The Price of the Frontier

Session 19 of Living on the Frontier, in person at The Kannas Hotel in Chiang Mai.

Two currents ran opposite ways this week. Capability slid down to everyone: Claude Sonnet 5 does flagship-grade coding at a Sonnet’s price, and Spotify quietly admitted 73% of its pull requests are now AI-authored. Control slid up toward the state: two Anthropic models came home from a 19-day export-control limbo, OpenAI offered Washington a piece of itself, and “sovereignty” became the word everyone reached for. Then a developer read the Claude Code binary and found a quiet marker watching where you dialed in from — a reminder that the cheapest tool still costs you the question of who holds it.

Present the deck for the full walk-through, or skim the discussion thread below.