The week it almost died
A board fired and rehired the man half the industry runs on over one weekend, and it drew a hard line under a question I can't unsee: what in this stack do I actually own
Friday afternoon a board fired the CEO of the company half the industry is wired into. By Saturday nobody knew who was running it. By Monday seven hundred people threatened to walk to Microsoft. It is Wednesday now and Sam Altman is back, the board that ousted him is being dismantled, and everyone is pretending it was a hiccup.
It was not a hiccup.
I sat at my desk in Prague watching the timeline lurch and felt something I haven't felt about software in a while: dependency. Real, exposed dependency. Every product we have prototyped this year, every clever prompt chain, every demo I showed a client — all of it runs through an API key that belongs to an organization that nearly tore itself in half over a weekend. Governance most of us never read. A nonprofit board nobody could name on Thursday and everybody could name by Sunday.
I have been burned by this before. In 2021 I built on a platform that the surrounding hype and fraud took down with it, and I learned that the rails you don't own can vanish while you sleep. You build a house; the land gets repossessed.
So when people call control "paranoia," I hear someone who hasn't lost anything yet.
The intelligence is astonishing. I am not stepping back from it. But this weekend drew a line under a quiet truth: the model is rented. The weights, the uptime, the decision to keep the lights on — none of it is yours.
I don't have the shape of the answer yet. I just know the question got sharper. What in this stack do I actually hold, and what merely holds me?
That is the part I will be chewing on long after the news cycle forgets this happened.