OpenAI's own app guidelines say commerce is physical goods only, and name subscriptions, credits and freemium upsells as not allowed, directly or indirectly. The same surface already ships an ads pixel and a Conversions API. That ordering tells you what it's for.
There's a distribution channel a lot of makers are quietly building for right now, and the rulebook for it is a page almost nobody reads. I read it this week because I was working out whether Murror belongs there, and one paragraph changed how I'd plan around it.
The models got dramatically smarter this year. Your product didn't get more trustworthy and in 2026, those turned out to be two completely different problems.
Here's the line that reframed it for me. Stanford's AI Index this year leans on a phrase from Ethan Mollick the "jagged frontier" to describe how these systems excel and then fall off a cliff with no warning. Their example is almost too good: an AI model can win a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad and still not reliably tell time from a clock face. Genius and incompetence living in the same box, and no obvious seam between them.
When I first started, I believed that as long as I built a great product, it would naturally become popular. But as I zoomed out, I realized the market is incredibly competitive. Having a good product alone isn t enough to truly convince users.
That s when I began building my presence on social media creating content about myself, sharing my journey, and talking about the product I m building. I ve come to see this as a very effective way to build trust and spark genuine interest not only in what I make, but also in who I am as a founder.
Throughput per developer is up 33.7%. Median time in code review is up 441.5%. If you're a solo maker, you are the review queue and you quietly stopped showing up for the shift.
There's a report that came out this spring that I keep coming back to, and I don't think it landed properly with makers because it's written for engineering leaders at big companies. Faros AI published "The Acceleration Whiplash" in April two years of telemetry from 22,000 developers across more than 4,000 teams. Not a survey about how developers feel. Actual measurement of what came out the other end.
As one year comes to an end and a new one begins, I find myself pausing to reflect. If you had the chance to say something to your future self to the version of you in 2025 and 2026, what would it be?
Looking back, I want to thank myself for how much I pushed through this past year:
For finding a job I genuinely value, even after going through a long period of stress and fear of unemployment
For speaking up and sharing my own perspectives at work
For choosing action over just talking
For walking away from toxic and unnecessary work relationships
For daring to learn new things outside my original field of study
For letting go of some comforts and entertainment to focus more on my health
Three months ago, we had a backlog full of AI features. Auto-generated mood summaries. Predictive journaling prompts. Smart scheduling for reflection sessions. Voice tone analysis. The works.
Every feature demo'd beautifully. Our team was excited. Investors loved the roadmap.
Last quarter, we built a feature at Murror that our engineering team jokingly called "the empty room." After a user finishes a journal entry, the AI doesn't immediately respond. It waits. For 30 seconds, the screen shows nothing but the user's own words and a gentle prompt: "Sit with what you just wrote."
No analysis. No reframe. No pattern recognition. Just silence.
High-risk got pushed to December 2027 and the whole timeline read as "delayed." Article 50 didn't move. It applied on 2 August, it catches you if an EU user sees your output, and the ceiling is 15m or 3% of worldwide turnover.
Two and a half weeks ago a rule started applying to most people reading this, and the coverage around it said the opposite.
AI apps convert trials 52% better and churn annual subscriptions 30% faster. The flattering metric lands in week one. The honest one lands in month twelve and by then you've already spent money on the gap.
Here's a pairing I can't stop thinking about, and both halves come from the same dataset.
There's a pattern in AI products right now that worries me: the goal is to make AI the relationship.
AI friends. AI therapists. AI partners. The pitch is always the same humans are complicated, AI is easy. No judgment, available 24/7, infinitely patient.
