Long-reads on how CricCuts cuts your highlights automatically, why on-device AI is the future, and the story behind the app — written by the person who builds it.
A bat meeting a ball is over in a thousandth of a second — so how does a phone catch it? A plain-English field guide to the ideas that make it possible: the physics of the sound (timbre, onset, attack, the envelope, the spectrum) and the geometry of the motion (luma grids, motion energy, the repetition heatmap, and the stance→trigger→swing→follow-through signature of a stroke). Concepts, not code — the vocabulary behind how CricCuts hears and sees the game.
Product & UXA general trimmer makes you scrub an hour of footage to find six balls. Cricket has a shape a purpose-built editor can lean on — so every thumbnail is framed on the moment of contact, the app reads adjacent nets and a batter who taps and wanders the crease, and a loading screen actually teaches you the game. The UX and product decisions behind CricCuts — plus TokTok vs coaching cuts, watermarked exports that get you noticed, why we're deleting our own advanced filters, and the one boundary box we'll never remove.
How it's builtWe build CricCuts with an AI agent in the loop — yet our single biggest accuracy breakthrough, learning where a recording's action keeps repeating, came from a human hunch no language model suggested. Not after one review, and not after many, by more than one of them — Claude and Fable included. On the real division of labour between a person and an AI. With a heatmap you can read at a glance.
The scienceYou can't fully feel your own technique — but a camera can show it to you, and your brain is built, right down to the neuron, to learn from what it sees. The science of self-observation — mirror neurons, prediction error, video self-modeling — and the exact cricket mistakes video fixes in batting and bowling, with real examples from Tendulkar, Kohli, Smith and remodelled bowling actions.
How it's builtThe cleverest thing about CricCuts is something you'll never run. We use LLM-powered agentic development to build, test and endlessly refine a complex, deterministic engine — the kind of app that used to need a whole team — and ship something cheap, instant, private and incapable of hallucinating. Plus a visual map of the loop we iterate in.
Interactive courseA guided, interactive course on the signal processing and small on-device AI models — MediaPipe Pose, Vosk and Silero VAD — that turn a raw net or match recording into a clean reel, automatically and entirely on your phone. Twelve modules, live demos you can poke, and a quick quiz on each.
Big pictureThe industry spent a decade making models bigger and more remote. The next decade belongs to small, specialised models running right on your device — faster, more private, greener and free. Here's why, and how CricCuts proves it.
Big pictureNot one giant brain, but a society of small specialists cooperating — the architecture of the human nervous system, and an emerging pattern in modern AI: mixture-of-experts, agent orchestration, and tools like Claude Code that run agents locally while leaning on the cloud. Graduate-level, in plain English.
The makerCricCuts is an independent, one-person project — built in late-night coding spells between early-morning matches, fuelled by billions of AI tokens and a few hundred cups of black filter coffee. The story, and a way to say thanks.
