Notes from the floor.
Engineering posts, product notes, and how the pipeline really works — straight from the team building it.
How the pipeline works: 5 stages, 8 steps, 10 states
Ten DB states, eight working steps, five visible stages — the actual handoffs between them, with the vendors that do the work.
EngineeringBurned-in captions rendered perfectly on a laptop and came out blank in prod. The bug wasn’t the renderer — it was a missing font in the container.
EngineeringThe new BullMQ worker, the two feature flags that route to it, and why image-before-video is a hard precondition — plus what’s still synchronous by default.
ProductHow VidFlow takes BTC, ETH, BSC and TRON without a custodian — a unique address per order, then an automated sweep to cold storage.
ProductWe cut three TTS providers down to one and added per-account voice cloning. What changed, what the cap is, and how to pick.
AI ResearchWe don’t ship a retention model. The hook stage gives you swappable openers — and why that beats predictive scoring.
TutorialTwo tables, one approval gate, and the single field that decides whether your scenes look like the same video.
Product NotesCredits, render time, queue depth — what it costs to scale, with no fictional creator success story.
TutorialWhat our shot planner actually does — semantic beats, style guides, reference images — and where prompts still leak through.