Two Things That Happened Today

fly.io launched phoenix.new — a live vibe deployer for Phoenix apps, which is either the most niche product of the year or the most inevitable one, depending on how much time you've spent watching Elixir people explain why Phoenix is secretly the best framework and everyone just refuses to notice.

The pitch is simple: open a browser, start writing Phoenix, it runs. Fly handles the deployment side, which they were already good at. You get the full LiveView experience without the part where you spend forty minutes figuring out why your mix release doesn't behave like your dev environment. Whether the vibe-coding wave actually reaches Elixir is a separate question, but it's a good bet from fly.io — they've been the de facto home for Phoenix apps for years, so they know exactly who they're building this for.

Meanwhile, OpenCut exists now — an open source CapCut replacement that showed up on the same day I was reading about phoenix.new, which is not meaningful but feels like it should be.

CapCut has had a rough year in the US — caught in the TikTok crossfire, banned, unbanned, existentially uncertain — and that apparently created enough of a vacuum that someone built an open source video editor to fill it. The genre of "open source clone of the thing that might get banned" is becoming a real genre.

Whether OpenCut is actually good doesn't matter yet. The fact that it exists and is open source and positions itself as the CapCut replacer is enough. The incumbent has regulatory risk. The alternative has a GitHub repo. This is how things change.