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The Weekend AI Engineer: Hassan El Mghari
Takeaway
Ship trivial-but-useful AI apps as open source on weekends — simplicity, distribution, and being open-source compound far more than audience size.
Summary
- Hassan (nutlope on GitHub) shipped ~11 side projects in a year, hit 8.5M unique visitors, 20K GitHub stars, 2.8M signups — all built on weekends, all open source.
- Examples: AI alt-tag generator (his first), QRGPT (pretty QR codes via diffusion), TechCrunch summarizer (lawyered down), AI commit-message CLI (30K dev users), photo restorer using GFPGAN (250K MAU, biggest in India/Indonesia).
- <5% of traffic comes from his Twitter — most arrives via word-of-mouth, Google, SEO, and other influencers; audience matters less than people assume.
- Common theme: trivially simple apps win because most of the world is not AI engineers; even ChatGPT wrappers can hit 100K weekend visitors.
- Lessons on monitoring open-source PR contributions and capping costs when OpenAI bill spikes from viral traffic.
side-projectsopen-sourceweekend-hacking
Original description
How *YOU* can - and should - build great multimodal AI apps that go viral and scale to millions in a weekend. Featuring the Vercel AI SDK and the new v0.dev AI frontend tool. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer Summit 2023. See the full schedule of talks at https://ai.engineer/summit/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2024! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/worlds-fair About Hassan Creator of RoomGPT