Image Gen
There's a cottage industry of "mega prompt" templates — 200-word strings stuffed with quality keywords, camera specifications, and artist names. Most of it is cargo cult prompting left over from Stable Diffusion 1.5. The keywords that mattered in early models do almost nothing in modern generators,
Image Gen
AI image generation has crossed the threshold from "impressive demo" to "I could use this at work." But "at work" is not one thing. A product shot for an e-commerce page has different requirements than a concept art exploration for a pitch deck, and
Image Gen
The legal and ethical landscape around AI-generated images is a mess. Not in the distant, theoretical "society needs to reckon with this" sense — in the immediate, practical "can I use this image on my client's website without getting sued" sense. As of early 2026,
Hex Wild
A Shopify operator running about 200 SKUs and pulling $15K to $25K per month had an AI tool for every function in the business — product descriptions, ad copy, customer service, inventory forecasting, email sequences. Five separate subscriptions, five separate dashboards, one person trying to keep it all running while also
Hex Wild
A solo podcaster producing a weekly interview show had eight AI subscriptions covering every stage of production — from guest research to social promotion. The hex stripped the stack to two tools. Three hours per episode came back. The audience noticed nothing. That last part is the whole story. The Stack
Hex Wild
A community college instructor teaching three courses per semester started using AI tools for course prep, quiz generation, syllabus drafting, slide creation, and student resource compilation. Within one semester, the tools designed to save time were consuming more time than the manual processes they replaced. The hex constraint cut the
Hex Wild
An independent AI consultant — the kind who helps small businesses figure out which tools to adopt — applied the hex constraint to their own practice. This created a tension that turned out to be the entire point: the person whose job is knowing about every tool chose to use only five.
Hex Wild
A tech YouTuber with 15,000 subscribers and a weekly upload schedule was running nine AI tools across a production pipeline that could have been handled by four. Scripting, thumbnails, B-roll sourcing, background music, title optimization, description writing, scheduling, analytics, and community management — each task had its own subscription. The
Hex Wild
Every developer with a side project has a version of this story. You start building the thing on a Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, you're not building the thing — you're configuring the tools you'll use to build the thing. By Sunday, you're
Hex Wild
The solo hex is hard in one direction — you have to be honest with yourself about which tools you actually use. The agency hex is hard in five directions at once, because every person on the team has a different tool they consider non-negotiable, and nobody wants to be the
Hex Wild
Eleven AI subscriptions. Four to six active clients. Monthly tool spend of $340. Monthly tool usage that could be honestly described as: three of the eleven, regularly. The rest were insurance policies against the fear of missing out — kept alive because canceling felt like admitting you didn't need
Hex Wild
Over the past year, we published eleven case studies of people and teams who downloaded the Hex Constraint PDF and actually used it. A solo publisher, a freelancer, a five-person agency, a solo developer, a YouTuber, a consultant, an educator, a podcaster, an e-commerce operator, a nonprofit, and a remote