Build Lab — field notes on building with AI

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Practical notes on building and deploying AI-assisted apps, published only after their claims and sources are reviewed.

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Latest field notes

Ship

Four things that broke shipping a Stripe SaaS on Cloudflare Workers

A tax-ID flag that rejects every checkout, a retry that replays a dead request forever, a sitemap that argues with itself, and a codemod that ran twice. All four shipped past a green test suite.

Ship · 8 min read

Four things that broke shipping a Stripe SaaS on Cloudflare Workers

A tax-ID flag that rejects every checkout, a retry that replays a dead request forever, a sitemap that argues with itself, and a codemod that ran twice. All four shipped past a green test suite.

Alex Liu
Lead Editor · Sep 22, 2026 Read the teardown →

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The Lab

Experiments published after their evidence is reviewed. ★

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Latest field notes

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★ FLAGSHIP

04 · The Lab

An AI video interaction ID is not a version history

A Build Lab protocol for branching, reviewing, accepting, and tracing iterative generated video before a creative draft becomes a publishable asset.

Aug 28 · 18 min

★ FLAGSHIP

04 · The Lab

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe needs an action-commit gate, not a WER victory lap

A Build Lab protocol for testing speakers, revisions, critical tokens, consent, and downstream effects before a voice transcript is allowed to change product state.

Aug 27 · 18 min

★ FLAGSHIP

04 · The Lab

Before your AI cites an expert, verify the institution behind the name

OpenAI’s latest influence-operation report shows how copied scholarship, false attribution, and cross-platform promotion can manufacture authority. This Build Lab drill tests the source graph before a small team publishes, recommends, or acts on it.

Aug 26 · 19 min

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