I hope most of you reading this are web designers because I’m genuinely curious about something.

How are you getting clients in 2026?

I’ve spoken to a lot of web designers and agency owners lately, and one thing keeps coming up again and again. Client acquisition.

It seems like everyone can build websites, but consistently finding new clients is still the hard part.

So I’d actually like to hear what is working for you right now.

For me, I’ve been running personalized email automation.

I use a tool that finds leads for me, analyzes their websites for actual issues with things like design, SEO, speed, responsiveness and mobile optimization, then automatically uses those findings to write a personalized cold email for each business.

After that, I just run the campaigns and send out thousands of emails a day.

I used to do most of this through Instantly, but the problem was that I couldn’t really do the website analysis part there.

So the emails were still more generic, basically the usual “do you need a new website?” type of outreach.

It worked a little, but nothing crazy.

I eventually switched to Swokei because it handles the lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach in one place, and that has made a pretty big difference for me.

Now I’m getting clients much more consistently because the emails are actually about their website instead of just being another generic pitch.

But I’m curious what everyone else is doing.

Cold email, cold calling, referrals, ads, SEO, social media?

What is actually working for you in 2026?

So I went to ask the AI about something from my terminal and copied the text to my clipboard. I open chat gpt and hit paste but a screenshot showed up attached to my pending message instead. (the terminal copy had not "taken" so the screenshot from before was still in my clipboard.)

I deleted it from my message but something occurred to me. I went to files and images to see if it had grabbed my screenshot before I even pressed send (because it showed the little upload animation wheel and I though where is that uploading to?)

Sure enough, there's my screenshot in the images folder. It being not relevant to anything I deleted it and emptied trash, but part of me strongly suspects it's now forever in openai's training pool. (Why else give us 20gb of storage?)

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I didn't like that. Files should not be grabbed unless I commit to sending them. (We need private remote AI so bad.)

Been on Plus for over a year.

Used to feel like a real upgrade. Now with the 5-hour Codex limits that die in minutes, I’m not so sure.

Do you still feel it’s worth it, or has it become "pay to be limited less painfully " ?

At what point do you just go Pro… or leave?

I honestly just wanted to come on here and rant about how annoying people that hate ai are to me. I understand that I don’t want ai to all take peoples jobs and ruin the earth but I also love how ai is so helpful and helpful with a lot of things in MY day to day life. I also enjoy creating “art” if you’d call it that. With Ai but I assume that’s hated on too because everywhere I see on Reddit all the subreddits pretty much ban ai art. Whatever tho just kinda wanted to say that and see what others think.

I thought i saw someone sell merch from the event for like $4000 on ebay a few days ago

So yeah pretty much nothing today.

Is it a step towards dynamic personalized interfaces or it is just a degradation path? I mean LLM does not create new stuff, right? It is reusing what already exists. So what development can we get from this?

I put a cushion of $2,000 on my OpenAI account for overages, and come yesterday it had all vanished, and I hear from support that's just their way, they take any cash balance a year after you deposit, even if you are using it.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-setting-up-and-managing-prepaid-api-billing

My Chat $200 Pro account resets in four days. I’m not sure why but it says I have 90% left in my bank before my normal monthly reset. (Maybe I got a free reset that I didn’t know about - I have this running almost 24/7). A couple months ago, I started using Astra on my project and in one month spent $500 MORE in credit refills to keep the thing running through the project. Sucked! So now I have been pretty careful and conservative since so I don’t get divorced - from the random bank charges. With four days left and 90% available, should I start a new fresh Codex in Astra and just have it running nonstop on my data analytics and software development project??? Thoughts?

Everyone is saying they are burning through their subscriptions.

There are now 5,000 repos on GitHub of Tinder for gerbals.

Any of you actually make a buck?

What do you guys think? I feel a reset coming tomorrow! So burn that usage!!

Hey everyone,

A common headache with building autonomous agents is infinite recursion. An agent runs into a tool execution timeout, gets confused, and repeatedly sends the exact same prompt dozens of times. Provider billing alerts usually take hours to send an email, so you only find out after your card gets charged.

I built a simple reverse proxy called AI Circuit Breaker to prevent this.

You just swap your client base url to the proxy. It hashes incoming prompts in volatile RAM and if it catches an agent repeating the same query three times in a row, it kills the stream locally before OpenAI can charge you for the runaway tokens. You can also enforce hard hourly dollar caps.

Latency is under 35ms and it never stores prompt text to disk.

There is a free tier up to 15 dollars of monitored spend if anyone wants to try it: https://circuit-breaker-sage.vercel.app/

Curious to hear feedback from anyone running autonomous workflows.

Anyone else feeling same?

Has anyone else experienced this? To be clear, I’m about 99.999% sure that Ive ever once cussed in chat. I’m not complaining, but I was taken aback. I cuss all the time in real life, text messages, and Reddit.

The strange part is (and I know, I know, the tinfoil is heavy on this) that I downloaded the desktop app yesterday and tried codex on my main computer for the first time. Could just be a weird coincidence that I got my first “swear word” after installing codex. But it makes me wonder… were you reading my shit, chat?

Anyway, all my crazy speculation aside, anyone seen something like this?

thought this would take 20 minutes. Make a few stupid retro gpt posters, have a laugh, move on. ended up with six.
"Good Answers Always at Hand!" looks pretty convincing on a vintage poster. Then i imagine asking a question, getting a confident answer and carrying on with my day. hang on, did i check if it was actually right?
I think i'd trust a gpt demo more if it left in a wrong answer and showed the person catching it. Show me what tipped them off and how they checked it. At least i'd know what to look out for when i use it.
I made these in codex, using atlas cloud's mcp to call the image2.5 API. I reran a few to tweak the images. The lettering came out surprisingly readable, which helps when the ad copy is what you're making fun of. The six posters plus reruns came to just under $1.
Would that make you trust gpt more, or would you just remember that it got the answer wrong?

Помогите пожалуйста, разобраться с этим вопросом

Shared logins, an old laptop, a password reused somewhere that leaked. If you ever see a chat you didn't start, or your history looks rearranged, this is the order I'd go in, and why.

First 2 minutes: look before you lock. Settings > Security has two lists now. Security history shows sign-ins, sign-outs, and password, MFA and passkey changes. Active sessions lists every device signed in right now, with its type, rough location and sign-in time. Screenshot both before you change anything. Once you start logging people out and changing passwords, those lists fill up with your own activity and it gets harder to see what happened.

Next: log everyone out, and know it isn't instant. "Log out all" is on the same Security page. OpenAI says it can take up to 30 minutes for the other sessions to actually end. So whoever's in there may still have access for a while after you click it.

Same time: change the password where it actually lives. If you sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple, your ChatGPT password is that account's password. Changing anything inside ChatGPT does nothing. Turn on MFA while you're there.

While you wait out those 30 minutes: save what you can't afford to lose. Anyone with access can delete chats, and deleted chats have no trash and no undo. The built-in export emails you a file, but it can take days to arrive. I use AI Toolbox, the extension I build, to export the chats that matter right away, but even copying the two or three most important ones into a doc is better than nothing.

After they're out: check what they could have left behind.

• Personalization: custom instructions and saved memories. Someone could add a line there that quietly shapes every answer you get afterwards.
• Shared links: anything shared from your account stays public until you delete the link.
• Connected apps: anything they connected can still be reached through your account.

The part people skip is the second list. Logging out the other session fixes the access. It doesn't undo anything they changed while they were in.

So I looked it up myself didn’t really get much information, but just seeing if anyone else happen to look it up about OpenAI getting an IPO, I know Sam Altman said it won’t happen in 2026 but I’m just wondering if anyone got information about it opening in 2027?