Architecture

For years the architecture visualization industry has been stuck with a strange limit. Studios can produce a still render so convincing you cannot tell it from a photograph, but the moment a client wants to move through that space, the cost jumps by an order of magnitude. Animation means cameras, keyframes, render farms, and days of compute per shot. So most projects ship as a handful of gorgeous frozen images, and the sense of actually being there never makes it to the viewer. Two things changed that recently. Image-to-video models can now invent believable motion from a couple of stills. And coding assistants like Claude can turn that footage into a polished, interactive site in an afternoon. I wanted to see how far that combination goes, so I built a small experiment. This is how it went. ...

When people hear that Comify’s backend is fifty-some AWS Lambda functions moving more than fifty million messages a day, the usual reaction is “isn’t serverless expensive at that scale?” It’s the right question with the wrong assumption baked in. Serverless got chosen because of the scale and the economics, not in spite of them. But you only get the good version if you design for it deliberately. The naive version is genuinely a trap. ...

There’s a version of a scaling story that’s all dashboards and Kubernetes. This isn’t that one. This is about a phone-number-verification product called CODAC that, at its peak, placed more than ten million calls a day, made around $12M a year, and was run by three people. We did it on a cluster of telephony servers that mostly looked like pets, not cattle, and the hardest problem we solved had nothing to do with the volume. ...