He went broke. He begged for help. And his code still runs on every website you use today.
This is the story of Denis Pushkarev aka. zloirock.
He single handedly maintains core-js, a JavaScript polyfill library that powers 75% of the top 10,000 websites. Apple, Netflix, Amazon, all of them depend on his code.
At his peak, he earned $2,500/month in donations. By 2023, that dropped to $400/month. Working 250+ hours a month. Supporting a wife and son. For $1.60
an hour.
He wrote: "I could stop working on this silently, but I want to give open source one last chance."
It got worse. He started logging donation pleas directly in the console. Developers saw them in their terminals and reported it as malware. They literally flagged his cry for help as a security threat.
We live in an era where a mass extinction of projects like core-js is on the way, because open source ≠ free labor.
But @BagsApp cracked something, Perpetual Royalties as Infrastructure. But it's a general platform. No repo integration. No commit-level attribution. No way to tie funding to the code itself.
That's why we're building GitBags.
GM.
I built a simple weekend project for @MetaMaskDev Hackathon.
A research agent that has no API keys and no custody of your money!
> Grant the agent a small, revocable onchain budget(MetaMask ERC‑7710 delegation).
> The agent pays per request for its own Venice AI inference over x402.
> Every single LLM call is an on‑chain‑enforceable USDC micropayment authorized by delegation.
> Each Transaction is relayed gaslessly through the 1Shot permissionless relayer.
Your agent can move fast but should it get the final say?
I tested the Ledger Agent Stack. Built a simple agent that does a Solana devnet transaction, and gave it zero keys.
The agent builds the transfer and asks a Ledger device (running as Speculos + DMK) to sign. The signing authority lives in hardware the agent can't reach.
Walkthrough + code below 👇
@Ledger #LedgerSponsor
Honest Take:
1. Setup isn't completely frictionless. The Solana app doesn't ship with a prebuilt ELF, so I had to compile it myself using Ledger's app-builder container.
2. The underlying model makes sense. The interesting part isn't another wallet integration; it's Ledger positioning itself as agent infrastructure. Giving agents hardware enforced signing boundaries feels like a more credible approach than leaving high value actions behind software secrets and API keys.
Everything I used to build it:
My Repo: https://t.co/m1JDUAzH9o
Ledger AI Tools docs: https://t.co/ZtotEZlpuY
Agent Skills: https://t.co/nQ0HDFueUv
Speculos emulator: https://t.co/xQYBc2HsBs
three months ago we started building @epochdotm as an experiment and ended up winning the @solana privacy hackathon, which landed us a sponsored @ns trip by @superteam to keep building epoch from there.
after arriving, it was a real rollercoaster, and the last month was especially hard, which is why we've been quiet.
still, we shipped. epoch is live on devnet (a private prediction market on solana powered by @arcium), picked up good traction, got submitted to colosseum, and recently got a mention in messari's solana q1 report.
so from now on, i’ve decided to document epoch’s journey and build in public. all the ups and downs, nothing filtered, everything raw.
here's ep 1. hope you enjoy.
Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI.
The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace.
They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up:
Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it.
Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived.
Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead.
The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much.
Uber's story is even worse...
Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April.
Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems.
Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.
The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money.
Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote:
"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."
This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans.
Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative.
Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing:
AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs.
The stock market rewarded every company that said it.
Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up.
But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill.
Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools.
Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible.
Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone.
And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control.
The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.
This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.
$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work.
What do you think?
I Genuinely lost hope in our democracy!
Really didn’t care about this Cockroach Party movement or whatever.
It would’ve easily faded out of trend within a couple of days.
But our insecure government just banned the satire account. Did the government actually fear an uprising from the youth?
To all the people defending deep state shit, STFU and get a life.
The common man is suffering, and the youth have lost all hope.
Don’t know whether boomer uncles and aunties will fight for freedom of expression or not.
But as critical-thinking youth, you only have two options for your future:
Either fight for the country and become the next Gandhi (high chance you’ll die), or leave the country!
If you have the luxury, choose the latter option. But many people don’t even have that choice.
Today or tomorrow, the person reading this tweet will directly or indirectly be affected.
@abhijeet_dipke@CJP_2029 account withheld in India/ banned now will be using twitter and other platforms via VPN only