Notes from the workshop.
Product updates, engineering notes, and thinking on privacy-first AI tooling.
The best AI for short-form video ads (TikTok, Reels, Shorts)
The prettiest video model loses the only test that matters: can it ship eight vertical, captioned hooks before lunch? Five picks, ranked.
The best AI voice for audiobook narration (2026)
The demo sells you the voice; the eighty-thousandth word tells you if you bought the right one. Stamina, license, and the store that bans it.
The best AI image generator for product photography (2026)
Most AI image models are great at art and terrible at keeping your actual product. Five that aren't, ranked on fidelity over beauty.
Pro product photos from a phone (no studio)
A phone, a kitchen window, four AI tools, sixty-three cents in API credits. Forty-two minutes to a six-shot product gallery.
How to make a 30-second AI video ad, end-to-end
Forty-seven minutes. Three dollars and seventy-three cents. Every prompt, every cost, one API — and the finished ad, embedded.
The best on-device AI apps for Mac (2026)
Your M-series Mac runs AI that was frontier-class two years ago. Eight jobs, eight picks, and the four categories nobody has solved yet.
AI for indie musicians: a 2026 toolkit
AI is a session musician you can hire at 2am for a dollar. Four pillars that earn their keep, and the parts of being an artist no model belongs near.
The last three months in AI: Audio models
Realtime voice latency fell under 200ms in four weeks. Music spent the quarter in court. Five sub-modalities, five clocks.
The last three months in AI: Video models
OpenAI killed Sora. The Chinese open-weight stack took the top three on the arena. And a 10-second clip now starts at fifty cents.
The last three months in AI: Text models
Six flagships in eight weeks, an open-weight model that tied GPT-5.5 on coding, and Meta walked away from Llama. The Feb–May 2026 LLM catalog.
The last three months in AI: Image models
Reasoning came to image generation, native typography stopped being a tell, and the leaderboard turned over twice. The Feb–May 2026 catalog.
Most AI work can wait. Your bill shouldn't.
Every major AI vendor charges half price if you'll wait a few hours. Most teams pay full price for work nobody is waiting on. A workload-sorting frame, and the four vendors' fine print.
Serious software is local. AI is finally catching up.
Photoshop is local. Excel is local. Your IDE is local. AI was the one category that wasn't, and the technical excuse for that just expired.
You don't need every AI model. You need the right five.
2.88 million models on Hugging Face. 359 on the leaderboard. You can do almost any job with five. The case for curation over catalogs.
AI products are mortal. Your workflow shouldn't be.
Eight obituaries in 24 months, nine Claude models retired, a four-hour ChatGPT outage. The case for keeping your daily AI workflow on a machine you own.