Two builds for Kusari: 7,777 assassins and a monthly art drop

Kusari is the studio behind Killer GF and Collectr, and full disclosure comes first: this is client work with skin in the game — our founder is also a co-owner on the Collectr side. Two engagements that happen to bookend how AI-assisted delivery has changed.

Gallery tokens

7,777

Traits

240+

Monthly editions

28

Editions sold

2,545

Public figures from the live Killer GF and Collectr sites as of October 2026.

The gallery, in the early ChatGPT era

Killer GF launched in January 2022: 7,777 generative assassin portraits by Zeronis, a former Senior Concept Artist at Riot Games whose League of Legends character designs include Ahri, Gwen, and Vi — generated from over 240 hand-drawn traits by the collection's own count, filterable in ten categories. Our piece of it was the gallery — the browser where holders and collectors explore the full collection — built in React on Firestore, with cursor-paginated 48-token batches cached per filter combination, a server-side aggregate count for filtered results, ten accordion trait filters with per-value counts, and a per-token modal with an OpenSea deep link and a hi-res IPFS lightbox.

The honest part: that Firebase wiring was done with GPT's help, in 2023 — before agentic tooling, when AI assistance meant carrying code between a chat window and an editor by hand. The leverage thesis this studio runs on today was already true then; the tools were just slower. We've been shipping with AI since it was awkward.

In August 2026 we came back to the same codebase for a full audit, and the diff reads like a list of what 2023 missed. The hi-res lightbox image now mounts only when it is opened — it had been downloading roughly 8 MB behind a hidden element on every modal open. The filtered count is fetched once per selection, in parallel with the first page, instead of once per batch. The ID search is debounced instead of querying Firestore on every keystroke, and revisited filter combinations are served from cache. On top of that: cursor and in-flight guards, real links and buttons with focus states, a proper dialog with focus restore, reduced-motion support, and tests for the data hook and the modal. The commit reports a 63% smaller bundle.

Collectr: a drop on the first, every month

Collectr is a monthly art-edition platform: a new limited edition from an independent illustrator on the first of every month, available all month and stored permanently on Arweave, with subscriptions that auto-collect each drop to the subscriber's wallet and customizable member cards. As of October 2026 it has released 28 editions — one every month since July 2024, without a gap — with 2,545 editions sold to 975 unique holders, per the live site. A first-of-the-month promise is a shipping discipline before it is a marketing line.

Our founder co-owns the platform and leads its frontend and marketing — setting direction with a team to delegate to, getting hands-on when it matters, and using AI throughout to iterate on UI, UX, and copy. It's the engagement model this studio recommends most rarely and believes in most: ownership.

Two Kusari builds, years apart: the first wired together with a chat window and patience, the second run on a monthly cadence with AI in every loop. Same thesis, better tools.

What we'd tell a client

• ▸AI leverage isn't new to us — we were wiring React to Firestore with GPT in 2023, and re-auditing that same code in 2026 showed how much the workflow has compounded since.
• ▸A recurring public deadline is the best process you can buy: 'the first of every month' forces scope honesty better than any methodology.
• ▸Skin in the game changes how you build — when the studio co-owns the outcome, 'good enough' gets a harder definition.
• ▸Permanence is a feature decision: storing the art on Arweave is what makes a digital edition worth collecting.