Engineering Blog
Notes from the team building MerchSage — AI-driven print-on-demand pipelines, Kestra orchestration, LLM-collaborative codebases, and generative-design techniques.
If you're clicking around a UI, hand it to Claude
A practice that pays off every time: as soon as you're touching a new system, spend five minutes giving Claude API access. The setup is cheap; the dividend compounds.
How we get clean design cutouts from a generative model
Generating against five maximally-contrasting blurred natural scenes, picking the most distant in HSL space, then stripping with Photoroom - and the two approaches that didn't work.
Agentic Kestra: making an LLM a first-class flow author
An MCP that closes the author → sync → test → observe → DB-inspect → reset loop, plus the codebase contracts that make LLM-driven flow authoring actually work.
How MerchSage turns a YouTube channel into print-on-demand merch in 6 stages
An overview of MerchSage's autonomous pipeline: Scrape → Analyze → Concepts → Designs → Mockups → Listings. What each stage contributes and how they fit together.