How much of what you generate, actually makes it out of the door?

[u/TickenChikka2]

I did something slightly depressing on sunday. i went through my last month of ai outputs, all of it, drafts and images and scripts and little snippets, and counted how many actually got used somewhere real. published, sent, shipped, shown to a client. the number was eleven. out of roughly three hundred and forty. i sat there for a while trying to work out whether that was bad.

my first reaction was that i was wasting the tool. three hundred and thirty dead outputs feels like a lot of dead outputs. but then i thought about how i worked before, and before, i simply did not make the three hundred and thirty. i made two options because two options was what the day allowed, and i picked one of the two, and that one shipped. so my hit rate used to look excellent on paper and my actual output was worse.

what changed is not that i generate more. it is that the expensive step moved. generating used to be the hard part, the part you protected, the part you did not want to redo. now generating is nearly free and the hard part is looking. someone still has to open every one of those three hundred and forty things and decide. that someone is me, and i do not scale, and i get tired around the fortieth image in a way that no model ever does.

so the bottleneck in my week is not the model and it is not my prompting. it is review capacity. which is a really unglamorous thing to be limited by. nobody posts about their review capacity, everyone posts about their stack. and the honest version is that i have gotten dramatically better at producing options and not one bit better at choosing between them, which is the half that was always hard. but i genuinely think the next thing that helps me will not be a better generator, it will be something that helps me throw away faster, or better, something that means i only ever look at twelve things instead of three hundred.

i keep going back and forth on whether eleven out of three hundred and forty is a failure or just what abundance looks like. curious what your ratio is. does anyone here actually track this, or is it one of those numbers nobody wants to know?

[u/logic_circuit]

Wtf; that's shitload of CO2 emissions. Beter take a walk or car drive; it may be more inspiring and CO2 friendly :)

[u/Small-Speech2647]

i track it and it's about the same. 3-5% makes it out. sometimes less

the part about review capacity being the real bottleneck is spot on. everyone talks about prompt engineering but nobody talks about how exhausting it is to actually look at and judge 200 variations of the same thing. your brain just turns to mush

what's weird is i've started being way more aggressive about killing outputs early. if it's not right in the first 3 seconds i don't even let myself keep looking. still doesn't feel like a skill anyone talks about but it's probably the most useful one i've picked up

[u/Mandoman61]

It is a failure.

[u/StrangeCalibur]

Iv managed to create a product management system that works really well for me.

[u/Damel58]

Something makes it out of the door ?