I keep hearing and reading about how programmers are at risk; basically, everything that can be replaced by AI is at risk.
Yesterday, Lenny Rachitsky shared a post that PM openings are at the highest levels since 2022.
At the same time, I read how big giants (Meta, Amazon, etc.) are laying off engineers because of AI, and then I read about how they had to hire back again because something managed by AI went wrong.
I ve been testing the 'Free Tier' limits of the 2026 AI landscape. While everyone swears by Claude 3.7 or GPT-5.2, I m trying to find the 'Golden Ratio' for makers on a zero-budget.
My current findings for the Office Bee MVP:
The Brain: Gemini 3.1 Pro (via AI Studio) seems to have the highest 'Reasoning-per-Dollar' (free) for deep R&D.
The Frontend: v0 (Free Tier) for shadcn/ui components.
The Glue: Bolt.new for the initial scaffold.
The Challenge: Most 'free' models hallucinate complex state management in full-stack architectures.
I have been cranking out apps for the past few years and loving it. Then one morning a week or 2 ago I got a little ambitious and decided to build a desktop email client because outlook was so-so and superhuman was ridiculously expensive.
