DEV Community: Richard Smith

Realistic AI-assisted content workflow without feeling fake?

Richard Smith — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:44:16 +0000

Anyone got a realistic content workflow that uses AI without feeling fake?

I run a small automation agency and I genuinely want to do my own content - on camera, real voice, no scripts. But lately I'm just not finding the time and consistency is suffering.

Looking at blending real content with some AI-assisted pieces to keep things moving. What does your actual setup look like? One all-in-one tool or a mix of things stitched together for writing, clipping, scheduling?

Doesn't need to be fully automated. Just enough to stay visible without me filming every single day. Cheap or free is a plus but I'll pay for something that actually works.

Curious what's actually working for people in similar situations.

Just signed an office lease and the wifi quotes are insane—anyone dealt with this?

Richard Smith — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:18:04 +0000

We just signed a lease for a basement office and I'm honestly floored by the internet quotes. $217 a month for business wifi in a small town feels like a lot, but maybe I'm wrong?

We've been getting by on mobile hotspot for our small team, but we're burning through data fast. We're a marketing agency, so there's constant video work—downloading, editing, uploading. Good internet would genuinely change how we operate.

I looked into Verizon small business but heard the speeds aren't great, and I don't need phone lines. The local ISP wants that $217. I even thought about asking other businesses in our building to split an upgrade, but that feels like too much.

So I'm wondering—what are my actual options here? Is $217 reasonable for business internet, or should I be looking elsewhere? Any small business owners dealt with this before?

Two Months In and Still Locked Out of My Venmo Business Account

Richard Smith — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 02:09:02 +0000

I've been trying to set up a Venmo business account for almost two months now. The basic problem: I get asked to validate my account, but when I check, it's already validated. Round and round we go.

Every time I reach support—whether chat or phone—they tell me the devs are working on it and to wait a few days. No ticket number. No callback. No way to actually track the issue.

I don't need hand-holding, I just need accountability. When you're running a small operation, two months of this is genuinely painful.

I've started looking at alternatives, but I'm curious what others are using. Square, Stripe, PayPal—anyone have a setup experience that's been less... endless loop-y?

At this point I might just move my payment flow elsewhere and revisit Venmo when (if?) they fix this. Has anyone else hit this wall, or found a workaround?

What Gets Easier When AI Can Design Your Circuit Board

Richard Smith — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:10:58 +0000

I've been following EEBench for a few months, watching AI models tackle real circuit design problems. The scores keep surprising me. Claude Opus 5 hit 61.6% on their benchmark. Grok 4.6 landed at 57.1%. These aren't simplified exercises—they involve genuine tradeoffs between performance, cost, and part availability.

The interesting part isn't whether AI can design circuits. It's what happens when it can do a reasonable job of it.

Hardware startups have always been expensive because expertise is scarce and mistakes are costly. If AI handles the requirements-to-verification loop reliably, the cost structure changes. Small teams could iterate faster on ideas that used to require specialized knowledge.

This also creates an opportunity for the tools themselves. A benchmark that can grade circuits objectively is also a training environment. Failed runs contain useful signal—which voltage missed its limit, which corner failed, whether the solution was unnecessarily expensive. That feedback is more useful than a model saying a schematic looks reasonable.

EEBench's approach with atopile is revealing: circuits as declarative code let the agent work directly on components and constraints rather than clicking through a GUI. The benchmark tests actual engineering, not computer use.

The question I'm sitting with is what "good enough" means for smaller companies, and whether that bar is rising faster than we expect. I suspect it is.

I built an AI call assistant for myself. It's in the Microsoft Store. I have zero users.

Richard Smith — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:16:34 +0000

Six months ago, I needed something to help me on calls where I freeze up. Sales calls, client escalations, interviews. So I built it. The technical part was actually the easy piece for me.

Speech recognition runs entirely on the user's machine, audio never leaves the PC. I killed every auto-suggest feature because it felt like being interrupted by a coworker. The model is NVIDIA's Nemotron, fine-tuned on about 8,000 examples I built by hand over months, quantized to FP8. Keeping response time flat as prompts grew took some engineering—we cache a stable prefix once per session so warm responses land in under a second, whether it's minute two or minute fifty.

The part I didn't prepare for: zero users. My LinkedIn post got 13 impressions. Show HN flagged me in under a minute. Posting on Facebook and TikTok has been silence. I'm in the NVIDIA Inception program, the app passed Store certification, and it actually works. But I'm a technical person with no audience and I don't know which door to knock on first.

For a Windows desktop tool targeting people who live on calls (sales, support, consulting), where did your first users actually come from? And is "free early access" the right framing, or does it signal "not real yet"? What would you do this week with no budget and no audience?

The Small E-commerce Trap: When You've Built Something Good But Nobody Finds It

Richard Smith — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:10:13 +0000

I spent six months building an online store last year. The product was solid—actually good. The website was clean. I knew the market. But months in, barely any traffic, zero sales.

I kept tweaking the site. Better photos. Better copy. Better SEO. Still nothing.

The frustrating part is I couldn't tell if the product was the problem, the website, or just that I hadn't found the right people yet. I'd been staring at it so long I couldn't trust my own judgment.

What I started realizing is that this seems to be a common pattern. Small e-commerce owners spending months building something and then hitting a wall on distribution. We optimize what we can see—the product, the site, the content—but the real problem is often getting in front of the right audience in the first place.

It makes me wonder if the real opportunity isn't in building another product to sell, but in building tools that actually solve this discovery problem for small operators. AI could help generate the right content, optimize for the right keywords, or figure out where the actual buyers are hanging out.

Have you seen anything that actually helps with this, or are we all just guessing?

I Turned YouTube into a Learning Platform—Here's What I Learned About Building AI Tools

Richard Smith — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 23:16:44 +0000

Last month, I open-sourced a plugin that adds a sidebar to YouTube videos. It reads transcripts, generates bilingual translations, and explains selected terms on the fly.

The idea came from my own frustration. I was trying to learn from English-language tech talks but kept pausing to look up words. A translator sidebar felt like a small thing that could make a big difference.

What surprised me was who actually started using it. I built it for personal use, but educators and L&D teams reached out saying they wanted something like this for internal training. YouTube has millions of hours of professional development content sitting unused because it's not localized or structured for learning.

This made me think about productization. A B2B version could include learning paths, progress tracking, and quiz generation from video content. Enterprise would pay for that. But it also means dealing with procurement cycles, compliance requests, and features I don't care about building.

Has anyone here navigated the leap from open-source tool to paid B2B product? I'm curious whether it's worth the complexity or if there's a simpler monetization path I'm missing.

Why selling a $5 digital design feels harder than it should

Richard Smith — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:13:47 +0000

I've been watching a pattern lately. Someone makes something fun in Canva, gets excited about selling it, then hits a wall of confusion around business registration, tax compliance, and platform requirements.

The irony is that the actual creative work might take 20 minutes. Figuring out where and how to legally sell it? That takes weeks of second-guessing.

The tutorials and Instagram content about selling digital designs mostly skip over the boring part—the compliance and logistics. Or they assume you already know what "registering as a business" actually entails for someone selling a few designs here and there.

This makes me wonder if there's a gap worth exploring. Tools or platforms that help small creators actually start selling without needing to understand legal jargon first. Not full-on business infrastructure, just enough to transact without anxiety.

Is anyone actively building something in this space? Or have you found existing solutions that actually work for tiny-scale creators?

My bank froze my payroll because paying international contractors "looks like money laundering"

Richard Smith — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:13:26 +0000

Four months of smooth international payments, then one day my bank decides I'm running a shell operation.

Yesterday I submitted August payroll like I always do. Today compliance called saying all my outgoing wires are temporarily held pending review. The issue? Sending money to multiple people in different countries on the same day "looks like structuring" to their system. I'm literally paying my developers for writing code.

Now they want contracts, invoices, and proof of business relationships for each contractor before releasing anything. This takes 7 to 14 days. My bank already has records of every single transaction I've made over the past four months, but apparently that doesn't matter.

I don't know what to tell my contractors. They're expecting pay and I've got nothing to give them while I scramble to compile documents for people I've been paying consistently for months.

The whole thing feels absurd. Small businesses paying legitimate international contractors are getting caught in anti-money laundering filters designed for actual criminals. The compliance team kept mentioning "multiple outgoing transfers to high-risk regions" like geography is somehow evidence of wrongdoing.

I'm curious if anyone else has dealt with this. What actually worked to get funds released quickly? And is there a better banking solution for teams distributed across Asia, Africa, and Europe that doesn't treat every payment like a red flag? I've been looking at some alternatives but most reviews seem written by people who've never actually run payroll through them.

I built a tool for myself, then accidentally turned it into something people actually use

Richard Smith — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:15:00 +0000

Started as a personal script editor for YouTube videos. Something I threw together because Google Docs felt too boring for organizing my thoughts.

Then I let a few friends try it.

Now we have 30 users and it's growing slowly but steadily. The tool ended up being a mix of Discord's vibe, a script editor, music player, link tree, and cool animations — honestly not sure how it ended up like this, but people seem to like it.

It's called Orb and it's at orb.ba if you want to check it out.

The part I keep thinking about: I almost didn't release it. I was so convinced it was just a personal thing that I didn't even consider it as one of my startup ideas worth sharing. Turns out that's exactly what it needed.

Anyone else have something they built for themselves that surprised them by having actual users?

From Paying £300/month for an accountant to wondering if I should build the tool myself

Richard Smith — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:11:14 +0000

Eight months into running my small business, I finally hit the point where managing books was eating too much time. Started reaching out to accountants in London. The quotes came back—£250 to £400 a month for basic bookkeeping. For a one-person operation just getting started, that's a meaningful chunk of revenue.

I got thinking. Most of what these accountants do is repetitive: categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, generating reports. The actual judgment calls about tax strategy or complex situations, I might need help with. But the routine stuff? That's automatable.

This got me wondering if there's actually a product here. A simple tool that handles the bookkeeping basics for micro-businesses—connecting to your bank, categorizing expenses, generating quarterly summaries. Something that costs a fraction of an accountant but handles 80% of the work.

Has anyone else been down this path? Are there decent existing solutions for UK small businesses, or is this still a gap worth exploring? I'd be curious to hear from other founders who've either built something similar or found a setup that actually works without breaking the bank.

Why not just trust the AI's top pick?

Richard Smith — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:09:16 +0000

That's the question I've been sitting with after noticing something strange: people actually do trust AI recommendations, but they're desperate for a way to verify those recommendations before buying.

It hit me when I watched someone ask ChatGPT for a product recommendation, then immediately open three browser tabs to check the specs, return policy, and reviews on their own. The AI gave them a starting point, but not confidence.

So I'm thinking about building a simple verification layer. One-click checks that surface the red flags: specs that don't match the listing, return windows that are about to close, reviews that sound suspiciously similar. Things that would make you reconsider.

The idea isn't to replace AI recommendations—it's to make them trustworthy. Give people a reason to actually act on what the AI suggests instead of getting skeptical and doing their own research anyway.

Is there a real product here, or just my own confirmation bias? That's the part I'm still working through. Has anyone else noticed this gap between AI recommendation and user action?