Week 2026-05

Times are changing, and you need to be ready. For example, SaaS services haven’t had it easy lately. @vlkodotnet

Week’s Highlight: The End of SaaS?

I’ll keep it a bit shorter today since work obligations are keeping me busy. But I have an interesting article that describes a growing problem for SaaS services — one brought on by the rise of AI-assisted development.

Companies now face a choice: buy a SaaS product or vibe-code their own solution. Naturally, they try the latter first, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But for SaaS companies, this means their revenue is under threat. If you own a SaaS product, you might think we’re not there yet — that your product is unique. Well, we’re already there. Your product needs to deliver something a vibe-coded solution can’t. If your SaaS is the customer’s entire work environment, you’re safe. Otherwise, you need to offer security, robustness, and most importantly, you need to start building features that allow customization for each customer. More on this topic in the following article:

Security Insights

Last week, Notepad++ disclosed information about a supply chain attack that compromised their installation infrastructure. If you install Notepad++ via WinGet or Chocolatey, you should be safe. If you install it directly, check your installation to make sure you’re not among the unlucky few who were targeted.

The next story involves the exploitation of a critical vulnerability that Russian state-backed hackers exploited just 48 hours after it was disclosed. The attack was highly sophisticated and demonstrates what we fear the most — that the day may come when we’ll need to install security patches immediately after release.

Third up is Shannon — an autonomous AI pentester designed to break your application before someone else does.

BIZ Insights

SpaceX is acquiring xAI, which means that the social network X (formerly known as Twitter) now belongs to SpaceX. Elon Musk explained the acquisition by saying they plan to launch one million satellites that will run AI computations, because space has practically unlimited energy.

Apple acquired Israeli audio AI startup Q.ai for approximately $1.6 billion. The startup specializes in speech recognition, including through facial expression tracking.

Ever wonder why companies invest so heavily in Super Bowl advertising? There’s a pretty rational economic basis behind it. You have a guaranteed massive audience that will watch — and even actively follow and discuss the ads on social media. The probability that it will positively impact your revenue is higher than with other channels.

AI Insights

Anthropic released the new Opus 4.6, featuring a 1-million token context window that comes at a premium, and reportedly takes tens of seconds to load into memory. But that’s not its main advantage — what stands out is its improved coding ability and better safety.

OpenAI responded immediately by releasing GPT 5.3 Codex, which burns fewer tokens for the same response. Otherwise, both models are more of an incremental improvement rather than a major leap forward.

Before that, OpenAI also released the Codex app — something like Claude Code but without a text-based interface.

Need proof that AI can handle complex programming tasks today? Not perfectly, but for example, engineers at Anthropic spent roughly $20K to have Claude Code write a C compiler in Rust. It’s a fascinating read, because that compiler actually compiles.

Qwen3-Coder-Next is supposed to be a great local model for agentic development. Give it a try — it might be a good fit, especially when you run out of Claude limits.

Voxtral Transcribe 2 is a model for fast speech recognition (under 200 ms) across 13 core languages.

NanoClaw is a lightweight alternative to OpenClaw that runs in secure containers. It has simple code but no UI, so you interact with it through integrations or Claude Code. It’s the first AI agent with Agent Swarm — meaning sub-agent orchestration.

The fact that AI agents can’t interact with the real world is no longer a problem. A new service called RentAHuman has launched, where AI agents can hire real people for physical tasks they can’t handle.

To close out this section, I’ll admit that I’m internally struggling with how usable AI-assisted coding has become. It scares me a little, but it also excites me that I can now build a simple project in minutes — one I never found time for before. I also don’t quite know how to deal with the fact that some tasks and projects are just... easier now. I love challenges, and with AI, there are fewer of them. On the other hand, it opens up new horizons for my creativity. Something similar — but better written — can be found in the following reflection.

Links Drop

TypeScript version 7 will feature a native compiler written in Go, meaning compilation will be 6 to 10 times faster. Currently, we still have version 6 ahead of us, which will be the last one with the JavaScript compiler.

CraftPlan is a small open-source CRM for businesses that handle inventory, manufacturing, and sales. The only downside I see is that it lacks localization support. But since it’s open-source, in the age of AI agents, that’s not much of a problem.

JBL released the Blue XL portable speaker for home listening — it looks like an oversized pair of headphones.

The RAM crisis has caused a delay for the Valve Steam Machine. Despite arriving late, it will also be more expensive.

New IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices are having trouble connecting to non-IKEA hubs. IKEA is aware of the issue and working on a fix.

Microsoft is already working on the sixth version of Widgets for Windows. Take a moment to remember all the previous iterations that ended up in the graveyard of discontinued projects.

Closing Visual

I’ll admit that I own a Lego typewriter model. But this is a whole different level.