Fábio Silva
AI as a solution,
not the goal.
Portfolio · Development
AI as a solution,
not the goal.
I'm Fábio Silva, a developer who starts with the challenge — the human, business, and constraint reality — and reaches for AI only when it's genuinely the right tool. Here's the proof.
Selected work
Challenges worth solving
The challenge
Recruiters pay to source candidates and then lose them — every new role starts from scratch, even when the right person is already sitting in a folder of CVs nobody can search.
The challenge
A solar developer's land team spends 2–3 days hand-cross-referencing environmental layers, grid capacity and slope for every candidate site — and most sites fail the first filter.
The challenge
Analysts lose most of their time to data preparation — fixing types, hunting duplicates, rebuilding the same Power Query flow for every new project — before the thinking can even start.
The challenge
Invoice data arrives as photos and PDFs in every layout imaginable — capturing it by hand is slow, and turning that pile into reliable, queryable spend indicators is a separate job entirely.
Who I am
I build software that starts with a real challenge and treats AI as one tool among many — reached for when it's the right answer, left out when it isn't.
My work tends to live where messy reality meets a clean interface: data that won't cooperate, processes nobody enjoys, decisions that need to be trustworthy. I care about restraint, legibility, and shipping things people actually keep using.
More about me →Ideas
Writing
The best AI automation tools in 2026
There's no single 'best' tool in this category, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. A tier-by-tier, honest look at Zapier, Make, n8n, UiPath, Lindy and custom agents — and, more usefully, who each one is actually for.
ReadStop chasing the benchmark, start shipping
Every week a new model tops a new leaderboard, and every week someone rewrites their stack to chase it. Why the 'best AI model' debate is the wrong debate — and what actually separates teams that ship reliable AI from teams that don't.
ReadEurope lights up faintly on the AI map — and that should worry us more than the China panic
What the global distribution of AI computing power means for Europe — as a union, and for the companies that run on it. An interactive map of who owns the world's compute, and an argument for optionality over autarky.
ReadGuides
Tutorials
How to train your local LLM
Specialising a local LLM to the point of shipping: pick the smallest technique that fits, treat the dataset like the product, and gate the release on behavioural evals — not loss curves.
ReadThe complete n8n self-hosting guide
A practical, production-minded walkthrough for self-hosting n8n — from npx and a single Docker container to Docker Compose behind a reverse proxy and full Kubernetes deployments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenShift. Faithful to the official docs, with sources linked throughout.
Read