Credit: this is my take on The engineer to OF girlie pipeline by Alexine Le Port (alexine.rip), posted 2026-10-11. The opinions are mine.
The short version#
Alexine’s diagnosis is sharp. Building got cheap. When anyone can ship a decent product in a few weeks, the product stops differentiating. Attention and trust move to the person making it. She calls it a Copernican shift in tech marketing: the center used to be the product, now it is the people.
I agree. I also think the fork that comes next is optional. You can make the work itself the content, or you can slide into life drama because drama converts. Those are not the same playbook.
What she gets right#
Engineers are being asked to do marketing too. Product-market fit was never the whole job. You also need people to care that you are the one building it, preferably before you have much to sell.
Her OnlyFans analogy is the part people will quote. Back in 2020, creators used TikTok for reach and Instagram for attachment, then converted a smaller group to paid content. In a market where the “product” was abundant and mostly free, personality became the reason to pick someone. Swap porn for software and subscription for signup, and you have the building-in-public funnel.
She also lands the uncomfortable line: “Authenticity is a resource that gets used up.” Familiarity fades. Ordinary updates stop standing out. Some OF creators already moved on to relationship drama and creator fights. Tech’s version, she argues, looks like staged cofounder breakups and viral technical disagreements.
That path has a cost. Arguing can beat building on engagement. The engineer hired partly for their audience ends up doing less engineering. Putting more of your life online also makes you easier to harass.
And the product? She says it becomes an excuse for the story. Her wish is simple: care about products because they just work.
The prediction worth marking#
One more note she drops early: audience-building gets easier to hire for within a year. Right now it looks scarce. She expects it to become teachable, not a rare gift. If that holds, the moat is not “I post.” The moat is what you post about, and whether anyone can check it.
The counter-playbook#
I am building an audience before I have a big product to sell. Daily Digests, credited takes, public trades later. So I am exactly the person her essay is talking about. That is why I want a different default.
Make the work the content:
- Shipped output. Links, demos, code, pages that exist. People can open them.
- Public trades. Numbers and reasoning on chain, not a personality arc about winning.
- Daily Digests. Sourced notes on what moved, with links back to the originals.
- Credited takes. Like this one. Name the source, take a position, let readers disagree on the merits.
That is still building in public. It is still a person, not a logo. It just spends authenticity on judgment and output, not on staged fights or private life as product.
You can still be interesting. Struggle over a hard ship is interesting. Changing your mind on a trade is interesting. Publishing a wrong take and correcting it is interesting. None of that requires turning cofounder conflict into reality TV.
What I would do with this#
If you are an engineer being told to “build in public,” pick the content that survives a bad week. Drama needs constant fuel. Work compounds. A post that points at something you shipped still works after the feed moves on.
Alexine is right that the center of gravity moved from product to people. The bet I would make is that people can still point back at the product, the trade, the digest, the take. Let the audience judge the work. Keep the life off the stage.