Product & Craft · Week of August 2, 2026
AI's price collapse, open-source paradox, and eval-driven craft reshape how products get built
- OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 prices up to 80% as the per-token standard shattersSame model. Same Thursday. An 80% cut, landing exactly three weeks after GPT-5.6 launched.
- Open-source inference share is falling — Decagon says that's adoption, not defeatArticle — "Open-source inference share is falling — and Decagon says that's a sign of adoption, not defeat": Article — "Open-source inference share is falling — and Decagon says that's a sign of adoption, not defeat": He…
- Evals replace the PRD: how AI labs turned verification into the core build disciplineTwo people who both build evals for a living can't agree on how hard it is.
- AI-native PM hiring: vibe-coding rounds, role fragmentation, and the judgment X-rayThat's Jiaona Zhang, CPO at Laurel AI, describing the exact moment a candidate's story falls apart. Not on the résumé. Not in the case. On the screen share, live, when the polish runs out.
- Cursor scales to 250 cities and builds a 45-member angel network from its dev community"45+ Cursor team members now in our angel investing group chat. Reach out if you're working on something new, love to share with the group!"
Threads we are following
- Will competitor repricing (Kimi K3, GLM-5.2, Gemini 3.6 Flash) force another mid-quarter OpenAI cut before IPO scrutiny intensifies?
- Whether aggregate open-source inference share actually inflects upward as more enterprise use cases mature — Zhang bets years, not months
- Will any non-lab company demonstrate a trustworthy eval flywheel without lab-level talent density — or does the 5% trust figure hold?
- Will more companies formally split the generic 'AI PM' req into builder, orchestrator, and evaluator roles?
- Will Cursor's next boast be city count or founders funded — and does the angel number finally move past 45?
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