Anatolii Maltsev

I'm a solo founder, engineer, cyclist, photographer and unapologetic cat person. I've been in IT since 2018, but I've never been particularly good at staying inside one box.
I've worked on backend systems, automation, infrastructure, AI, microcontrollers, TinyML, blockchains, and game development. I've built things that were useful, things that were weird, and a lot of things simply because I wanted to see if I could.

Since 2022, my wife, our cat and I have been travelling around the world. With the world getting a little crazier every year, we decided to see more of it while we could. We've lived in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and now we're in Georgia.

At some point, building things stopped being something I did on the side. It became the job.
Over the last year I've been working on AI systems as a freelance engineer. I've built RAG systems, multi-agent workflows, support systems, document automation and integrations with external platforms.

I want to have a serious conversation about something that has been sitting on me for a while.

Why do genuinely valuable products stay in the shadows while generic copycat solutions collect hundreds of upvotes?

Let me be fair about this first. I have no idea how much of that attention turns into actual users, revenue, or retention. I don't know their numbers. Maybe the hype is working fine. Maybe it isn't. I can't see inside any of it.
So I'm not going to claim those products are bad. I'm going to claim something narrower and stranger: that the systems rewarding them are not measuring what we think they are measuring.