Distribution — writing and launching like an engineer

Artifacts that no one sees don't exist. Distribution is the multiplier on everything above — and engineers systematically underinvest in it because it feels like marketing. Reframe: it's documentation with reach, and the engineer's version has a formula:

The content engine: every project from Topics 86–88 ships as a pipeline of derivatives — the README (the salespage), the deep-dive post ("how I built it / what I measured" — write the post you needed before starting), the launch thread/post, and eventually the talk. One unit of work, four units of distribution. What performs for LLM engineers specifically — notice these are exactly your Module 10 muscles: benchmark posts with tables ("I quantized 5 models to 6 levels; here's the quality atlas"), from-scratch explainers ("DPO in 300 lines, annotated"), cost breakdowns ("what fine-tuning actually costs: $1.87, receipts attached"), failure postmortems, and measured contrarian takes ("the reranker mattered more than the embedding model: ablations inside"). The common denominator is numbers — the one ingredient the ocean of AI content lacks, and therefore your entire differentiation.

The platforms, by function: X/Twitter is the AI industry's town square — the founders, researchers, and infra engineers you want to reach are actually there, and the underrated mechanic isn't broadcasting, it's substantive replies: consistently adding measured, technical value under posts by people in your spike area builds recognition faster than shouting into your own timeline. A personal blog is the canonical, permanent, searchable home (platforms decay; your domain doesn't). Hacker News / Show HN for launches — brutal, honest, and one good thread can matter more than a year of tweets. r/LocalLLaMA and the HF community for local-AI and model work — genuinely kind, high-density audiences for exactly Tier-S projects #1, #2, and #4. LinkedIn for recruiter surface area (repost your blog; don't create for it). And talks — meetups first, conferences after; community organizing, which you already do at scale, is literally this infrastructure pre-built.

The cadence truth: one genuinely deep post per month plus consistent smaller presence, sustained for twelve months, beats any burst — because almost nobody sustains it. Consistency is the moat precisely because it's boring. And the compounding is real: post #1 gets 40 readers; post #14 gets quoted by someone whose reply-guys include three founders. The curve is flat then steep; most people quit in the flat part, which is why the steep part is uncrowded.

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