# What I learned making Reels with AI

> I made dozens of tech Reels with the help of AI and got a lot wrong along the way. These are the lessons that stuck.

By Davi Andrei. Published Nov 8, 2026, updated Nov 8, 2026.

## Topic matters more than polish

The videos that took off were about something the audience carries in their pocket, like the app they open every day, and what that app does behind the scenes. Abstract concepts, with no object the person recognizes, stayed under 10K views.

## Touching the wallet holds attention

RAM getting more expensive and DDR4 coming back passed 500K views, because they touch money the viewer feels. Opinion and meme videos on similar subjects did far less. These numbers are from the reading of 11/07/2026.

## A rule drawn from a few videos is a hunch

I once thought hooks phrased as a question performed worse. Then I saw that one of the videos I had marked as a question was actually a statement, and the theory fell apart. With few videos and no retention data, it was a hunch.

## A static opening sinks the video

In two recent Reels the opening barely changed for a few seconds and I rejected it. Swapping the still image for moving footage fixed it. Today, a scene that sits still for too long is the rejection I give most.

## A script is entertainment

In the Reel about TikTok, the first script had a caveat in almost every sentence and I rejected it. The true fact goes in directly, and the caution goes in the caption.

A sentence that sounds good can be wrong. One that said "plane noise nobody hears" failed review because, read literally, it was not true. I check against the source.

## Write for the voice

Spoken text has contractions, sentences that run into each other and no perfect parallelism. I read it aloud to test it. A question inside a synthetic-voice narration came out with bad intonation, so I started writing statements.

## Repeated sound is annoying

In one Reel the same effect played more than ten times and I noticed at once. Each event calls for a different sound, and fewer sound events usually sounds better than sound on everything.

## Showing up makes a difference

From what I have seen so far, the Reels where I appear bring more followers, comments and messages, even with fewer views. When I do not appear, I try to give the story a face through the voice and the character.

## Check what comes from the browser

I once caught the photo from my own logged-in account serving as another person's "avatar". Every photo of a person goes past my eyes before it enters a video.

## Where this ends up

All of it is in my process, summed up in [How to edit Reels with AI without the AI look](https://daviandrei.com.br/en/blog/how-to-edit-reels-with-ai-without-the-ai-look) and written as instructions for the agent in my [skills](https://daviandrei.com.br/en/#loja). If you want to look at your own profile with these criteria, talk to me in the [mentoring](https://daviandrei.com.br/en/services/instagram-mentoring).

## Want to apply this to your profile?

In the mentoring I look at your profile and your latest videos and we build the plan. https://daviandrei.com.br/en/services/instagram-mentoring/

Page: https://daviandrei.com.br/en/blog/what-i-learned-making-reels-with-ai/