Weekly AI Builder Notes: April 29, 2026

# Weekly AI Builder Notes: April 29, 2026

This note points to the deck I used for the April 29 AI builder meetup. It was a weekly briefing rather than a transcript, so the useful artifact is the replayable slide sequence and a compact record of what the room was meant to carry forward.

The deck moved through GPT-5.5, DeepSeek V4, Microsoft and OpenAI distribution changes, the Musk v. Altman trial, budget coding options, and a small OSS tool roundup. The practical thread was pricing pressure and model placement: builders should know when to pay for frontier quality, when to use cheaper open endpoints, and when the toolchain matters more than the model headline.

The evergreen point is that AI infrastructure is becoming a routing problem. Capability, price, latency, privacy, and workflow ownership all matter. The weekly format is useful because it keeps those variables visible before they harden into habit.