> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Crawling Down the Stack - URL: https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/crawling-down-the-stack/ - Published: 2026-10-14T17:28:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T17:46:23.000Z - Description: With AI maintaining it, I can run my site on a bare server instead of paying a platform to make hosting easy. Middlemen from hosting platforms to Airtable sell that ease. Agents deliver it for cents, eventually for free, so their customers shrink to people who haven't heard about AI yet. - Author: Saadiq Rodgers-King - Tags: Tech Industry, AI, Business Strategy Claude told me the other day that swap memory usage on my server was high. For some reason the box was leaning on swap instead of its real memory. Claude diagnosed the cause and had the config change ready. ![Terminal output from Claude headed Needs attention: swap. MySQL has 526 MB in swap and only 17 MB in RAM, and a cold newsletter request took 5.3 seconds against under a second warm. The proposed fix lowers swappiness and trims MySQL's memory settings, with about 15 seconds of downtime.](https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/content/images/2026/10/2026-10-14-crawling-down-the-stack-swap-diagnosis.png) I said, "Yeah, fix it." That server runs my website and this newsletter. I couldn't manage it without AI tools. At best it would be brittle, old, and buggy. At worst it would be compromised by international hacker groups using it to stage attacks on corporate and private computers. I have a pile of little apps spread across three hosts. Some older ones are on Vercel. Newer ones are on Cloudflare. My website and newsletter run on a DigitalOcean droplet. Each of those infrastructure providers smooths out a different amount of friction. Vercel is the easiest to work with. Cloudflare is powerful and still handles a lot for you. DigitalOcean gives you a computer on the internet somewhere and leaves the rest to you. The pricing works differently too. Vercel and Cloudflare price their services with the servers abstracted away. A droplet's economics work because I pay for the box and can stack as many things on it as it can support. I had the background to run a server like that once. I don't have the time now. I don't remember every service and config file, and I don't want to spend my days that way. That gap is what most SaaS is built on. Now Claude or Codex connects to the box, upgrades services, and diagnoses problems. I say yes or no. That makes the droplet usable for me in a way it couldn't be before, so I can take the better hosting price and crawl down the stack. It's fascinating and empowering to see. Last September, in [Tools My Tools Can Use](https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/tools-my-tools-can-use/), I wrote that I could see a world where I had "my own bespoke version of Vercel" running on DigitalOcean or anywhere else, "orchestrated entirely through AI agents and CLI tools." I'm not all the way there. A droplet that Claude helps me run is a start. A lot of software companies built their business on letting less specialized people do a hard thing. Hosting platforms do it for deployment. No-code tools do it for databases and apps. Airtable is one I've [written about before](https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/tools-my-tools-can-use/). It built a lot on top of a database so marketing and sales teams could use one. In that same September piece, I described building an app for a nonprofit. My first instinct was to connect their survey tool to Airtable. I built it from scratch instead, because with Claude Code that was less work for me. In August, Airtable [agreed to sell to Bending Spoons](https://www.reworked.co/digital-workplace/bending-spoons-acquires-airtable-for-1285b/?ref=saadiq.xyz) for about $2.25 billion including its cash. In 2021 it was valued at more than $11 billion. The trouble with that business is that you're a middleman. You collect rent for making a hard thing easier to start and easier to use. It's respectable work while there's a gap to fill. Earlier this month I wrote that [your checking account runs on friction](https://saadiq.xyz/newsletter/your-checking-account-runs-on-friction/). The 0.1% rate is what we pay to not think about our cash, and banks have collected that payment for decades. Middleman software works the same way. The subscription is what we pay to not think about the database or the server. But now AI gives me a better experience than the middleman did. I pay for the bare database or server and cents for the model calls. When those calls run on local models, they'll cost nothing. So the customer base shrinks to people who haven't heard about AI yet, and it keeps shrinking until the business gets squished.