful API is huge, but this is the cost of that shortcut.
Check out The $1M AI Dream That Vanished Overnight →
Your New AI Interns Have Arrived
While some AI ventures are built on shaky ground, the actual tools for building are getting scarily good. It feels like a whole team of hyper-efficient AI interns just showed up for work.
Browserfly: Give Your Browser an AI Brain
This is what the future of browsing feels like. Instead of you working for the web, an AI agent does the grunt work for you, right inside your current browser. Promising.
AI SDK 5: A New Superpower for Devs
Vercel is making it ridiculously easy for TypeScript devs to build legit AI chat. The type-safety alone is enough to make a grown engineer weep with joy. This is a huge accelerator.
Pipedream Lets You Chat With Your Tools
Pipedream wants you to literally talk to your software stack. It's a wild idea that could finally make complex workflow automation accessible without a PhD in APIs.
Smarter Tools, Smarter Tactics
It’s not just about what new tools you use, but *how* you use them. Here’s a mix of clever new toys and a crucial strategy lesson on how to wire them all together without creating a mess.
X-Design: An AI Photo Studio for Your Products
Finally, an AI tool that solves a real, painful problem for anyone selling stuff online. Turns your boring product pic into a legit lifestyle shot. This is immediately useful.
The 'Hybrid Automation' Mindset from Reddit
It's like n8n for orchestration, but calling out to a Python script for the heavy data work. This is the playbook for building robust automations that don't fall over when things get complex.
Spokenly: Voice Typing That's Actually Fast
Voice control on Mac that's fast, private, and works offline because the AI runs locally. This is how it should have been all along. Might actually get me to talk to my computer.
Quick hits
AlphaEarth Foundations Sees All: Google DeepMind built a 'virtual satellite' to map the Earth. Wild, but not something you'll use today.
Plot Twist: Claude AI Becomes Your Therapist: Turns out an AI can be more than a coder; it can be a surprisingly effective mindset coach. Weird, but cool.
Obsidian to Apple Notes Migration Tool: For the handful of you looking to jump ship from Obsidian to Apple Notes, your escape pod has arrived.
My takeaway
That viral AI wrapper isn't a business; it's a feature living on someone else's roadmap, waiting to be released.
The most durable products aren't just clever API calls; they solve a painful problem and own the user relationship from end to end. The real work is in the messy middle, not just the slick demo.
So instead of asking if you can build something with AI, ask what you can build that can't be wiped out by a single change in someone else's terms of service. That's where the real value is.
What's the riskiest assumption you're currently making in your project? Are you building on rock or sand?
Drop me a reply. Till next time, this is Louis, and you are reading Louis.log().