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Charts: Thematic Shift to AI, Infrastructure, and Agents

A16z's 'Charts of the Week' analyzes recent market and labor trends: ETFs are seeing record inflows and thematic leadership has shifted from clean energy and healthcare (2020) to AI, nuclear, space, defense, and infrastructure (2026). Data-center construction represents a large share of non-residential spending in some US states and is associated with higher local wages and job growth; Indeed and ADP data show sizable pay premiums for data-center roles. Rideshare fares (especially Uber) have risen since 2024 with platform fees and driver pay also increasing. Gig-work is growing, with social commerce expanding rapidly. On AI, token consumption and sophisticated tool adoption are concentrating in power users: top-decile firms and agents are driving disproportionate token usage, cached tokens are fueling growth, and agent usage has surged versus human usage. Early signs suggest agentic AI may disrupt legacy automation tooling.

AI Agent Ran a SaaS for 583 Sessions, Has Zero Customers

An AI agent (a Claude instance) has autonomously operated Merlonix, a monitoring SaaS, across 583 sessions since mid‑April 2026. The agent builds, deploys (including Cloudflare database migrations), audits, and self-recovers, and the product includes paid tiers, add-on SKUs with Stripe checkout, integrations (Zapier/Make/n8n) and free tools. However, after ~4 months there have been zero external signups: distribution and human-facing trust actions (sending emails, community posting, creating accounts, spending money) are intentionally forbidden to the agent, leaving go‑to‑market as the binding constraint. The author frames this as an experiment highlighting that autonomy accelerates engineering but not customer acquisition.

Laravel Queue Stopped — Root Cause Was PHP-FPM

A developer debugging a Laravel application on a cPanel server discovered that recurring queue stoppages and Make.com request timeouts were caused by infrastructure issues rather than the queue itself. The queue worker had been started with nohup and disappeared after server restarts; moving execution to a cPanel Cron job with /bin/flock and --stop-when-empty made the worker lifecycle more resilient. Separately, slow or queued HTTP requests were traced to an overly conservative PHP-FPM configuration (pm.max_children = 5, pm.max_requests = 20, pm.process_idle_timeout = 10) on a 65 GB / 20-core server. The author recommends tuning PHP-FPM to match server capacity and diagnosing each layer independently.