Field notes from the floor.

Three AI products launched to massive hype between 2024 and 2025. One quietly compounded its way into Goldman Sachs. One died losing $15M a day. One is dying slowly. The differences were visible on day one.

Midjourney fell from the top 10 to #46. OpenAI shut down Sora after burning $15M a day for $2.1M in lifetime revenue. The map of which standalone AI tools survive the bundling pressure, and which categories get absorbed.

A peer-reviewed 2026 study found six million fake GitHub stars across 15,835 repositories. Even the honest stars are pointing at the wrong thing. The signals that actually predict AI tool adoption.

Eight tools, four trade-offs, and one honest admission: no single agent wins every job. Ranked from real benchmarks and merge rates as of May 2026.

Eight models that ship agent workloads in production, ranked on the three failure modes humans don't notice: brittle tool calls, context that rots past 80K, and unit cost at ten million runs.

A working evaluation flow for agents specifically — eval set construction, the four failure modes that don't show up in demos, and the contract clauses that matter when the vendor disappears.

Five self-hosted AI coding agents — who runs each one, which proprietary product it actually replaces, and the specific places it falls short of the closed equivalent.

The seven-day recap, recomputed every visit: biggest movers, new admissions, hot sectors. Auto-generated from the live index.