The Archive · 2013 — Now
Notes from the practice.
Write to figure out what you actually think. The post is the second draft of a thought you had earlier in the day.
521 essays in the archive · 13 languages · 55 categories
My AI Bill Went From $200/Month to $45. I Shipped More, Not Less.
June: $57.01. July: $33.09. Two months after switching to DeepSeek V4 Pro via OpenCode, my AI costs dropped 75%. The commit history proves I shipped more, not less — 786 commits across 4 products. Here's the full breakdown.
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I Evaluated 40 AI Podcasts Across 7 Languages. Six Pipeline Fixes Later, Here's What Improved.
I built an eval framework to grade my AI podcast pipeline across 40 real episodes in 7 languages. The review step was making scripts worse (3.34 → 2.91). Citation URLs all looked fake (score: 1.28). Chinese was the weakest locale (2.88). Six fixes, one day, and a new model later — here are the before/after numbers and every change I made.
How I Write System Prompts That Actually Get Enforced (After My AI Hosts Said 'Trời ơi' 13 Times)
I spent days crafting a system prompt for my AI podcast hosts. They read every word and ignored almost all of it. The fix wasn't better words — it was understanding that LLMs process rules differently depending on where they live in your pipeline.
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The One Question That Killed an Entire Curriculum Architecture in a Week
No. 05AIOffline Mode for My AI App Didn't Need AI. It Needed Boring.
No. 06AINative Isn't a Skin: Rebuilding DIALØGUE's iOS App
No. 07AII Rebuilt My Site With Two AI Models: Opus for Design, Codex for Execution
No. 08MarketingWhat Publicis Is Really Buying for $2.2B: Notes on the LiveRamp Deal
No. 09AI6 Months, 3 Game Projects, 0 Shipped
No. 10AII Rolled Back 2,724 Lines After One AI Audio Change Broke Production
No. 11AII'm Using Claude Code for Everything Else But Coding
No. 12AITwo years after my 7 Andrew Ng courses: the 2026 path I'd actually take
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