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Everyone's shipping AI demos.
Almost nobody writes about what breaks when real users and real money hit them.
So I'm going to. Twelve posts on the unglamorous problems behind production systems I've built solo. Once a while: 01/12
Most RAG demos retrieve the wrong chunks, mine runs hybrid pgvector + Postgres full-text, RRF fusion, then a cross-encoder rerank.
The Anthropic/OpenAI SDK will hang your app for 10 minutes on its default timeout here's the failover chain that fixes it.
I let an LLM write SQL against a customer's live database ,and the schema guardrail that keeps it from doing damage.
Nobody talks about billing for AI - I meter every token so no call ever goes unbilled, per tenant.
Half of enterprise documents are scans your RAG silently can't read - the OCR fallback path, with cost caps.
Chat memory isn't a chat array - server-side history and result replay so reopening a conversation costs zero tokens.
hls_time=2 did nothing and my 10-second video stayed one segment - the keyframe/GOP bug, and the one flag that cut it into exact 2.000s chunks.
Gating premium video without Widevine - capability tokens, per-request takedown re-checks, presigned segment redirects.
I costed out 10,000 users before writing a line of code - and why "10k users" secretly means three different things.
When should software refuse to act without a human? The gates I build to stop the machine on purpose.
In multi-tenant systems, one bug leaks everyone's data - isolation, RBAC, audit logging, instant token revocation.
Routing delivery riders through a city with no street addresses - zone maps, walk-graph sequencing, dispatch. #systemdesign #AI #softwareengineering
The network for creativity
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With new AI video models coming out every week, I'm starting to find them harder to compare.
Since most of them are already pretty good, the differences between the models start to feel less significant.
And maybe that's actually the interesting part.
As the models start to converge in quality, I've been enjoying the directing part more, because that starts to matter more than the generation itself.
Once the visuals are there, it's about deciding how they move, connect, and build on each other.
Here's a short product sequence I created with FLUX 3 over the weekend!
Unpopular opinion 101: "growth hacking" is dead.
[Image credit: Yoav Tchelet]
Okay, here's a take that gets me in arguments, so I'll see how it lands here.
The "growth hacking" playbook everyone was running 2015-2020 is dead.
Not declining. Dead.
And we've got to stop pretending it still works.
What I mean:
1. Cold email at scale - Inboxes are a graveyard now. Reply rates are 1/10th what they were 5 years ago. Anyone telling you they're getting 8% reply rates is either lying or selling you a course.
2. LinkedIn automation - LinkedIn detects it, prospects ignore it, and the people running it loudest are the ones with nothing real to show.
3. SEO "growth hacks" - Google's algorithm and AI summaries killed the playbook of pumping out 200 thin pages targeting long-tail keywords. The brands winning now have actual expertise and authentic content.
4. Viral loops / referral tricks - Worked in a market where the average person wasn't already in 14 SaaS tools. Not in the CyberPunk era we are heading to.
5. "Hack" funnels - Customers know when they're being funneled. They bounce.
What's actually working in 2026 from what I've seen:
- Distribution through real communities. Slow, hard to measure, doesn't scale linearly. Works.
- Founder-led content that's actually opinionated, not the LinkedIn "I learned 5 things from my failure" slop.
- Honest comparison content that mentions competitors fairly. Buyers Google "X vs Y" and trust the result that doesn't pretend to be neutral.
- Customer interviews driving product changes that show up in the product, then the product itself becomes the marketing.
And of course, the Boring stuff like good onboarding, fast support, fixing the 3 things every customer complains about.
None of this is sexy.
None of it fits a "hack" framing.
None of it makes a good Twitter thread.
There are no growth 'hackers' anymore.
But there will always be sustainable Growth Marketing & GTM Engineering...
Okay my rant is over 🥴
#growthhacking #growthmarketing #saas #gtm #saasmarketing
Distribution through real communities and honest comparison content both ring true from what I've seen too. Founder-led content is the trickiest one on that list though, most founders either can't sustain the volume or it ends up sounding like LinkedIn thought leadership anyway....
THE ATTENTION GAP 1 — A speculative advertising campaign for ElevenLabs.
AI has made creative production almost limitless.
But when everyone can create more, creation stops being the scarce resource.
Attention is.
This campaign explores that tension through a six-part visual progression — from abundance and sameness to humanity, silence and finally a question:
What deserves to be heard?
The project is not anti-AI. AI is the medium and the context.
The creative challenge was deciding what to generate, what to reject, and ultimately, what to leave empty.
Concept, Creative Direction & Editing — Vanesa Martinez
