sherifbutt.dev · cardiff, uk
$ ls writing/

Notes from two years of building in public — mostly offline.

Long-form on scraping infrastructure, CAPTCHA adversarial ML, the changing economics of open source, and the mistakes I've made running a solo studio. Drafts are visible on purpose — if something looks interesting, email me and it'll ship sooner.

8
total
3
published
5
drafts
monthly
cadence

##index

8 of 8
tags
01
Aug 2026● live
The prompt I never wrote
None of the things I say when I want an image contain the word image. Getting an agent to notice that worked — and made everything downstream more expensive, harder to reproduce, and impossible to give up.
aifoundertechnical
10 min
→
02
Aug 2026● draft
The illustrator who was never the problem
He couldn’t picture the scene from my story, turned up unable to work, wasn’t the one from the demos, and sent a bill nobody had quoted. Not one of those four is a complaint about drawing — I had hired an artist when what I was missing was a studio.
aifoundertechnical
8 min
·
03
Jul 2026● live
I built a tool to find customer pain. Its best output was telling me I was wrong.
Reddit blocks AI crawlers, so I built an MCP plugin to get in. Then it spent three days proving me wrong — about my market, about my wedge, and finally about whether it should be a product at all.
aifoundertechnical
11 min
→
04
Apr 2026● live
Using YOLO for CAPTCHA recognition — 17 phases from demo-ware to production
Quad-signal fusion, 7-layer motor control modelled on neuroscience papers, cost/accuracy tables. The naive approach works in the demo and breaks in the wild — this is the rebuild.
aiscrapingtechnical
14 min
→
05
May 2026● draft
The dark side of open source in the age of AI
AI collapsed the cost of replicating a SaaS from $500K to $500. That changes the open-source calculus — here's the math with Sentry / HashiCorp / Redis as the evidence.
ossfounderessay
~10 min
·
06
May 2026● draft
Self-healing selectors: why V-Scrape rebuilds its own extraction logic
Cached LLM-derived extractors + drift detection. How to not pay for the same reasoning twice.
aiscrapingtechnical
~7 min
·
07
Jun 2026● draft
BYOK is a feature, not a cost centre
Why passing AI provider keys through to the user is the right default for power tools.
founderai
~5 min
·
08
Jun 2026● draft
Benchmarking scrapers honestly — methodology behind ScrapeMe
What the 18 scenarios test, why 1,800 points, and how the 9-signal bot-detection score is computed.
scrapingosstechnical
~9 min
·