Ben

We had to choose: build @trysecretsauce with templates or go fully agentic. Templates would have shipped faster. Here's why we didn't. Templates put a ceiling on what AI can do for your brand. They're fast to produce and consistent in output - but consistency comes from constraint. You can only get what the template was designed to give you. And the template was designed for everyone. If your brand doesn't fit, you adapt the brand. That's backwards. An agentic system has no ceiling. You get the best practices baked in, but you're not borrowing someone else's aesthetic. The output is shaped by your brand - your colours, your tone, your vibe - not by what the template allows. If you can describe what you want, you can make it. The tradeoff is that it's harder to build, harder to control, and harder to make consistent at scale. Those are real problems. They're also the problems worth solving. We didn't want to build the ceiling.

We tested SecretSauce on 3 languages this week that we haven't formally built for. The test: take a real campaign asset, adapt it into Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai - correct fonts, correct copy language, artist name and logo unchanged. Two aspect ratios each. It worked. The agent used asset cards with font references and language rules to know what to change and what to leave alone. It didn't need to be told explicitly, it inferred the rules from the card. What it tells us about the product: the asset card system is more powerful than we built it to be. Users can encode rules we didn't anticipate, and the agent honours them. This week showed us the platform is working in ways that go further than we originally designed for.

We had to choose: build @trysecretsauce with templates or go fully agentic. Templates would have shipped faster. Here's why we didn't. Templates put a ceiling on what AI can do for your brand. They're fast to produce and consistent in output - but consistency comes from constraint. You can only get what the template was designed to give you. And the template was designed for everyone. If your brand doesn't fit, you adapt the brand. That's backwards. An agentic system has no ceiling. You get the best practices baked in, but you're not borrowing someone else's aesthetic. The output is shaped by your brand - your colours, your tone, your vibe - not by what the template allows. If you can describe what you want, you can make it. The tradeoff is that it's harder to build, harder to control, and harder to make consistent at scale. Those are real problems. They're also the problems worth solving. We didn't want to build the ceiling.

If you've used AI to make content, you've likely played the Prompt Lottery. You write a prompt, hit generate, and pray. 50 tries later you might get something usable. I got into all of this with @KiaJohnson1 on the @designrushmag Podcast. We covered the 25M character problem that started SecretSauce, why impressive AI demos fall apart in real workflows, and what brand teams need to get right before they scale any of this. Thanks Kia, great conversation. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=6xnnv7…

"Too early" is exactly why we started building @trysecretsauce . The people in the know said the tech wasn't ready. We proved it was. Now the work is putting it in the hands of every operator who needs it.

GPT image2 as visual planner and input for Seedance2(i think). Nice combo.

CustomGPT V2.0

SISA MALAM (Remnants of the Night) An AI-generated short film by Dan Pradana Made with Seedance 2.0 via @runwayml Edited with CapCut @capcutapp @capcutapp_jp A slice of life. A woman. A man. A flat somewhere in the city. And the quiet hours between afternoon and night where something unspoken slowly finds its way out. No action scenes. No explosions. Just love that finds its way through moments. + + + While AI influencers keep declaring Hollywood is cooked just for clout or engagement, I've been quietly trying to figure out how far Seedance 2.0 can actually go. And it's been one of the most challenging and rewarding things I've made. Fight scenes with Seedance 2.0 are easy. But drama is not. The goal was simple but hard: stop relying on random footage stitched together with a voiceover, and instead build something continuous. Scene by scene. Moment by moment. Reaction by reaction. A love story told through glances, small talk, and the kind of silences that say more than dialogue. Far from perfect, but further than I expected. + + + The characters are entirely AI-generated using Nano Banana. But the souls behind them are real. Risa (Icha) was inspired by a remarkable woman I admire. A middle-aged lady who could not have children of her own adopted an orphan girl at the age of eight. That girl is Icha. She grew up to become someone with a depth of warmth and maternal instinct that is hard to describe. When her adoptive mother later took in two more orphans, Icha, now 24, naturally became both an older sister and a mother figure to them. Through her I wanted to explore something I find genuinely beautiful about Southeast Asian women: that nurturing instinct, so quiet and so deep, it doesn't need to be taught. It simply is. Riandi (Rian) is a reflection of my younger self. Long before I married my wife, we lived in different cities. Every weekend I would take a two hour travel bus just to see her. No WhatsApp back then, no easy communication. Just a longing strong enough to move. We never went anywhere fancy. Cheap warung food, roadside stalls, just sitting together. It was never about the place. It was about needing to see her. That kind of love makes you do things that make no logical sense, and you do them gladly. We eventually got married. She gave me three boys. All of them. And she remains the only woman in the house, an absolute princess surrounded by chaos, and she handles it with more grace than any of us deserve. + + + I hope you enjoy the video. The technology is there. It has come a long way, and it keeps getting better. Looking forward to keep experimenting. 🙂

@mxvdxn @runwayml @capcutapp @capcutapp_jp Awesome short Dan. I actually really love the feeling that none of these slices of life "exist", yet they feel so real and familiar. It's also amazing to see AI being directed to do something else than flashy action scenes.

14,500 reasons to move to Thailand.

A client asked for a feature this week and we moved it up the roadmap. Here's what made that an easy call. They wanted a video ad replicator - something that could analyse existing video content, identify silences and unclear parts, and clean them up automatically. We'd been thinking about it but hadn't prioritised it. Then we looked at what we'd already built. The image replicator was working. The underlying capability - analysing content to understand what's working and generating variations - was already there for images. Video was the natural next step, not a new direction. When a user request fits cleanly into something you're already building, that's not a pivot. It's confirmation. Check out the feature on @trysecretsauce: trysecretsauce.ai

Today we shipped 6 video features built around the same core thesis: brand intelligence, not just a wrapper around an AI video model. Any tool can generate a video and slap your logo on it. But teaching the agent to take your brand, your audience, and your goal and reason through the best hook, format, and creative direction before it generates anything - that's what we've been obsessing over. Today on @trysecretsauce you can: 1. Clone a video that's killing it on your feed and recreate it for your brand and audience 2. Give your product a TikTok moment with a video that stops the scroll 3. Restyle your outfit, background, and lighting in a video that’s too good to nix but rough to post 4. Overlay yourself onto any background to get the TikTok green screen effect 5. Add automatic subtitles to reach the viewers scrolling on mute 6. Post without getting flagged as AI Try it now: trysecretsauce.ai

OK, Opus 4.7.

Just fork it.

Unless you're comfortable “exploring AI” like it’s 2023, you'll need SecretSauce to ship the output of a whole dedicated creative agency, in minutes. SecretSauce is your on-brand, self-improving, 24/7 creative agency. Get your own account now, your competitors already have.

The tradeoff: compaction isn't lossless. You're making a judgment call about what matters and what doesn't. Some detail gets dropped. The agent continues with a compressed version of what happened, not the full picture. But a bloated context is worse. Hallucinations compound. Quality degrades gradually and you don't see it coming. A clean compressed context outperforms a cluttered full one. There's no perfect answer here - just better tradeoffs. Compaction is ours for now.

So we built compaction. Instead of resetting, we strip the context down to only what the agent actually needs to keep working. The image it generated. The prompt that produced it. Not the full schema, not the raw API call parameters - just the meaningful output. Trim, summarize, extend the session without starting over.

One of the least glamorous product problems we're solving right now is also one of the most important. Here's what happens when a user's conversation gets too long - and what we built to fix it.