levelsio says software is dead, Arvid Kahl says no
levelsio spent the week arguing everyone will build their own personal software on demand. Arvid Kahl answered with his inbound: enterprise prospects asking for multi-year supply contracts, because of agents.
Real money
Theo says $400k of Codex got nowhere, $20k of Opus finished in two weeks
Theo shipped tsc-rs, a full rewrite of the TypeScript compiler, type checker and LSP in Rust, built by agents over five months. He says he burned about $400k of Codex tokens and got nowhere, then about $20k of Opus and got there in two weeks, and that he has not read a single line of the code.
I have not read a single line of the code.
Stolen playbooks
Marc Lou open-sourced the Beehiiv replacement he built in a few prompts
After churning from Beehiiv over a third price rise, Marc Lou released MailCheap, the self-hosted newsletter tool he vibe-coded, saying it runs on Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails and is 92% cheaper than Beehiiv for him. He says his first yearly Beehiiv bill was $1,000 and his next would have been $4,000, against under $300 a year on SES plus MongoDB.
Newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, when in fact the real cost is the number of emails sent.
What changed under us
Rauch: 60% of Vercel deployments are now agentic, up from 3% in January
Guillermo Rauch published Vercel's machine traffic numbers: 58.18% of network traffic is bot-originated over the last 30 days, against 32% in January 2024, and over 60% of deployments are now agentic, up from around 3% in January 2026. He says up to 83% of pageviews on Vercel's own docs come from agents, and that the share rises the more they optimize content for them.
The web will thrive, but it will be built for and by agents.
Founder fights
levelsio says software is dead, Arvid Kahl points at his enterprise inbound
levelsio's "software is dead" post ran all week and ended with him walking back the tone, not the thesis: he says it is an explosion of creativity, not doom, just a different paradigm. Arvid Kahl pushed back with evidence from his own pipeline, saying enterprise customers are asking him for multi-year supply contracts and integrations, and that personal software will not mesh with process-driven hierarchical businesses for a long time.
The inbound I get from enterprise customers who want multi-year supply contracts and integrations tells me that software is very much not dead.
Skim these
levelsio's non-profit retro project hit 100,000 users in two days
levelsio says 100,000 people used his browser-based retro OS project in two days after two years of nobody caring. He says it cannot and will not make money.
Tibo's own X data: life posts beat product posts two to one
Tibo pulled his 6,000-plus tweets and listed what works: posts naming his products get a 77 like median, posts about his kids and the chalet get 167.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Theo's Codex agent work fail but Opus succeeded?
Theo spent $400k of Codex tokens over five months without finishing a TypeScript compiler rewrite, but spent $20k of Opus and completed it in two weeks. The difference shows that the expensive part of agent work is spending tokens on a model that cannot finish the job, which only becomes clear months in.
How much cheaper is self-hosting a newsletter tool than Beehiiv?
Marc Lou built MailCheap, a self-hosted newsletter tool that runs on Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails and costs him under $300 a year, versus his original Beehiiv bill of $1,000 that would have risen to $4,000, making it 92% cheaper for his use case.
What percentage of Vercel deployments are now made by AI agents?
Over 60% of Vercel deployments are now agentic, up from around 3% in January 2026, and 58.18% of network traffic is bot-originated over the last 30 days against 32% in January 2024.
Is software still viable for enterprise customers?
Yes, enterprise customers are asking for multi-year supply contracts and integrations, showing that agent workloads are opening enterprise doors that were previously closed to small teams, even as personal disposable tools grow at the low end of the market.
What type of social media content performs better for makers?
Posts about personal life and family get a median of 167 likes, while posts naming products get a median of 77 likes, meaning personal content beats product posts roughly two to one.