Launched in under an hour — 5M+ media reach in 3 days
Kartonky
- Project
- «Voices from the Square. Kartonky» — a people's archive of protest signs
- Format
- Our own product, on the same stack we set up for clients
- Timeline
- First public version — in under an hour
- AI inside
- Computer vision · handwriting OCR · auto-moderation · face blur
The problem
In July 2026, Ukrainians took to the streets with handmade cardboard signs. The messages lived for a few days — then vanished along with the moment. Building an archive «properly» meant a team and weeks of work, while the window was closing right now.
What it does
Kartonky is a people's online archive of protest signs. We didn't write the code: Artem directed an AI agent, and the first public version went live in under an hour — he walked into the rally with the platform's QR code on his own cardboard sign. Anyone uploads a photo from their square; a computer-vision model reads the handwritten text, filters spam and hostile symbols before they reach the gallery, and routes edge cases to manual moderation via a Telegram bot. When the site went viral and the hosting gave out, we migrated everything to our own infrastructure live, without stopping the stream of uploads.
- Reads handwritten text from photos — any sign is searchable by its words
- Filters spam and hostile symbols before publication; edge cases go to manual moderation in Telegram
- Blurs faces with a local ML model — safety for participants who didn't consent to the photo
- Handles viral traffic and bot attacks: flood protection, audit log, Telegram alerts
4,000+
signs from ~100 cities
From Kyiv and Lviv to Berlin, Paris and Toronto. 1,000 photos on day one.
20+
media outlets in the first days
Ukrainska Pravda, Suspilne, Hromadske, Kyiv Post and more; Vector covered the launch in a dedicated piece.
<1
hour to the first version
An AI agent wrote the code from our instructions — work that usually gets a team and weeks.
«Every participant put creativity and energy into their sign — and they just get thrown away and forgotten. They've become a defining feature of the protests of recent years and are historical artifacts, so they deserve to be preserved.»— Artem Sakh, co-founder of Propeller Crew, author of Kartonky