Writing
Notes on building in public
AI video, prompts, distribution and shipping fast.
Field notes ·
85 launches, and 13 of them ship a robots.txt nobody wrote
A viral SEO thread ends with nine lines on AI search and the claim that it is the same game. It is not: the answer engines run on permission, granted per user agent, in a file some founders are no longer writing themselves. So I audited every Show HN launch of the week. 85 domains, 29 with no robots.txt at all, 13 serving a block their CDN wrote, 9 of those contradicting the founder’s own Allow: / three lines lower. And not one site in the sample blocks the crawlers that actually feed the answers.
Field notes ·
136 videos, 34 still up, and the two you have seen are ads
A 61 second TikTok handed to me as the perfect organic UGC video. ffmpeg, whisper and TikTok’s own JSON say otherwise: 14 blocks not twelve, 239 words a minute with 7.1% silence, a store card naming an app that had already been renamed, and an adAuthorization flag on exactly two of the account’s 34 public posts. Those two are the ones you have seen. The organic median from the same girl in the same room is 16,900. Also, while I was writing this, Apple pulled the app.
Field notes ·
137 apps lock your phone until you pray, and one holds 42% of the ratings
A day-8 build-in-public post: $349, #110 in the App Store, “basically on track to $10k/mo”. I found the unnamed app, read both listings live, and counted the competition. 137 apps sell the same mechanic, 95 shipped this year, their median has four ratings, and the two listings share a screenshot with one word changed. The playbook in full, the founder math done honestly, and the four curl commands that check all of it.
Field notes ·
Three agents, two models, and the expensive one never reads a file
A workflow post with 40.3K views and more bookmarks than likes, and for once the prompts were in the screenshots. Scout, implementer, reviewer: my adapted copies in full with a copy button each, the routing rule that holds them together, and which of their guardrails is mechanism versus honor system.
Field notes ·
I saved 40 reels and studied none of them, so Claude studied all of them
Forty saved references, zero ever studied. I pointed Claude Code at my VPS: 30 reels downloaded, 360 storyboard frames, 24 Whisper transcripts, every like count read from the embed pages. What came back is one skeleton wearing forty faces: a three-layer hook, a proof flash, a filmed screen, and a one-word comment gate.
Field notes ·
The AI can cut your podcast, it cannot tell you which 40 seconds matter
Eighty-seven seconds of TikTok, read frame by frame. Cutting a video has been free for years, which leaves one hard question, and the system in the video answers it by scraping 11,600 published clips and matching every one back to the moment it was cut from. The pipeline, the demo, the three places the argument leaks.
Field notes ·
Frames are cheap, clips are expensive, the cut is sacred
Higgsfield opened unlimited Seedance 2.5 for up to 33 days: 30 second one-shots with audio in the same pass, 50 reference materials per job. Unlimited moves the bottleneck from the render bill to your system, so here is the system: nine steps, one loop, from stolen taste to the single upscale pass at the end.
Field notes ·
Name your hooks like rappers, design your AI models like Michael Jackson
Every UGC video is two products: a 1.5 second hook and the video behind it. Three viral clips, one system. A persona-named hook deck, the Drake, the Kanye, the Hitchcock, the Houdini, and the MJ principle: one designed quirk that makes an AI model recognizable. Hooks win the first video, the quirk wins the second.
Field notes ·
The anti-slop stack is three tools, two paywalls and one colour
Paper, Refero and ui.sh, the workflow I was handed for designing without the AI smell. What each layer actually does, what the bill comes to, which two doors are locked, and the background colour all three of them share with this site.
Field notes ·
Anthropic’s anti-slop skill is 1,336 words, and one paragraph matters
763,000 installs of a single markdown file. Which claims survive a grep, the three looks it says AI design keeps landing on, why this site is one of them, and what a memo can do that a framework cannot.
Build log ·
The Telegram bot that runs my server, and the one I deleted
One bot for a VPS, an X queue and a CRM. Two of them were removed on purpose. The transport that needs no public door, the claim that survives a double tap, and why a card in a chat is a second copy of the truth.
Field notes ·
The AI making your 3D is not the AI you think
Mesh generators and frontier models solve two different halves of one problem. Kimi K3, Opus 5 and Fable 5 produce no geometry at all: they produce the part that was actually slow, which is everything between a mesh and 60fps in a browser.
Build log ·
Install this site on your iPhone (no App Store involved)
I am not building an iOS app: I made the site installable instead. The manifest, the generated home-screen icon and the two lines of iOS metadata, copied from this site’s source.
Build log ·
The motion stack: from Lenis to WebGL
Smooth scroll is mostly a trap. The stack I actually shipped, the gotchas that cost me evenings, and why the things I swore I would leave out ended up on the page anyway.