Last Wednesday night, a message popped up: my friend had resigned from OpenAI. I panicked for a second.
First thing I counted that night: browser tabs
I was rushing a client's video script at home in Shenzhen when WeChat buzzed. A friend who's an engineer in San Francisco sent: "I quit." I assumed it was a job hop. Then he said: "OpenAI. I can't stay." I didn't reply—first, I checked my browser. 12 ChatGPT tabs, all open.
What's been happening at OpenAI these past six months
This isn't one person throwing a tantrum. Over the past few months, the safety team and core researchers have been leaving publicly. The most famous is Jan Leike—head of OpenAI's "alignment team," basically the person in charge of "keeping AI from going bad." In a public post, he wrote the company has been "putting products ahead of safety." A colleague on the same team, Mikhail Tatarinov, also left. Before going, he wrote in an internal memo: "I don't even trust what I built myself." The screenshot leaked to Hacker News. Out of 400+ comments, half the indie devs were asking the same question: should I switch tools?
The Atlantic ran a piece with a one-line headline: "I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken." Reading it, I finally got it—this wasn't one person yelling in pain. The whole building was shaking.
I got stuck too + what you can do tonight
I once made a dumb mistake. Last December, ChatGPT had a major outage. I had a client deliverable due the next morning. I sat in front of my screen for 8 hours doing nothing. After that, I started building "tool backups"—sounds obvious, but most peers never do it.
Money: $0–$30/month. Free works fine: use one main tool, keep a free-tier Chinese AI as backup (Kimi, Tongyi Qianwen, or Wenxin Yiyan all work). I pay an extra ~$20/month for Claude as my safety net because my clients demand high-quality English copy.
Time: 2 hours the first night is enough. Open your phone notes app, list every AI tool you've used this week, sort into three buckets: "can't deliver without it" / "important but can muddle through" / "nice to have."
Tech barrier: If you can use a browser, you can do this. Not everyone needs this. But if you ask AI more than 5 times a day, having a backup feels reassuring.
First step: Tonight, scan your last week's work log (Notion, WeChat file transfers, whatever). Count how many times you asked AI something. Takes 2 minutes, but instantly shows how much you're "betting" on these tools.
Three plays for three stages
If you're just starting (0 clients, under ~$700/month): Don't stress about it yet. Free tiers are enough. Get your business running first. Backup only matters once orders pile up and deadlines get tight.
If you have 1–2 stable clients: I'd say open at least one more AI account as a backup. Don't tell the client, don't switch workflows—think of it as "a side dessert next to the main course." One day the main restaurant loses power, and you can still serve your client a plate.
If you're scaling (team of 1–5, ~$2,800+/month): You need an internal process doc spelling out "which AI for which step." The wildest peer I've seen: 5 people, 5 different AIs. A client asks "how do you do this?"—5 people, 5 different answers. At that stage, what tool you pick is secondary. Consistency is everything.