It won’t be long, but may calm you down if there is some sort of anxiety you still suffer from.

How I perceived the boom at first

As a software engineer, I’ve been observing the sudden adoption of AI tooling among developers from a front-row seat. I read tech newsletters, I talk to tech friends, and most importantly, I work at a world-class FinTech company that made a heavy bet on AI training and tool investments. As I already covered in Vibe Coding is Over, it happened that I was in the group of people who adopted AI assistance the quickest, and to the highest level out there.

It was always hard to keep up with what’s happening in the tech world. Everything evolved so quickly that you needed to constantly learn just to maintain the same position. But this time, for the first time ever, I was unsure whether I would keep up at all.

The flood of news about AI tools, AI adoption, and AI taking over jobs overwhelmed me at first. I had multiple little kids, so the amount of sleep was at an alarming level, and there was never a worse time to process a massive amount of new knowledge and habits, or to change all the possible workflows to keep up with the new demand.

I remember when I got scared that I would be replaced by AI soon, and tons of influencers repeated this all over the place.

Then layoffs started. Every single big corporation started to announce massive layoffs in tech engineering, partly because of AI adoption. My initial thought was: It’s premature.

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Hiring highly skilled workers is hard. It takes time, and it takes investment to teach them the business model, its complexity, the culture, and more.

But it happened a lot. Over and over again, so naturally I was anxious. What if we get replaced by younger coders who are quicker at adopting the new tools and workflows?

Then the data came in.

Three things that made me calm again.

There are a few things that made me wonder: wait, what?

1. Layoffs were not what they looked like

First of all, let me make things clear: AI does impact layoffs in big-tech by A LOT.

But on closer look, layoffs were not what they looked like at first glance.
Only five companies explicitly said the layoffs were because of AI. IBM GREW after saying AI replaced 30% of HR; the loudest cutters reallocated staff - they DIDN’T SHRINK.

At the same time, solopreneurs and indie hackers were springing up like mushrooms after rain. My X friend recently posted his thoughts on how the app market got flooded with little tools, doing the same little things. Solving the same simple problems. Coincidence? I doubt it.

The competition in solving simple problems has exploded to levels never seen before, but that has made complex problems even harder to solve.

And what will it bring us long term?

2. Quality became the bottleneck

We started getting alerts about major companies having outages here and there. The Anthropic status page showed below 99% uptime. Every week we heard about a data breach or a major outage.

There are fewer incidents reported nowadays, but when they happen, the impact is more noticeable.

As I’ve already covered in Building is solved, selling is not, developers all over the world got flooded with AI-generated CVE reports. One example is the curl maintainer talking about approximately 20% being AI slop, which resulted in a month-long Summer of Bliss.

While you may see hundreds of thousands of habit-tracker apps in the App Store, there are things that cannot be halfway delivered or half-broken.

Imagine that some clients require contracts where penalties for downtime can be pretty high. In those companies, code reviews became the bottleneck, because somebody needed to sign off on the features and take responsibility for them.

AI helps a lot with the labor, but can’t ensure correctness. We need humans. Experienced humans, with good contextual memory and an understanding of the business and service dependencies, who never lie about having read the docs.

NLnet Labs & CEO of AuraSpark wrote articles about the importance of preserving the skills needed for quality not to drop, and about how the sudden urge to automate everything makes people struggle to think.

junior employment fell roughly 9 percent within six quarters relative to nonadopters, while senior employment kept right on growing

Seniors are needed. More than ever. And they will be needed even more.

3. Students doing worse at school

The trend to lay off everyone in the urge to automate everything seems to be reversing, or at least slowing down.

But there is more on that. The PISA 2025 Report shows that students are doing better homework, but perform 20% worse on exams. The struggle is becoming a real problem, as this affects all domains.

In a few years, the biggest problem could be hiring anyone who is able to keep AI hallucinations on a tight rein. Already, the number of duplicated lines reviewers need to deal with is growing rapidly.

And what will happen to us, seniors, who need to review all the code that degrades in quality but increases in duplication?

So what does it mean for you?

Take a breath, and calm down. Then let me know what your thoughts are about this topic. If you’ve been doing well in your job, there is a good chance you’ll do well in the future. Your skills, your ability to think deeply, overcome issues, and critically look at the designs without the urge to save tokens - are becoming more and more important.

The ability to plan thoroughly, step by step, chaining conclusions, will make you an AI power user who will need to teach younger folks the right approach.

And finally, if you choose the path of building something on the side, you’ll be able to tackle harder problems than most people.

Take care, and if you’re still unsure, reach out to me, I’m happy to talk about these topics!

I published multiple resources about AI usage, some of my foundations and my background. What I did in the past, and how it affected when I’m here.

But is anything of that important to YOU?

I actually doubt it is. It was important for ME. To show I’m credible. That I’m engineer, and that I’m not a noob.

Why did I do that?

Partially, because I was unsure for WHOM I want to write. The only thing I knew is that I want to work with developers - because tech audienuce is one of the BEST possible out there. Not the easiest one - actually, very demanding one, but absolutely amazing in many, many ways.

That’s why I I leaned towards writing technical content - issues with vibecoding, ai setups and tools. That was safe. Same as writing some philosophical content - that shows where is my PoV and where I’m aiming for.

But that was for me too! Trying to figure out where this publication is heading. Almost none of that was for you.

And then, this week, I’ve finally asked the obvous question: what’s the point of writing technical content?.

To prove I’m engineer? - That’s the only thing I never need to prove to anybody, my whole life is a proof.

To attract developers? - Then I’ll attract developers who want to be better devs - not those building business.

Conclusion was simple: There is NO point.

And now I know more.

My numbers were saying this the whole time.

I just... wasn’t reading them.

Here are some stats from my dashboard.

• 141 notes published. That is not a typo - almost five notes per day.

• Those 141 notes earned 2,482 impressions and 29 link clicks.

But here is the interesting part:

• 60% of those impressions was seen by people who already follow or subscribe to me. Only 40% of my reach was new.

• On X I have 1,066 followers. Last time I measured the split, everything outside Substack combined - brought me about 3 subscribers in a month.

This sounds crazy, but I was just talking to the same room, just louder. I published 141 times and reached no new audience.

I was busy working on the wrong thing.

Who I am writing for.

I’m writing for Developers WHO wanna sell what they built.

There are people who are great at selling but stuck on the technical side. I’m not writing for them. I am not here to cover basics of setting up Claude Code or Cowork - there are other newsletters for that.

There are great developers too! And they’re dedicated only to climb the career ladder because of great job they have. I absolutely can understand this because I love my job too! BUT I’m not writing for them. They’ll get more great publications in The Pragmatic Engineer or other tech-oriented deep dives.

I’m here for subset of people.

I’m ASSUMING you can build. I’m assuming you build well - and you know you can.

AND I’m assuming there is a next step in front of you that has nothing to do with the code: distribution of what you just built. Getting somebody to pay for the thing you’ve just finished.

People who visit my profile want to solve the problem of distribution, not building.

They’re not all developers. What they share, though, is one sentence:

“I know the technical foundations, I build for a living, and now I want to sell this.”

The thing is that my precise, analytical and strategic thinking won’t resonate with a lot of people, and I know that technical audience is full of people who do get it - because this kind of thinking is a part of the job.

But if you want to just be better dev, and NOT interested in building side business, then this publication is not for you.

It’ll be

• Technical

• Focused on building financial freedom

• By compounding your skills and actions over time.

Something I did not expect

A few days ago somebody hit the paid button on this newsletter. The first one ever. So I asked him why he did it.

It wasn’t a discount. It wasn’t a bonus. It wasn’t even a any of the publication I had listed on my website.

It was the one-line description of the publication - for developers who can ship but can’t sell - because he read it and thought: that’s me.

One sentence, put where a stranger could read it, did what 141 notes could not.

Now the part that’s actually about you

Let me ask you:

What are you even doing online right now!?

Are you in tech communities? “Build in public”, “Dev.to”? “Hacker News”?

But why? Are you providing dev career growth services, coaching juniors or building tools for teams? If not, that’s not your audience! That’s YOU.

You’re hanging in the room that you’re feeling comfortable, and calling it marketing.

If you have an app for accountants:

• are you anywhere near Accounting communities?

• Which newsletter does an accountant open on Monday morning?

• Have you researched WHERE they read, who they follow?

• What do THEY call the problem you solved? (Because I promise you they don’t call it what you call it.)

If you can’t answer those points, it doesn’t matter how good the build is. You’re shipping into an empty room and reading the silence as a product problem.

The product is fine. You’re in the wrong room.

And I know this because I just spent eight months making the same mistake, with better tooling and more discipline than most people bring to it.

If you can define for whom is your product for, then here is the next step.

What stops people from selling

Defining WHO your product is for is step one. Most people can do it if you push them a bit.

Step two is where everybody hangs out:

Where are they, and what exactly do you do to be in that room?

I could not answer that in April. I can answer it now, and it changed how I spend my time this week.

What I did about it.

Everything above is generic lesson from my last months. Below is the exact workflow I’m using to overcome the issue.

If you’re not going to subscribe, at least take the standalone version.

If you’re not going to subscribe, at least take the standalone version.

I packed the launch side of this - the 47-point checklist, the researched platform lists, the landing page copy, the prompt pack - into the Ship & Sell Starter Kit. $29. It’s what I wish somebody had handed me eight months ago instead of another “just build in public” thread.

My usual Claude Code setup is one tab per product I work on, and each tab split into about four panes.

Each tab contain different theme of work, like different repos or products that require my attention.

It looks like parallelism, but mostly it isn’t. At any given moment one, maybe two of those agents are actually working - the rest are parked on a question, waiting for me to come back and answer it. The panes are open. The work is idle.

I tried to run it as controlled chaos, and for a while that felt like a skill I was building. But every time, after a stretch, my brain would flatten out and my focus would go with it. I kept losing the track of: “wait, where were we?”

My eyes were spinning, my memory was full of holes.

I assumed I was the problem. My feed is full of screenshots with 16+ agents running on one screen, and no mention of cognitive load anywhere - the conclusion was simple: the technique existed and I simply hadn’t learned it yet.

So I checked.

I went looking for how people actually use multiple agents, because I was about to release a tool built on the assumption that workflows like mine are a common pattern.

The results surprised me.

Parallelism is popular - just not how we think about it.

The very core finding is, that parallel agents give way better results and do it faster, than any single agent running - and to be precise, a lead agent with subagents outperformed a single agent by 90.2%.

It comes from Anthropic’s June 2025 write-up of how they built their multi-agent research system.

But there is a trick in this. It’s about research system.

This is about relative improvement on open-ended research tasks - the kind of question where you want breadth, where subagents can each go off and read different things and come back.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT:

• 90% fewer bugs.

• 90% less time.

In above workflow, a lead-agent is the orchestrator. It spawns agents, and merge results. This is where the workflow is efficient and works well.

AI concludes and goes back to you with precise, short answer:

In the same post, though, a few paragraphs on, the authors write this:

...domains that require all agents to share the same context or involve many dependencies between agents are not a good fit for multi-agent systems today.

And then, less ambiguously:

most coding tasks involve fewer truly parallelizable tasks than research

And this is where it gets tricky. Because, for many tasks in my professional job, and when running my business too, this will NOT work as such anymore.

At the end, I’ll become an orchestrator. And here is what it brings.

Both of these are parallel

The workflow is oriented around the orchestrator-worker. A lead agent plans the work, spawns subagents, and merges what they bring back. The lead agent is the load-bearing part. Keep a note of this, because that will be important later.

Here is my one pane on a Tuesday evening:

1. I ask for a code review.

2. The agent comes back with a list of issues.

3. I say: spawn an agent per issue found, verify or debunk each one, give me what survives.

4. I read one answer.

That is six or ten agents running at once. It is also one thread, one question, and one thing to hold in my head. The fan-out happened below me, and it collapsed before it reached me.

BUT, here is the other shape, that better reflects what I do to earn for living.

Team of 7 people, each creating pull requests.

1. Pane one - review a pull request.

2. Pane two - review a different one.

3. Second tab - implement the next thing on the roadmap. This thing consists of 10 tasks, two running at once.

4. Third Tab, run load tests for the upcoming major versions we’re releasing.

Some of the tasks will use separate agents underneath. But at the end, I’ll have 4-5 things to react two at any given moment.

Nothing collapses. Every pane comes back with its own question, in its own context, on its own schedule, and the merge step is a human who has already worked a full day.

Both of those are parallel. But the second is real, and the second produces cognitive load that our brains had never a chance to get used to.

In the workflow that was measured on, the thing that plans and merges is a model.
In the grid on my screen, it is me.

But there is more, something that came out more recently, and it is the one that changed my mind about myself.

Almost nobody is doing it

In June 2026, researchers including economists from Wharton, Columbia and Duke published usage data from OpenAI’s Codex. This wasn’t a survey of what developers say they do - a track of what they really did.

67.4% of organizational users and 63.9% of individual users never ran concurrent turns at all.

Not rarely. Zero. Yes, if agent automatically decided to spawn few subagents, that’s different story.

Then the part that reframes the whole discourse:

inside OpenAI, only 10.7% of users stuck to a single workflow, and 28.6% ran five or more agents concurrently.

What does it implies?

The heavily parallel workflow being sold to the rest of us is mostly practised by the people who work at the labs building the tools.

You think it’s conspiracy? NO!
It is the ordinary thing where the people closest to a capability adopt it first and hardest, and what is normal for them, becomes and aspiration to everyone else. Dogfood your own product! Make trends instead of following them! This is what’s happening here!

But it does mean the gap you feel between your setup and what you see in your home feed, is very much misleading.

Two-thirds of developers never run two turns at once.

Four panes with one or two live agents in them is not a failure to keep up - that is roughly the shape of the distribution, and the setup I was measuring myself against is a minority practice concentrated among the people who build the tools.

This told me, that I was not behind on the technique, but something else was the case.

So what actually breaks

When I eliminated the agent count as the problem better question was left with me: when developers say they lose control of AI coding work, what specifically goes wrong?

There are three different things that get merged into one complaint, and separating them is most of the work.

1. The model loses context inside a session.

This is the thing documented to death, independent on how you work, and this is the thing every big AI company is racing to fix with bigger windows and memory systems.

This is not a workflow problem.

2. Agents collide on shared files.

This one is real, and the receipts are ugly.

The Claude Code issue tracker contains a report, where a cleanup agent deleted source files a second agent was still using. That was 22 files, around 7,400 lines, described by its author as unrecoverable.

Ach, if that’s not enough, another report contains worktree cleanup destroying a .git directory and most of a working tree.

Worktrees and isolation are the answer here, and they work well. Copy your notes. Allow agents to work separately, never touching the same file instance together.

Resolve conflicts on pull request merges.

Not much to say here - keep your files backed up... So let’s check the last reason.

3. You lose the thread.

Not the model. You.

In my setup that has a specific shape: every pane sitting on an unanswered question is an open loop I am holding in my mind, and I am the only thing routing between them.

Add a new tab or window and you have not added throughput - you have added something new to remember about.

That third one is what I keep hitting, and it has better witnesses than I expected.

Simon Willison wrote in February:

“I reached the stage of parallel agent psychosis where I’ve lost a whole feature - I know I had it yesterday, but I can’t seem to find the branch or worktree or cloud instance or checkout with it in.”

Addy Osmani, in April, calls the standing cost of it the ambient anxiety tax - it never appears on a task list, but it draws from the same reservoir as everything else.

Someone filed a Claude Code feature request describing himself as the user as message bus, copy-pasting between five sessions.

No survey exists

But here is the uncomfortable part.

Those examples above are just anecdotes. Excellent, well-observed anecdotes from people who experienced similar issue I did. BUT there is no survey. There is no number for how often developers lose track across agent sessions, how long it costs them, or how many sessions is too many.

The nearest hard figure anyone reaches for is a 2018 study of general human task-switching, which found that 29% of interrupted tasks are never resumed. That study has nothing to do with AI, yet still sounds suspiciously familiar to what I describe here.

The honest summary is: widely discussed and never measured.

But I built something for it anyway. Just to solve my problem, and hopefully improving the daily work of my team - and maybe your too!

What I built

mindskein brief. This is one command, three sections, answering the question I was asking Claude by hand every morning: what are my priorities, what is running elsewhere, and where did we leave off.

It hooks into Claude Code, keeps a registry of sessions and what state they ended in, writes a handoff per session, and reads my priorities out of my own notes. It runs locally, makes no network calls by default, and the core is open sourced.

The thing it fixes, is that when I open the laptop at 20:30 on a Friday, to continue work I left last time at 21:50 on Sunday, then the first fifteen minutes go to reconstructing where I was.

Multiply by five evenings.

What someone else shipped, two weeks before I released

I had a lot of fun working on this project, and it became useful immediately. I feel calmer now, I stopped loosing the context when my computer restarts because of the obligatory system update.

But the game of life is not as easy.

On 7 August, Claude Code shipped cross-session messaging. Sessions can now find each other and send text - the migration finished, the column is added, your rebase is safe. It closes the “user as message bus” complaint directly, from inside the tool, for free.

I am not going to pretend that didn’t take a bite out of my premise. I tried what’s possible now, and still had complains.

What is left in mindskein is narrower than what I thought I was building, and I think it is still real: Claude’s messaging connects sessions that are live, in the moment, while you are watching.

The thing I need is recall the next morning, across sessions that have already ended, joined to what I decided mattered this week.

• Pull from notes.

• Pull from jira if configured

• Pull from github for review requests or new feedbacks.

• My goals progress

• Claude, Codex saves sessions.

Something to wrap it all up in: “This is where you’re now, and where you’re heading this week”

The point

So, was I the problem? NO, I just worked on wrong assumptions!

I thought I would find out whether four panes is too many. What I found is that the number of panes was never the variable.

Remember the load-bearing part? A lead agent plans the work, spawns the workers, merges what comes back. This is what brings efficiency. But every time I split another pane, I built exactly that architecture. With myself sitting in the lead agent’s seat.

A model in the orchestrator seat keeps its state between turns. I don’t, and neither you.

I close the laptop at 21:50 on a Sunday. I sleep. I spend eight hours at a different job. I come back on Friday holding maybe a third of it.

The orchestration didn’t fail. The orchestrator went offline.

In that whole diagram, the human is the only component with no persistence layer.

So what was the “something else” I promised you?

Storage.

And it has a price you can actually count, even if nobody surveyed it. Fifteen minutes of reconstruction. Five evenings a week. That is an hour and a quarter, every single week, that you’d spend on remembering instead of doing.

Most of one of my working sessions - gone forever, every week.

What can you do?

There are two moves here, and they are different jobs.

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Where the work can fan out below you, let it. Ask for the review, let ten agents check ten things, read ONE answer. That shape scales. It is the one the research was ever about. I haven’t found a ceiling on it yet.

Where it can’t - different repos, different products, a feature that spans a week - you are the merge step. No amount of restraint changes that.

Then the question was never how many agents you can run but whether anything is holding the thread while you sleep.

That is the whole system. Delegate what I can, and catch what is left when I can’t.

Now, do I know if the second half is a problem anyone else has? Honestly... no. There is no survey, so I am making one myself.

The tool is live and the core is open: github.com/swilgosz/mindskein

The Mac OS desktop app is being built, all my paid subscribers have early access and discounts on everything I build, feel free to join!

If it turns out to be something only I needed, I would rather find that out in public.

How many open loops are you holding right now?

I’m engineering my way to $1M in public, and AI tools and workflows are very big chunk of my life nowadays. I have day-job and ~90 minutes a day to build the business online.

Initially, as with everything, I was hyped on trying out new tooling, but quickly realised, that this leads to quick burnout and nothing else.

Here is my concern.

With AI you can build quickly - so people do it.

Nowadays building is solved for a big chunk of work, especially for personal tooling, small workflow simplifications and one-person startups. I covered this concept briefly in my other article: Building is solved, selling is not , so I won’t repeat here. Just let me say one thing about tooling:

There is a survey made by DX. They tracked AI tool usage across 135,000 developers from 435 companies.

The average time saved by AI tooling was ~3.6h per week, which is great, but that’s just a first part of the conclusion. The data stayed flat at around four hours even as adoption soared.

More tools equal same savings.

The thing is, we’re getting flooded in new AI toolsets every single day, but there is a limit of what we can use efficiently. The conclusion for me is exactly the same as I claimed 10 years ago:

Master your tooling instead of chasing new shiny things

This list vs Roundups

Given my time constraints I can’t evaluate tools & apps the way the roundups do and I don’t even want. Matt Wolfe ships a list every week and The Rundown ships one every morning, but both cover more sth like: “what exists out there” and both are made to answer completely different question.

Look for those if you want to check “what’s new, what’s possible” - in order to get inspired.

Read below, if you want to get the idea of: “What this guy is actually using when he advances on his journey to $1M”.

This list is narrow, and it is meant to be, because it answers a single question you should also ask before installing new app:

Does this give back more time than it costs to learn?

Most tools are never going to the next stage, because they fail on this single-question evaluation bar.

A tool that saves me 20 minutes a week but takes six hours to set up breaks even in five months, and if you add to it the actual cost in case this is paid too, then paying for itself takes even longer.

I’ll forget twice why’ve installed it by then!

I would like to be juggling a handful of tools instead getting flooded with them.

So here is the list that help me build my side-business and keep my sanity at the reasonable levels.

Note: If a tool provides an affiliate link, it’s included, because why not?

Actively used

Wispr Flow. I talk, it types.

I use Wispr Flow daily on both - my computer and phone. Even though I’m a coder and native keyboard typer, dictation speeds up my input 2x while removing completely the problem of typos and saving my fingers from overload.

Currently a lot of communication with Claude happens through me spelling out what I want. and my content drafts and raw ideas are also just dumped out of my mind while I’m walking.

WriteStack, feeding Substack and Buffer.

I refuse to post daily, making myself a content hamster, instead of entrepreneur. Therefore, I do time-boxing and put my activities in batches so I can write notes and short-form posts once and schedule them for multiple days in advance.

For that, I use Writestack, which allows me to quickly schedule shortforms on substack using the predefined schedule, so I can stop worrying about those being written and lost forever.

I also use it to extract some notes out of the articles I write. The key thoughts I want them to be repurposed across multiple platforms. Absolute gem and time saver.

Turning a full-time job’s worth of context into decisions

Claude Code with custom agents and skills.

This is the one that changed the shape of the week, not just the speed of a task. I stopped using AI as a chat window and started encoding my own business into it: a CEO agent for strategy, a COO for planning, a Ghost that writes in my voice, and around 50 skills that are just my own repeated processes written down once.

The unlock wasn’t the model. It was realizing that every time I explained my business context to an AI, I was paying that cost again. Now it reads plan.md and audience.md and knows more about my positioning than I can hold in my head at 21:00 on a Tuesday.

Cost to learn: high. Genuinely high. This is the one exception to my own rule, and I want to be honest that it took [CONFIRM: how many evenings?] before it paid back.

What it replaced: the two hours a week I used to spend re-briefing a chat window.

Obsidian Second Brain fuelled by Readwise

Readwise into Obsidian.

Highlights from articles, books, podcasts, videos and tweets land in my vault automatically. I use Readwise Reader app to feed in all my newsletters and highlight hem, but anything, like web clips, video reviews and my rough ideas got into my Obsidian through automation.

I never care about this part, read whenever I happen to be at the moment, and whatever I highlight or bookmark, will reach my Obsidian at some point.

They sit in a “0. Brain Food“ folder and get pulled into notes when I need them.
I cannot count how much time this saves - prior to this I did not take any notes from anything I’ve watched or read, beacuse of friction required to save those. Not anymore though!

The AI part is small here, and that’s the point. The value is that the pipe exists and runs without me. Claude has dedicated folder in the obsidian PKM that he manages freely.

Fal.AI

My startups use Fal.AI or Claude API for everything currently and Well, it’s not about time saving, it’s about making impossible possible - If I’d need to develop this all myself, I’d never ship anything AI related :). Benefits? Infinite.

Main AI Workflows

• Ship & Sell starter kit - a workflow helping me distribute and sell products I’m shipping. I’ve wrapped it into a product which my paid subscribers with a great discount and Founding members have for free.

• Article → Shortform Drafts → Scheduling - This is one of the biggest time savers every week, because writing an article already takes a lot of time, and extracting key thoughts from what you already put togeteher, in order to publish as a note is tedious.

• Weekly News fetching for market analysis

• Weekly News research for Article ideas

• Code-oriented workflows (tons of them)

• Week planning & strategisation

• Newsletter email curation.

Honorable mentions

• Looka - Brand preparation tool I’ve used to create logo, color pallete and more for Engineer of Wealth

• Gamma AI - presentation tool I use for live performances and slide-based talks. This reduced slide preparation time from 2 days down to 3 hours!

• Descript - for video recordings, creating a transcript I could use to feed by content-repurposing is a must, and while I don’t use it currently, I leveraged it a lot when worked with my previous youtube channels, and most likely will get back to it soon!

That’s it for now, and what’s your top picks?

Footnote

Quick Note: Once a month I open a thread where you post what you built and the one call you’re unsure about, and you get the lever back. It’s called The Engine Room, it’s free, and edition 01 is open until September!.

Join and tell me which tool on this list you’d have add, cut or replaced!

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This is usually the part where a creator quietly waits for better numbers before writing anything. One product flips, other one flips, who cares? “I’ll publish when I’ll have sth to share!”

Publish the win! That sells well!

Skip the flat month.

It’s so convienient, nobody will ever remember. “People only start to care about what you’re doing once you become successful”.

Those were thoughts that appear in my mind. If you’re building in public, I bet in your head too!

But nah, I can’t do that here! If you think that’s because I’m brave, you’re wrong! It’s because “don’t hide results” is one of the three rules this whole brand stands on.

Engineer of Wealth is a form of a journal. The idea here is to make a claim and run experiments to check whether it works. I have strong believe it does, but the proof is for me to come up with.

Anything I’ll experience is going to be a help for you. To speed up your progress, help you skip mistakes, and make leverage of my learnings. The moment I start filtering, everything else I’ve written will just become marketing.

So, here it is a summary of my recent actions.

What I actually did

The Ship & Sell Starter Kit is a 47-point checklist.

Items 1 up to 16 are build and launch.

That covers researches about your strong skills, your audience, figuring out the pricing, etc. Here is placed a guide to ensure the checkout process, delivery mechanisms, full-run of the purchase-flow to test whether your clients can actually buy anything.

Preparation of landing page copy, launch posts and campaign email series.

Items 17 through 23 are distribution

The second big chunk is kicking-up the distribution. Here comes warm DMs to the inner circle, Reddit posts in the related communities, Indie Hackers & Dev.to articles. Community engagement in general.

And yeah, I started to drift here.

First 4 days everything went flawless.

Checkout page got live on LemonSqueezy, I’ve tested it with a REAL purchase - I bought my own product to verify the receipt email and the file delivery. Landing page got deployed, I’ve sent it to my friend and I got real buy after discount - but we just buy everything from each other just to support and provide feedback. Useful, but does not count.

All Files were uploaded, then verified a second time from the buyer’s side, because “it should work” is not a test.

Launch posts on X, Substack and LinkedIn, all on July 27.

By day 4: 16 of 16 items were done.

I felt great! It would be so nice if that was the end of story. However...

What I didn’t do

The checklist is very clear about what comes next.

Days 5 to 14: items 17 to 23. That’s where the sales actually live.

Here’s my real log:

• Day 5: I’ve sent Udemy reactivation email. 3,000+ students I’d not talked about to for years. I’ve postponed that for a long time.

• Days 6, 7, 8, 9.

• Day 10: I’ve built the warm-DM system. Sent 3 DMs out of 20. This is the most out-of-comfort activity for me.

• Day 11: opened the affiliate program (50% commission) for creators, and also researched 30+ distribution channels.

• Day 17 (today): item #19, the Reddit post, is STILL a draft in my vault. It appears you cannot post anything until you build enough karma per community.

I want to be precise about something, because it’s the whole point of this essay: I was not lazy during days 6 to 9. I was working.

Just not on the thing I should. I worked on the product, polishing the export script, fixing two stale files, tagging a release.

I did engineering work to avoid distribution work - prcisely because engineering work FEELS like progress, which is exactly what makes it such a good hiding place.

The real reason to procrastinate: shipping has a definition of done

This is the part I didn’t understand until I watched myself do it.

git push either works or it doesn’t, your tests pass or they fail. The deploy is green or it’ll bleed in red right in front of your eyes! Every single thing we do as engineers ends in a binary answer, and we get a small hit of closure for free.

“Post on Reddit” has no green checkmark. It has a comment section. Then you figure out you cannot post. So you need to be active in different threads, until enough karma is built. Once it does, your post becomes obsolete, and you need to write it from the beginning. However, publishing means, getting commments you get to respond and that’s another distraction from the engineering work.

Ok, you publish and what then? Did it work?
Ask again in three days. Keep post URL in the notes to refere later. Remember about later.

Will the DM get the response? Maybe he’s on holiday. Should you follow up? Nobody knows. There’s no green or red light that bumps if interaction with human succeeds.

We’re trained on closed loops for our entire careers. Distribution is an open loop, so the brain does the obvious thing and routes around it, back toward the closed loops, where it knows how to win.

The learning for me is, it’s a badly designed workflow.

I have ONE side project with 3,000+ paid students, and a graveyard of others with zero. Same engineer. Same code quality. The difference was never the code. On the Udemy course, I accidentally did the unglamorous post-launch work for months. On the rest, I shipped, tweeted once, and went back to what felt good.

What actually moved the numbers

But here is the bright side of the equation.

Since I started promoting my product and brand following the checklist I shipped - even if badly, my Substack went from 46 subscribers to 78. X went from 1,017 followers to 1,059.

Then, five real conversations opened with people in my niche, one of which applied to become the first affiliate!

I got 5 people signing up to AutomateIdeas AI - my second product, and gave me very thoughtful feedback how to improve the product ideas validator even more!

None of that came from the product being bad or good.

All of it came from the four or five days where I did my items on the checklist, instead of items that felt like coding.

The product had exactly zero influence on those numbers. It sat there, complete, well-tested, guaranteed, and did NOTHING for me on its own. That’s because products don’t sell themselves. That sentence is on my landing page, I wrote it!

....and I still needed to watch my own log to actually believe it.

So, I changed it

If the problem is that distribution has no definition of done, then the fix is to give one.

I stopped writing “do outreach” on my list. It’s now: 3 to 5 DMs per day, sent, logged in the tracker. That has a finish line! I can fail it or hit it by 22:00. I can even gamify this!

Same for the rest:

1. Every distribution channel gets a date, not a status.

2. The checklist item isn’t done when I feel it’s done. It’s done when there is a link in the tracker to the published note or post.

Boring? Sure, and that’s the point. Boring things have definitions of done. This is why it was so hard to be an engineer prior to AI era - because you need your brain being able to work with boring stuff and repeatable work.

What this means for you

If you shipped something this year and it made no money, I’d bet that it is not about product itself.

Go count it honestly. How many days since launch, and how many of those days did you do something that had no green checkmark at the end of it? How many hours have you spent writing or coding, and how many on distribution?

That ratio IS your answer.

So - what’s YOUR item #19? The one that’s been finished for two weeks, waiting for a click?

Tell me in the comments! I’ll go publish mine on Sunday week summary, and I’ll report the numbers either way.

Shameless Plug

PS: Yes, I’m going to name my own incentive here, because pretending otherwise would be silly. The thing I failed to distribute is the Ship & Sell Starter Kit - $29, the 47-point checklist that covers days 1 to 14 of launching a digital product, plus the AI prompts that write the marketing parts I hate writing. Follow it and launch in 14 days, or get your money back.

Items 1 through 16 work. I’ve now proven that twice. Items 17 through 23 work too - I just took an embarrassing amount of time to actually run them.

Are you building your way to $1M?

Subscribe to Engineer of Wealth! This week I’ve launched “The Engine Room” - the closed thread where you can post what you’re doing and I’ll respond with what lever I’d pull next to push forward. My community is very small yet - but growing - and we’re going to support each other by giving feedback and testing early whatever comes there.

Subscribe now

Growing together is way more fun, so feel free to join! The link to this month’s chat is here. See you there!

It’s all related to people acting in their own best interest.

A short story from my beginnings

When I started growing my online presence, I was publishing a lot - and most of it was sent into the void. That produced a certain level of frustration, because everything thrown into my feed had 100+ comments, while I barely got a single like.

I would publish a post that got no recognition, and a few days later a similar — or exactly the same — one from another person would get a flood of likes and comments.

I started to wonder: Why? What am I doing wrong here?

While there are many answers to that, one particular thing I found interesting, because it can be replicated. It’s one of the compounding types: compounding people’s incentives.

When you’re small, people can only HOPE

I can write sth useful. The problem is, other people can too! Especially in the era of AI, we’re all flooded with content of all sorts. Put yourself in the shoes of a random user who wants to build distribution online - and with limited time. Who will you spend your time to integrate with?

Sure, some random interactions happen, but the main answer to this is: whoever, that you can benefit the most by cooperating with.

For the audience growth the key is to find the right people - and allow the right people to find you!

If they see a very small profile publishing deep, valuable essays within their interests and goals, they can only HOPE that 3 things will happen:

1. This account won’t stop publishing great content.

2. This account will grow over time by doing things right, so the collaboration won’t be a waste of time.

3. Over time, it will attract an audience related to their activity.

When you’re big, people can SEE and HOPE for more.

Now compare this with a similar profile, but one with a track record of audience growth AND a log of valuable articles. That same user doesn’t need to HOPE for the 3 points above. They SEE it already happening, so they can interact directly, to show their presence to that audience! And hope shifts - towards: “Maybe big account’ll interact back giving them a boost”.

The choice is simple - just straight away:

1. Interact with the content - the audience will likely see their activity at some point.

2. Maybe the big account will occasionally react (the hope part), giving them a random boost.

Here is an example, where a much bigger account randomly reacted to my content, after I had been active within their publications.

So what are the implications of this?

As you progress, a growing pool of smaller accounts joins your network - partially in order to grow themselves!

(And yes - what you’re about to do with this button is exactly the mechanic at work :))

And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just a mechanism that exists, and we can all leverage it!

When I was starting on X, I could only attract profiles practicing strategies like: “subscribe for subscribe, follow for follow”. Worthless: outside of my target group, they’ll never share the problems I’m solving, so they’ll never become my clients nor even contribute to deep conversations on the content I’m publishing.

But as soon as I’ve crossed 1,000 followers on X, things started to change!

Suddenly, when I repeated exactly the same activity within a tech-oriented pool of developers interested in leveraging AI to build and ship products in public - I started to get very different results.

The same strategy, the same activity, exactly the same pattern applied - but with a bigger account. It resulted in multiple days of gaining followers exactly from the audience I aim for.

Here is a screen of the experiment I’ve made a few days ago exactly for this essay publication. To prove the point.

Partially, they’re interested in what I’m making. But a bigger audience makes people thinking that I’m more credible - and they no longer need to HOPE for reach within their group of interests.

They SEE it’s already a fact.

The hidden statistic

As I’ve been writing in my other article: Life is a Badly designed Game, approx only 0,05% of X accounts have more than 1000 followers. That means when you go past that milestone, 99,95% of profiles out there will be smaller than you.

You can read more about it here:

This is huge! When you realize where you are in the pool of global it is hard to not get excited!

The Growth Coaching tactics

Coaches on Substack or other platforms that teach you how to grow your account have perculiar thing in common.

Because of how social media works, their strategy is usually a perpetuum mobile.

By the way, if you do NOT know how social media work, here is a simplified version of all the social algorithms in the world:

If post get some traction, it’s pushed towards more people. Ends of story. All the rest are cosmetics, like natural behaviour detection, and such.

So here is how coaches leverage that:

1. A post with a lot of deep activity under it gets pushed towards more home feeds.

2. Therefore, coaches encourage people to be active on each other’s posts.

3. People become active on the coach’s posts, as everybody in the network follows the coach - hoping to be noticed by the rest of the network.

4. They are active on posts across the network.

5. Their posts get shown to more feeds, and their accounts grow.

6. The coach’s profile grows most of all.

There is an unfair advantage in investing in the growth of your Substack profile (or any other platform you focus on) - as well as helping your followers to succeed!

If you’re small today, run the mechanic in reverse

Maybe you’re on the small side of this equation right now. Then this same mechanic explains why your early grind feels so dead - the second engine simply hasn’t kicked in yet.

You publish: “Substack, connect me with AI enthusiast!”. And the same day, an account with 100k subscribers publishes sth like that too. No wonder your post does not perform well.

But you don’t have to wait for it! What you can do instead?

You can run the mechanic in reverse, starting today: engage upward, with intention and strategy!

1. Find post that already is popular and collects people of your niche.

2. Engage with everybody there - be useful, answer questions, share your thoughts.

3. Make yourself known by using the traction someone already got!

4. That way you’ll help both - them and yourself.

That’s Win-Win-Win situation - the one I love the most.

Be useful in the threads of bigger accounts within your niche. That’s not begging for scraps - as you’ve just seen, the exchange is mutual by design. It’s exactly what my reply-grind sessions above were doing.

Conclusion. Grow your damn account!

All that is to provoke you to think about it. If you’re not investing effort into growing your audience, it’s similar to NOT investing your money. There is not a single reason for neglecting either of those activities.

1. People generally work towards their own interest. Therefore, if you can provide more benefits to them over time, they’ll be more likely to engage with you.

2. And reach is the benefit that a lot of people aim for.

Let me repeat the key thought:

As you progress, a growing pool of smaller accounts joins your network - partially in order to grow themselves!

It works like a snowball.

So - will you keep pushing the rock uphill alone, or start building the snowball that others push for you?

Leave a comment or restack this!

After this essay, you know exactly why it’s worth your effort! :)

PS: Why even bother with growing an audience at all? Because one day you may have something to sell — and the distribution part is something I myself neglected for too long. It appears I was not the only one, and most people make this mistake.

If you’re a developer who already shipped something but nobody’s buying, that’s exactly the gap my Ship & Sell Starter Kit closes: launch your first digital product properly in 14 days, and get paid for your efforts!

If you just subscribed - this is the one post that tells you what this place is, where to start reading, and what to do next.

I’m a software engineer who can build virutally anything, and is learning how to acquire skills other than that.

I’m NOT a guru claiming to know everything about money and wealth generation.

I believe that generating wealth is a problem to solve - with a systematic approach, and engineering principles.

I’m here to Prove The Point and document the journey. When I’ll succeed, you’ll be able to get there much faster.

The claim: $1,000,000 online

Most people in this space will tell you the 9-5 is the thing to escape. I’m running the opposite experiment. I am software engineer and like my job!

My setup:

1. a full-time engineering job,

2. three homeschooled kids, and wife that needs attention

3. and roughly 90 minutes a day to build with.

My claim:

You can build $1M in income-generating assets inside that constraint - by being intentional about what you do and avoiding stupid mistakes. For me my job is the funding round, not the enemy!

I track the progress on my $1M quest page, reserving each square for $1k earned:

Of course, it’s not that simple - there are hidden costs and taxes involved - so for simplicity, I track the secured assets from income over time.

Current status: $100k+ secured, 10% of the way there.

Read these first

The best entry points into the archive, depending on what brought you here:

• My approach to wealth generation - why wealth is not just money: the four-part definition (money, health, freedom, wellbeing) this whole project optimizes for. Family first, money follows.

• Compounding is the core engine - the single mechanism everything else here is built on: why some people rebuild from zero every few years, and others never have to.

• Dude, grow your damn acount! - the hidden mechanic behind audience growth: why big accounts grow on autopilot, and how to make other people’s goals work in your favor - even while you’re small.

• Life is a badly designed game - the mental model behind it all: life runs on the same mechanics as games. Learn the rules, stack advantages, and build a game inside it that you can win. Push probability to your favour.

• Building is solved, selling is not - if you’re a developer who ships things nobody buys, this one’s for you. I’m solving it in public, real numbers included.

• Vibe coding is over + The prompt is the new typing - how AI actually changes a builder’s leverage.

What happens next

Three ways to go from here, depending on how deep you want in:

1. Read along (free). Deep essays and build logs - real numbers, honest post-mortems, no daily noise.

   Subscribe now

2. Ship something. If you’ve built things that never sold, the Ship & Sell Starter Kit ($29) is the system I wish I’d had: a 47-point checklist plus templates to launch your first digital product - in 14 days, or your money back.

3. Stuck before the idea? automateideasai.com generates validated product ideas matched to a real customer profile.

If I can ask you something…

Hit reply and tell me one thing: what are you building toward? And what’s the one thing that blocks you?

I read every reply, and those answers shape what I write next. I also love to connect with people with similar mindsets.

If you want to verify whether I’m legit before you invest your time here, feel free to read my story.

But there is a caveat!

I’m not here to encourage you to push hustle culture, sacrificing everything for money, just to realize you’re getting rich but you’ve lost the chance to build a fulfilling life on the way.

I’m here to prove that you don’t need to choose money OVER family or health - and I’ll use my engineering brain to show myself (and you too) how to do it. You don’t need to hate your boss and your 9-5 job to get compounding effects over time.

The idea is to build real wealth without losing your family, your health, or your principles on the way:

• Clear constraints.

• Solid architecture.

• Long-term thinking.

• Relentless iteration.

First I build it for myself, then I help 100 others do the same.

No hype. No lottery tickets. Just systems that compound.

Small experiments I’m learning on and sharing those learnings with you.

The story so far

2018 → 2023: The Udemy experiment

In 2018 I created a Udemy course that over time reached almost 4,000 students and generated around $14k of revenue.

It was a nice little experiment to check whether earning online is even an option. I had never earn a single $ before outside of the job I did on the daily basis.

Because I still had my day job, I saved this extra income, put it into my first investments, and set the rest aside for the next project. In this period, 2 of my kids were born. Eventually I switched my focus to the next initiative and closed the course due to the lack of time for maintanance.

2021 → 2025: Hanami Mastery

In 2021 I got fascinated by the Hanami Ruby framework - an extremely well-designed project that solved pain points the Ruby community hadn’t addressed for over a decade. The main problem though, was the lack of educational resources and the traction in the community.

I started learning the project deeply and immediately began recording video tutorials around it. This quickly turned into a very profitable little project, generating over $43k within a few years.

I’m proud of this project, though I couldn’t continue it due to personal reasons. This income I also did not need to spend because I did not drop my job - instead, I’ve accelerated career. In this period I’ve secured the role of Staff Engineer.

Instead, I invested thousands of hours into learning everything I could about investing.

2022 → … : The investing era

By understanding the psychology of markets and the assets I invest in, I generated over 300% profit between 2022 and 2025, focusing on Bitcoin (and Gold in the early days). I’ve secured half of the profits, leaving the rest in place, waiting for a price drop to repeat the play.

2026 → … : Engineer of Wealth

Over the years, I clearly did something right. I generated online savings crossing $100k - 10% of one million dollars - while having a 9-5 job, 3 homeschooled kids, and a lovely wife.

I also observed many people struggling with things that I did naturally.

So I’ve decided to do 3 things:

1. Make a claim.

2. Share what I know, do, and build.

3. Increase the pace.

That’s what this newsletter is.

Who I am

I’m Sebastian Wilgosz.

Professionally, I build distributed systems. I’ve worked with microservices, event sourcing, and automated payment systems. I understand scale, failure modes, and compounding effects. In recent years, as Staff Engineer, I’ve been close to anything happening in the AI world and its adoption.

Personally, I’m building toward financial independence while putting family first. I don’t want my wife to be forced into work. I want to educate my children deliberately. I want time and freedom without chaos.

I’m not selling a finished story. I’m documenting the build.

My edge isn’t charisma or extreme consistency. It’s synthesis.

I connect engineering, economics, psychology, and leverage into practical execution.

My core philosophy

1. Systems beat intensity. Grinding harder is not a strategy. Grind is cool and needed early, but at the end the good architecture and long play wins.

2. Sustainable beats impressive. I care more about 20 years of stability than 20 months of hype.

3. Wealth is engineered. It’s the output of compounding assets - skills, value given, products, assets, reputation.

4. Family is a design constraint, not a trade-off. If your plan requires sacrificing what matters most, redesign the plan.

5. Public accountability accelerates growth. I build in the open. Wins, mistakes, pivots.

The goal is not “rich” nor “retire early”. The goal is financial independence, a strong marriage, present fatherhood, and work chosen - not required. This is a 10-year build, and compounding rewards patience.

See you inside,
Seb

P.S. If you’ve read all the way down here, you’re exactly who I’m writing for. So seriously - hit reply and tell me: what are you building toward, and what’s standing in the way? I read every one.

Greetings from Wrocław.

Quick context for new readers: I’m a Staff Engineer shipping loyalty systems by day. By night, usually the 20:30 to 22:00 window after kids are asleep, I build my own products in public. This newsletter documents that experiment with real numbers, including the ugly ones.

This week, one of the most respected engineers in open source did something remarkable. He turned the internet off.

And why am I the one writing about it? Because I just finished my own summer of bliss: 11 weeks offline.

1. THE SUMMER OF BLISS**

Daniel Stenberg has maintained curl for decades. It runs on billions of devices. If anyone has earned the right to be listened to, it’s him.

This month, he stopped listening.

From July 1 to August 2, 2026, curl is not accepting any vulnerability reports. Not through HackerOne, not through email. Stenberg calls it the “summer of bliss.“ (source: Cybernews, BleepingComputer, July 2026)

The reason is a flood of AI generated security reports. The numbers tell the story better than any rant could:

• curl’s bug bounty paid over $100,000 across 87 confirmed vulnerabilities before shutting down on January 31, 2026.

• Historically, more than 15% of incoming reports were valid.

• By 2025, that rate fell below 5%.

• Roughly 20% of all submissions were AI slop.

And here’s the nuance that makes this story worth your time: Stenberg acknowledged that AI report quality improved over time, and AI ultimately contributed to around 50 real bug fixes in curl. The tool was never the villain.

AI made producing a report nearly free, while evaluating a report stayed expensive, because evaluation requires a human with judgment. When output becomes infinite, attention becomes the bottleneck.

And the big problem is, that attention span is dropping down tremendously.

Think about it for a minute.

2. THE COMMUNITY SAYS IT OUT LOUD**

The same week curl went quiet, the most trending conversation on Indie Hackers was a thread titled “The hardest part isn’t building anymore.” It has 110 comments for the time I’m writing this.

The thesis: with AI, shipping is easy. The hard part is choosing the right problem, finding demand, and getting users.

Two lines from that conversation got me:

“The hard part shifted from building to choosing the right conversation.”

“building feels productive, but it often delays the harder question: where is the real demand?”

That second one hurts, because building does feel productive. You end the evening with commits, with a working feature, with something to show. Asking “where is the real demand” ends the evening with an uncomfortable open question.

The curl story and the Indie Hackers thread are the same story at different scales. AI collapsed the cost of output, but did not reduce the cost of earning attention and trust.

Every solo dev’s real competition is no longer “can I build it” but “can I get a stranger to care.”

3. MY OWN UNCOMFORTABLE NUMBERS**

I can build. Fourteen years of professional engineering, event driven systems, data pipelines, the whole toolbox. This year I shipped automateideasai.com, a live product with working payments. I built and launched the Ship & Sell Starter Kit, a complete system for going from built to shipped in 14 days.

And selling is still the part I’m figuring out. In public, with real numbers, every week, in this newsletter.

• Ship & Sell = 0x sales

• AutomateIdeasAi = 1x sale

• Substack Subscribers = 54

• X followers: 1011

• Hanami Mastery newsletter: 152

• Udemy students: 3000+

Sharing this is uncomfortable but I think it’s important.. The only thing that gained somewhat good results in attention numbers is the one that had own distribution: Udemy. So I’m figuring it out.

The most valuable thing in an AI saturated feed is a verifiably human person figuring it out in public. I’d rather be the honest test case than another guru with a screenshot

4. FINDING DEMAND BEFORE WRITING CODE**

So what do I do differently now? Here’s the system I’ve committed to, stated publicly so you can hold me to it.

Rule 1: Conversations before code.

Before building anything new, I find where the target user already complains. I do not run sruveys, because my audience is near 0. I look for threads that exist without me. If I can’t find repeated, unprompted complaints about the problem, the problem is not painful enough to pay for.

Rule 2: One channel, done properly.

The research I ran last week was blunt about this: for a small newsletter, the growth engine is consistent Notes plus one strong essay, not being everywhere at once. Scattered presence is the distribution version of 47 half finished projects.

Rule 3: Sell before polishing.

The Ship & Sell Kit taught me this the honest way. A landing page and a payment link validate more in a week than a roadmap validates in a quarter. If nobody clicks buy on the ugly version, nobody will click buy on the pretty one.

What’s next

I think it’ll be even more meaningful to build things that are HARD to be reproduced quickly with AI help, becuase if disproportion becomes so vast, even less people than now will be willing to jump into this train.

The revolutionary part of 2026 already happened**, and it happened to everyone equally: building got easy. What’s left is the unglamorous, human, slow part. Attention. Trust. Demand.

The maintainer of curl bought himself a month of silence. Honestly, he earned it.

The rest of us have to earn the opposite: a reason to be heard.

Talk next week,
Seb

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P.S. If “shipped but not sold” describes your project, the Ship & Sell Starter Kit is exactly this problem turned into a 14 day checklist. It’s $29 at the founding price. As I keep adding value to it, the price moves to $79 and then $129, and early buyers keep every future update at the price they paid. Details check out here!

Anthropic’s Economic Index dropped quietly that month - the kind of research paper that ends up in industry decks six weeks later once someone figures out what it actually says. I’ve been sitting with it for a couple of weeks. I think it’s the most important number I’ve read this year.

revenue as a working engineer. Numbers are real and posted publicly every
week

Here’s the number: 0.92.

That’s the correlation between prompt quality and productivity outcome, holding tool use constant. In plainer English: once two developers are using the same model, the single variable that explains whether they ship in a day or a week is how they write the prompt.

Not their typing speed. Not their framework. Not their prior experience. The prompt.

I’ll come back to that. First the part that made me actually close my laptop and stare at the wall.

Augmentation Mode

52% of Claude.ai users are now in “augmentation” mode.

Last year the headline use case was task delegation - write this function, draft this email, summarize this document. You told the model what to do, it did the thing, you checked and shipped.

This year, more than half of Claude.ai sessions are conversational. Back-and-forth. Thinking-with. The user is not handing off a task; they’re using the model as a second brain that talks back.

That sounds small. It isn’t. It’s a different product being used by different people for a different reason.

The sign this has really shifted is quieter: the top 10 use cases dropped from 24% of all traffic to 19%. That doesn’t sound like much. It means the tail of “what people use this for” has exploded. The long tail is now bigger than the head. People are using Claude for things nobody thought to optimize for.

Coding is still about 35% of conversations - that’s held steady - but inside coding the texture has changed. Less “write me this function.” More “I’m stuck on this architecture, let me walk you through what I’m seeing and you tell me where I’m wrong.”

The 12x number and why it’s the honest one.

Anthropic reports that college-level tasks now complete roughly 12x faster
than a year ago. High-school-level tasks, 9x.

I want to be careful about this. A lot of AI productivity claims dissolve on contact with a working engineer’s actual week. But 12x on a cohort of measurable cognitive tasks, controlled for model version - that’s not a vibe. That’s compression.

• A week becomes an afternoon.

• An afternoon becomes an hour.

The METR study last year said developers with AI were 19% slower than developers without. That was the contrarian stat of 2025. Same cohort, recut this year: 18% faster. Same developers, same tools. What changed is how they were using them.

That’s the 0.92 number showing up in the field. The people who got good at prompting compounded. The people who didn’t stayed where they were - or got worse, because they stopped trusting their own instincts and started trusting someone else’s autocomplete.

The trap.

Here’s where I have to be honest about where I’ve been. I spent most of 2024 treating AI like autocomplete. Good and fast autocomplete. But autocomplete - which is to say, I gave it small local tasks and verified the output the way you’d review a capable junior’s PR. Only in 2025 it had changed.

The problem with that workflow isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it doesn’t scale to the conversations 52% of users are now having. Autocomplete is a one-shot transaction. Augmentation is a dialogue. Those are different skills.

Writing a good prompt, I’ve come to believe, is closer to writing a good memo than to writing a good search query. It has:

• A problem statement, in the words I’d use to a smart colleague who just walked into the room.

• The context they’d need to make a judgment call, not follow a narrow instruction.

• What I’ve already tried and ruled out.

• What I specifically want back, and in what form.

When I write prompts like that, the 0.92 number shows up in my own week. When I don’t - I get exactly what I asked for, at high quality, and it turns out I was asking the wrong thing.

That last line is the whole game in 2026.

What this means for the developer who ships.

If you are a developer reading this in April 2026, you are in one of three
places.

Place one: you still treat the model as autocomplete.

Your ceiling is about a 2x productivity gain. That’s fine. That’s also where most of the industry was in early 2025, which means it’s where the value got priced already.

Place two: you treat the model as a pair.

You think out loud to it. You argue with it. You hand it 3x more context than feels necessary and you read its responses like you’d read a smart colleague’s memo. Your ceiling is the 12x cohort.

Place three: you’re using the model to ship businesses, not just code.

Product decisions, pricing, copy, support scripts, positioning. You’re not a better coder. You’re a one-person company.

Place three is the Indie Hacker Renaissance I wrote about Friday. Place two is what the DORA report found in mature teams. Place one is most of tech, and it’s the seat that gets squeezed between the other two as the year goes on.

Moving between these places is not a skill ceiling. It’s a habit change. It’s how you start a conversation with the model on Monday morning.

Where I am.

I’m writing this week-one of a Substack relaunch, with $6 of online product revenue for the year. I’m not in place three yet, even though I have systems setup for myself. I’m climbing from place two to place three in public, with audit numbers posted every week.

Part of what I’ve been building - quietly, mostly on weekends - is the prompt library I wish I’d had in 2025. Not a list of “10 ChatGPT prompts for developers.” The actual prompts I use to take a product idea from “I’d build that” to “someone paid for it.”

• Pricing conversations with the model.

• Positioning dialogues.

• Launch day orchestration.

That’s the Ship & Sell Kit.

It launches Next week. Founding price $29 for the first 50 seats. The waitlist is this Substack - if you’re reading this, you’re on it.

I’m pricing it deliberately low because the point this quarter is not revenue. The point is feedback from the first cohort while I still remember what it was like in place one.

One thing to watch this week.

Stripe Sessions 2026 is in San Francisco April 29–30. The expected reveal is Managed Payments going generally available. If you’re past $5K MRR and still on the old Connect flow, that announcement is going to change your architecture diagram.

I’ll cover it on Wednesday.

Until then:

1. write your prompts like memos.

2. Argue with the model.

The 0.92 isn’t a ceiling. It’s an invitation.

The Engineer of Wealth is a weekly transparency report on building online
revenue as a working engineer. Numbers are real and posted publicly every
week.

That silence is the entire bill for everything you shipped on Friday.

For the last eighteen months, the loudest message in our industry has been:

• it doesn’t matter.

• Vibe code it.

• Prompt your way through.

Ship it Friday, fix it never, the model will handle the rest.

Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase “vibe coding” almost as a half-joke, and the half that wasn’t a joke became a movement. Ninety-two percent of developers in 2026 have adopted some flavor of AI-assisted, prompt-driven development. We are all vibe coders now.

It looks ridiculous when we compare it to overall adoption between sectors. Developers are lapping everyone.

Except the bills are coming due.

A Medium analysis published this April put the numbers in front of us.

• Forty-one percent of code generated by AI assistants gets churned - rewritten or thrown away - within two weeks of being merged.

• Duplication is up four-fold compared to pre-2024 codebases

• 1.5 million record API key breach traced back to vibe-coded applications - and that’s the most expensive lesson of the year so far.

The pattern the model produced was not wrong. It was generic. And the developer who shipped it did not know enough about API key handling to recognize what was missing.

That last sentence is the entire essay. Let me show you why.

Vibe coding optimized for the demo, not the system

Vibe coding is, in the cleanest definition I can give you, the practice of treating the model as the engineer and yourself as the product manager.

1. You describe what you want, the model writes it, you skim it, you ship it.

2. If something breaks, you describe the break, the model patches it, you re-skim, you re-ship.

For a certain class of problem, this works astonishingly well. Throwaway scripts. Internal tools that three people will use.

Weekend prototypes that are really just thinking-out-loud in code form. I have built dozens of these in the last year. So have you.

The trap is what happens when one of those weekend prototypes gets traction.

Vibe coding does not optimize for the things that distinguish a prototype from a system. It does not optimize for what happens when the second user logs in at the same moment as the first. It does not optimize for what happens when the third-party API rate-limits you on a Tuesday afternoon. It does not optimize for the migration you will need to run six months from now on a table that suddenly has fifty
thousand rows in it.

It optimizes for the demo. And demos do not survive Monday morning
production traffic.

The 4x duplication number is the smoking gun

Read past the headline figure - 41% churn - and look at the duplication number. Four times the duplication of pre-2024 codebases. That is not a quality metric. That is a forensic fingerprint.

Duplication at that scale only happens when nobody in the loop knows what already exists in the codebase.

1. The model does not know because the model has a context window, not a memory.

2. The developer does not know because the developer has been outsourcing the act of knowing for the last eighteen months.

I have been writing code for fourteen years. I am currently a Staff Ruby Engineer for a Singapore-based client, and the single most valuable thing I do in that role is not write code. It is to remember.

• I remember which service owns which queue.

• I remember why the retry logic on the payments path was rewritten in 2024.

• I remember the conversation we had about the index that nobody wanted to add and the production incident eight months later that proved we should have added it.

That memory is not nostalgia. That memory is leverage. It is the reason a senior engineer can walk into a meeting and save the team a week of work in fifteen minutes.

And it is exactly the thing vibe coding cannot do for you, no matter how sophisticated the model is, because the relevant context is not in any document the model has ever
seen.

For two years, that kind of memory looked like overhead.

In 2026, it is the moat.

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Why the senior engineer era is back

The discourse this spring has shifted hard. The JetBrains developer survey published this month tells the story from a different angle:

Claude Code’s adoption has climbed from 3% to 18% in nine months, with an NPS of 54 - the highest in the market. And the developers driving that adoption are not juniors looking for a shortcut. They are the senior engineers who already know what good code looks like and have figured out how to use the model to write more of it without sacrificing the thing that made them senior in the first place.

The pattern that keeps showing up in every honest postmortem I read is the same one.

The engineers getting the most out of AI in 2026 are the engineers who could have written the code themselves and chose not to, because they knew what to ask for, what to verify, and what to throw away.

The engineers getting hurt are the ones who let the model fill in the parts of their judgment they had not built yet.

That is not a story about AI being bad.

That is a story about leverage being the wrong word for what vibe coding actually was. It was not leverage. It was a loan. And the interest just came due.

If you are 30+ and quietly worried, read this part twice

If you are reading this and you are a senior engineer who has spent the last year quietly worried that your fourteen years of pattern-matching, your scar tissue, your habit of asking “but what happens at 3 a.m. when this fails” - that all of it was about to be commoditized by a model with a better context window - I want to tell you something specific.

You are early.

You are not late to AI. You are early to the version of the industry where the people who can actually verify what the model produces become the most valuable engineers in the room. The 41% churn number is going to get worse before it gets better. The duplication number is going to get worse before it gets better.

And every one of those numbers is a job posting waiting to be written for someone who can read code and tell whether it is real.

The thing you have been told for two years - that your experience is depreciating in real time - was never true. It was a sales pitch from people who needed you to feel that way so the tools could be priced as a replacement instead of a complement.

Your experience just became the scarce resource.

The question is what you are going to do with it.

The honest part

Here is the honest thing I will tell you, because the only currency I am building this newsletter on is honesty: I have been writing code for fourteen years and my current online business has made $5 to date. That $5 is not a metaphor. It is a number on a Lemon Squeezy dashboard I look at mornings.

The reason I am telling you that is because the gap between “fourteen years of senior engineering” and “$1 of online revenue” is not a code gap.

It never was.

It is exactly the gap the vibe coding crowd was selling a fake bridge across. The actual bridge - the one I am walking across right now in public - is the thing nobody wants to talk about because it is unsexy and slow and involves

• writing landing pages

• email sequences

• posting on platforms where the engagement is humbling.

That is why I built automateideasai.com - an AI-powered tool that validates your product idea against market fit, competitors, and audience before you write a single line of code. Free to explore, pay to go deeper.

Because the actual bridge between “fourteen years of senior engineering” and “$1 of online revenue” is not building faster. It is knowing what to build. That is the step most of us skip, and it is the one that turns vibe-coded weekends into actual businesses.

If you have been waiting for the right moment to stop vibe coding and start building something of your own that survives Monday morning, the moment is now. The senior engineer era is back. Your scar tissue just got expensive again.

The only question left is whether you are going to validate the idea
before you build it: https://automateideasai.com

👉 This post is a bit long, you may want to see it directly in the browser! 🙏

97% of day traders lose money long-term.

Every single one of them believed they were skilled. They watched a few YouTube tutorials, nailed two trades in a row, and concluded they’d cracked the market. Then they blew up their accounts faster than you can say “leveraged long.”

A few things worth knowing about this statistic: the 97% figure comes from studies of retail traders, The losses aren’t evenly distributed either - many of the 97% lose far more than the 3% gain, because the winners are often institutions, algorithms, or early holders with structural advantages.

This isn’t just about trading though. It’s about how most people misread success in EVERY SINGLE DOMAIN - business, career, investing, health. Someone gets a lucky break and builds an entire identity around a streak that was statistically inevitable for someone. Just not repeatable for them.

So let’s break it down.

When you think about beating the market, do you wonder who will you compete with?

1. Professional Wall Street investors

2. Insiders

3. Institutions

4. Early Holders

5. Project’s Developers

6. Algorithms and advanced bot alerts.

This looks so unfair, it’s hard even to articulate. Still, people think they can be smarter after watching a few videos on youtube. And the funny thing is, it works out for someone, sometimes, and every here and there for someone else - just because of how probability works.

Here’s the core truth most people refuse to accept:

Variance hides skill in the short run and reveals it in the long run.

Short-term results are noisy. Long-term results are brutally honest. And the difference between the two is where fortunes are made - and lost.

I touched on this idea briefly in Life Is a Badly Designed Game (Section 3: Skill > Luck Over Time). Today, we’re going deep.

The Luck-Skill Spectrum

Not everything in life sits neatly on one side. Most activities are a blend of skill and luck - the question is how much of each.

Michael Mauboussin, in The Success Equation, built a framework for exactly this. He mapped activities on a continuum from pure luck (slot machines) to pure skill (chess). Most of life sits somewhere in the messy middle.

Disclaimer: Even Chess requires luck. Your opponent may have just a bad day.

Sports data makes this tangible:

• NBA outcomes are 85-90% explained by skill. The best teams almost always win.

• NFL outcomes are roughly 62% skill. Any given Sunday, a mediocre team can beat a great one. But over a full season? Talent rises.

• Poker, over 1,500+ hands, shows skilled players earning roughly 10x what unskilled players earn. Over 10 hands? Anything goes.

Kahneman nailed it: ”A good process will usually have a good outcome, but only over longer periods of time.”

There’s also a paradox here that most people miss. As the average skill level in a field rises, luck explains more of the difference between winners in the short term. When everyone is good, the margins shrink and randomness fills the gap.

But if you zoom out?

The compounding effect of even tiny skill edges becomes overwhelming.

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The Math - Why Time Is the Great Separator

It’s a shame that most people do not understand statistics, but because of that we’ve great advantage.

The Law of Large Numbers states that as the number of trials increases, average outcomes converge to the expected value. Variance shrinks toward zero.

In plain English: flip a coin 10 times - you might get 8 heads. Below each dot represents 10 coin flips run.

Flip it 10,000 times - you’ll land very close to 50/50. The same principle applies to skill expression in any domain. Below, you can see each dot representing 10k flips, and how final result deviates from 50%.

One quarter of great investment returns could easily be luck.

A hot streak in business - maybe the market was just favorable.

But 10 consecutive years of outperformance? The probability of that happening by chance alone approaches zero.

This is the mathematical backbone of the entire argument. Time doesn’t just reveal skill - it demands it. Every additional trial strips away another layer of noise and leaves you standing naked with your actual ability.

The coin doesn’t care about your confidence. Neither does the market.

Who else earns on markets?

At the start of this article I’ve shown you who you’ll compete with when you choose the market trading path:

1. Professional Wall Street investors

2. Insiders

3. Institutions

4. Early Holders

5. Project’s Developers

6. Algorithms and advanced bot alerts.

But the funny thing is, even from those groups, a lot of people still lose their money over time.

So WHO actually earns?

The research shows, that those, who do... nothing.

Literally. The best-performing accounts tend to belong to people who forgot they had them. There’s a famous story about a Fidelity internal study that found their top-performing accounts belonged to dead people or people who forgot they had an account. The story itself is almost certainly an urban legend - no one has ever found the original source. But the principle behind it? Backed by mountains of data.

DALBAR has been tracking investor behavior since 1994. Their 2025 report found that in 2024, the average equity investor earned 16.54% while the S&P 500 returned 25.02% - an 8.5 percentage point gap. Over 20 years, a passive $100K in the S&P 500 grew to $717,503. The average investor’s behavior reduced that to $345,614. Investors correctly timed the market direction only 25% of the time - worse than a coin flip.

Here’s an even more telling finding. Studies consistently show that women outperform men as investors - by 0.4% to 1.8% annually depending on the study. Fidelity analyzed 5.2 million accounts over a decade and confirmed it. Warwick Business School found the same with Barclays data.

The reason? Women trade about half as often.

Not better stock picks, no insider knowledge. Just... less activity. Less overconfidence.

In the curve above, it almost perfectly reflects the profit eaten by the trading cost. The consequence is, that nearly 1 full percentage point less eaten by friction annually. And the compound curve shows what that quietly adds up to over 30 years - over $100,000, generated entirely by restraint.

As Jack Bogle — the man who created index investing - put it:

“Don’t do something, just stand there!”

The mechanism is brutally simple: overconfidence → more trading → more costs and bad timing → worse returns. It works the same way whether you’re a retail trader, a hedge fund manager, or a crypto degen. The more you touch it, the more you break it.

And before the crypto crowd says “but HODL works” - yes, for Bitcoin. For the average altcoin? A study running 480 million simulations found the median HODL return was -28.4% after fees. The spectacular wins you see on Twitter are survivorship bias. For every guy who forgot about his Bitcoin and woke up a millionaire, thousands of others forgot about their altcoins and woke up with nothing.

The people who actually build wealth in markets aren’t the ones making clever moves. They’re the ones who stopped making moves altogether.

The Graveyard of Lucky Gamblers

Let’s look at where luck-dependent strategies end up.

Crypto traders: 95-98% lose money long-term. They all believe they’re skilled and smart, yet they lose life savings without understanding the math of probability. Every now and then one person gets lucky, earns tons of money, and the masses confuse that with mastery.

They completely ignore the fact that someone will always win by pure chance. That’s how probability works. If a million people flip coins, someone will get 20 heads in a row. Then they’ll start a Discord and sell a course about it.

Day traders broadly: Only 1-3% consistently beat the market. Active traders underperform passive investors by 6.5% annually. That’s not a rounding error - that’s the cost of confusing activity with skill.

Mutual fund managers - the supposed professionals: Only about 15% maintain their outperformance over 14 years. The rest regress to the mean, which is a polite way of saying they got lucky and then they didn’t.

Now here’s a comparison that hits close to home. I follow these two figures in the Polish investing/trading space: Cezary Głuch and Rafał Zaorski.

Trader21 aims for steady wealth growth. Disciplined. Methodical. Boring, if you’re the kind of person who needs adrenaline with their morning coffee.

Zaorski? He generates incredible profits. And incredible losses. He went broke multiple times. He gambled other people’s money, used extreme leverage, and was wrong more often than he was right.

As I noted when studying their approaches: ”I prefer calm, slow pace of steady increase of wealth, and I do not need to be the absolute best in the market to be satisfied.”

One strategy survives contact with time. The other survives contact with Twitter.

The Skill Builders Who Won

If time destroys lucky gamblers, it canonizes skilled practitioners. Let’s look at the evidence.

Warren Buffett beat the market in 28 out of 31 rolling periods - placing him in the 99.99th percentile. The probability of achieving this by luck alone is effectively zero. What looks like “magic” is 70+ years of compounding a genuine skill edge. He still lives in the same house he bought decades ago - because wealth built on skill doesn’t need to perform.

Annie Duke, professional poker player turned decision scientist, put it best: ”There are exactly two things that determine outcomes: luck and decision quality. Luck you can’t control. Decision quality you can.” She tells a story about Phil Ivey - one of the greatest poker players alive - who would obsess over suboptimal plays even after winning sessions. Because he understood that the outcome wasn’t the signal. The process was.

Alex Hormozi: ”Volume negates luck.” He points to Kobe Bryant, who did three practices a day while everyone else did one or two. In the beginning, Kobe was worse than his teammates. Then equal. Then better. Then untouchable. Because when you 3x your reps, you don’t just keep pace - you compound ahead. The gap becomes uncatchable.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, found that the companies that went from good to great ”did not have a perfect track record. But on the whole, they made many more good decisions than bad ones.” Not perfection. Consistency. The Stockdale Paradox at work: retain faith that you will prevail, while confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.

Do you notice the pattern?

None of these people eliminated luck from their lives. They made it irrelevant through volume, consistency, and deliberate improvement.

The Real Skill - Staying in the Game

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that ties everything together:

Skill beats luck. But only if you don’t quit.

January 9th - that’s the day researchers found that 80% of people abandon their New Year goals. Nine days.

That’s how long most people’s “commitment” to change lasts.

On the X platform, only 0.05% of accounts have more than 1,000 followers. Not because growing an audience is impossible, but because it’s uncomfortable, unclear, and unglamorous in the early months.

The feedback loop is brutal: you post into the void, the void doesn’t clap, and your brain says “see, I told you this was pointless.”

This is where the concept of deliberate practice matters.

Anders Ericsson’s research showed it’s not 10,000 hours of anything. It’s focused, feedback-driven improvement. Engineers understand this intuitively - it’s debugging your approach, not just writing more code. It’s reviewing why your last article flopped, not just publishing another one.

Angela Duckworth formalized something useful here:

Performance = Talent x Effort²

Effort shows up twice. First, effort builds skill. Then, skill multiplied by effort produces results. This is why consistent, mediocre-talented people routinely outperform brilliant people who dabble.

And then there’s the compound interest law, as Brian Tracy put it simply: ”If you invest money and allow them to grow using compound investment mechanism, you will get rich at some point. That’s all.”

That’s it. No secrets. No hacks. Just time + skill + not quitting.

As Phil Konieczny would say - don’t try to time the peaks and valleys. Average your way across multiple cycles, and it becomes very hard not to build wealth. People just think too short-term to see it.

The Honest Nuance

I’d be lying if I told you skill always wins. There are domains where luck still dominates, and pretending otherwise is its own form of delusion.

Low-sample domains - startups, entertainment, viral content - have enormous variance. You can do everything right and still fail because the sample size is too small for skill to express itself. One product launch. One movie. One tweet. These are closer to coin flips than chess matches.

Do that, quantity negates the luck, as Ycombinator stated: 2/368 investments, following the power law of profit distribution.

Black swan events exist. Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility is relevant here: some systems don’t just survive disorder - they benefit from it. Building optionality, keeping reserves, positioning yourself to gain from unexpected events - that IS a skill. Perhaps the most underrated one.

And there are real trade-offs you can’t escape. Time vs. money. Freedom vs. certainty. Growth vs. comfort. As I wrote in the newsletter framework: ”Adults accept trade-offs. Children look for hacks.”

You can’t optimize for everything simultaneously. The skill is knowing which trade-offs to accept - and accepting them without resentment.

Understand, which game you’re playing on.

The Question to Sit With

To win: work on the skills and use luck when it happens. Never depend on it.

The disciplined person’s move this week is boringly simple: pick one skill. Practice it deliberately. Measure your progress. Then repeat - not for a week, not for a month, but for years. Compounding is the core engine that powers everything, and long-term players always win.

Your skill set is the only asset that can’t be inflated away, can’t be seized, and appreciates with use rather than depreciating. As Paul Jarvis wrote in Company of One: ”You have to be good at your skill set before you can expect to achieve autonomy from using it.”

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with:

Are you building skill - or just hoping your lucky streak holds?

But there’s a catch. To build anything, you need materials — and chopping a tree takes forever with your bare hands.

And you need to hurry up, because every 20 minutes the night comes and the world fills with monsters that will kill you in one hit.

That means whatever you want to collect, you’ll face the same set of problems:

1. Weak tools.

2. Lack of useful materials.

3. Options are very limited.

4. Everything takes forever.

5. Your progress is constantly interrupted — or reset — by the threat of dying.

This is what the early game looks like. You know there are endless possibilities, but to get there you have to push through real struggle: repetitive tasks, grinding for resources, slowly building survivability to the point where progress can actually stick.

It’s boring, and it’s intentional.

Most people will quit.

Most people will quit.
For any ongoing effort, most people quit. People aren’t used to working on the same thing for a long time. You can see it everywhere.

1. Most people quit the gym before January ends.

2. Most people can’t keep up a diet.

3. Most people won’t consistently save money.

4. Most people won’t publish daily for years.

It doesn’t matter what you pick — the data is always the same. Most people quit.

So if you want to build a product for recurring buys, what do you do?

As a system designer, you want to make them quit early.

Focus on long-term players

It may sound harsh, but it’s nothing personal. Game designers want to entertain players — but the real key to funding future games is keeping the game alive long enough to make money.

If most players quit early, spreading resources across everyone is a waste.

Filtering out players who won’t stick around is smart resource allocation, not cruelty.

And this is why every system tests patience first. You start with a grind.

• Posting daily for a year.

• Mining diamonds by hand in Minecraft.

At the start, most information and possibilities are hidden from you. You know nothing, you have no idea how to optimize, your tools are weak and cheap. You’re stuck doing repetitive tasks.

In real life, you start with low income, low savings, low returns, and invisible progress.

Nobody wants to collaborate with you yet, because there’s a good chance you’ll quit. Collaborators and investors run the same test - patience first.

Exactly like in games.

Early game is about surviving
Games simplify feedback. Even when progress is slow, you can measure it. Life doesn’t give you that luxury — most of us lack the metrics to look back at, and that’s how slow feedback gets mistaken for the wrong direction.

Veterans know the early phase is not about winning — it’s about surviving long enough to scale.

Here’s part of a conversation with another Substack creator, when I offered a small collaboration. It shows exactly what I mean.

If someone wants to work with you, they’ll first check whether you’re going to stick around. Do you have content? Do you publish consistently? Are you making progress?

In the end, the most valuable asset anyone has is time. And successful people do not want to waste it.

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How to not get bored early

So here is the real question. How to not get bored?

The short answer: stop expecting not to be bored.

Early game is designed to be boring and that’s the point! That’s the filter. Once you accept this as a feature - not a signal that something is wrong - you’ve already won half the battle.

But there are also practical moves that make the grind survivable.

Build your own XP bar.

Games track progress for you in their own interest! Not yours. Life doesn’t track it at all. That’s why slow progress feels like no progress at all.

The fix is simple: create your own metrics.

• Track the number of articles published.

• Track subscribers, even when it’s 12.

• Track the streak.

When you track nothing in life, you also mine blind.

I track my Substack growth every month. At 25 subscribers, it looks ridiculous. But 25 > 12, and that’s movement. In a game, that number would show on a progress bar. You’d feel it. In real life, you have to build that bar yourself.

And you may set up some little milestones to reach, that are achievable relative to where you are right now!

Play the meta, not the session.

Session-by-session thinking will destroy you. One bad night of dying to creepers looks catastrophic. But zoom out to the map you built over three months, and the single death doesn’t matter.

Same in life. One bad week with no readers, no sales, no traction. Or one week of being sick, resulting in no publication. That feels like failure.

But ask a different question: are you more capable than three months ago? Do you have more content? More proof of work? Then you’re leveling up. The session was bad. The character is stronger.

Optimize the grind.

You’re an engineer. Use it. Or if not, use other engineers’ minds.

If something is boring, the answer isn’t to quit - it’s to find the most efficient path through it. In Minecraft, you don’t hand-mine coal forever.

Instead, you craft better tools, you build a furnace, you auto-craft coal from wood - and automate the whole process. You design a mining system.

The same logic applies in reality.

• What can you template?

• What can you batch?

• What removes friction from the boring work?

You’ll be surprised how much of the early grind can be systematized - and how much less painful it becomes once you’re solving the system instead of suffering through the task.

Find other players at the same level.

Solo grinding is the hardest mode.

The Substack creator from that screenshot tested my consistency before investing time in collaboration. That’s actually the right instinct - but it also reveals something important. Other people at the same stage of the game are rare, and valuable.

You don’t look for players far ahead of you. They’re the most visible, but at the same time, they’ll make YOU feel invisible.

You don’t look for players behind you. They’ll pull your focus backward. People grinding through the same early phase - people who understand why 25 subscribers feels simultaneously tiny and meaningful - those are the ones worth finding.

They’ll hold you accountable. They’ll celebrate your first $27 sale as if it were $27,000. Because they know exactly what it took to get it.

Remember what you’re building.

Not the business. The character.

In every RPG, the hero’s journey is boring before it’s epic. But the players who make it aren’t the ones who are never bored. They’re the ones who understand what the boring is building toward.

Early game is character creation. It’s the part of your story that makes the later chapters meaningful. If you skip it or quit it, the rest of the story has no weight.

The game is designed this way on purpose. Not to punish you. Not because the designers are cruel.

Because the destination only means something to those who walked the whole path.

Keep mining.

There are 2 types of successful people. PERIODICALLY & CONTINUOUSLY successful one.

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Periodically Successful Person

The first type of successful person is is PERIODICALLY successful one. There are periods, where they have extreme or significant success, and others, when they bancrupt, loose everything they’ve built and they start over.

It’s extremely visible in the investing world. Around 95% of traders loose all the money long-term. You may hear about very successful trades, but they’re usually made BY DIFFERENT PEOPLE over time.

Here is the example what it means:

1. Today I get rich

2. Tomorrow I get bancrupted, but you’ll get rich.

3. The day after, you’ll get poor again, and someone else will have the trade of life.

However, we only hear about spectacular successes. The second part of the story is usually hidden.

But where is the hidden trouble? The first type of person, need to start over, again and again, to reach the same level of success they’ve already did in the past.

I’m not interested by that. And if you neither, keep reading!

Continuously successful person

In this article and in General, I’ll mostly talk about the second type. A person who is more and more successful over time, instead of starting over and over again.

Extraordinarily successful people rarely start from scratch. During the span of their lives, they perform smart actions that compound over time. For example, investing allows you to use the money you’ve already earned to multiply future results.

Over time, to achieve the SAME results, you need to put LESS effort. If you wish to continue pushing hard, the effects will keep multiplying.

But for that, you can’t lose that money you’ve already earned. You need health you’ve already got. You need people you’ve already helped to. And this is what I’d love to stick with you.

0 times infinity is still 0

How you’re being tricked by games

Nothing meaningful is linear. Look at games. XP, skills, gear, territory, influence - all compound. If you want to reach the next level in-game, XP feels slower the more you progress, because the progress bar stays the same while the required points explode.

Progress didn’t slow - your scale did.

If you already block 98% of incoming damage, an extra 1% doesn’t reduce damage by 1%. It cuts what’s left in half.

That’s compounding.

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Progress scale change awareness

I know, the example with defense % in games can be seen a bit odd, but Life works the same way!

Here is the chart showing Bitcoin’s price over time (Black Line).

Let’s say, I’ve:

1. Bought 1 Bitcoin in 2015, for $300.

2. Sold it in 2018 for $10k.

I’ve have got 33x of return!!!

Then compare that with this situation.

Let’s assume, I’ve:

1. Bought 1 Bitcoin in 2022, for $20k.

2. Sold it in 2025 for $120k.

In that scenario, I’d earn “barely” 6x of profit.

In the first example, I’d earn $9,7k, in the second: $100k

It’s not visible from the chart, because THE SCALE IS CHANGING.

If I’d change the chart to linear to keep the scale, we’d see how much of a shift had been done recently.

The progress does not slowed down - it accelerates. To the point, people need to adjust scale, so the early progress is still visible.

Make a lever from compounding.

Earning first $100k takes forever, but second is way easier.

If you are aware of the scale not being linear, you’ll quickly notice that the jump from $1M to $10M is only 10x while getting your first million if you have a dollar - ONE MILLION TIMES.

However, this 10x is far greater progress, if you’ll keep the scale LINEAR.

The compounding effect gets crazy when it comes to your health, reputation and network too! Help enough people for long enough and the effect becomes exponential.

Here is a useful rule to Remember:

Small advantages held long enough dominate big advantages held briefly.

Unfortunately, people quit both right before compounding starts to matter.

Don’t be like them.

Next week...

Next week I’ll cover why early progress is boring by design, so make sure you subscribe for future deep dives!

If that idea resonates with you, please let me know in the comments and share this article with your friends!

Let’s Engineer the Wealth together!

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The sense of life is to grow yourself through constant sacrifices, while doing it playfully.
-- Jordan B Peterson

Life consists of real problems to solve, and those who can solve them better usually thrive.

But how to struggle with real problems through play? Well, we build stories and that’s an amazing concept, but I can think of another example, which is gaming.

In this letter, I’ll talk about the concept of gamifying wealth generation, but you can apply this to any important problem you face, and try there.

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About a little idle game

Let me tell you a story.

There is a mobile game, named “The Tower” - straightforward idle game, where the goal is to perform recurring runs defending your tower from incoming enemies. After each run you’ll inevitably loose at some point, you use the earned coins to upgrade the tower a bit and try again against harder waves.

Classic loop. Nothing fancy.

So why bring it up?

Because in this game, there are 8 (eight!) different currencies to manage:

1. Cash

2. Coins

3. Stones

4. Cells

5. Module Shards

6. Reroll Shards

7. Keys

8. Time

Each currency is earned differently. Each unlocks different upgrades. And each affects overall progress in non-obvious ways.

Still, though, what’s the point?

That complexity doesn’t repel players.

It attracts them. Why?

Because the game provides:

• Clear feedback loops

• Visible progress

• Community strategies

• Step-by-step optimization paths

People have essentially solved the game.

Kids. Teenagers. Non-technical adults.
Some of them run spreadsheets more complex than small businesses!

When it was shown to me that’s when it hit me:

Why can people master insanely complex games - yet struggle so badly with real life?

And here is why.

Why people struggle in life, while perfecting their games?

The same people that can optimize every single asset to built the best empires or collect most powerful equipments in-games, struggle with getting rich in real life.

Have you ever wondered, why?

We play games of all sorts, solving different problems, from puzzle-like, through calculations and cryptography, through economical optimizations and strategical thinking, to memory and pure action-like quick reflexes.

All that require effort, and usually we don’t care - we have fun by doing so. In games, effort feels light. Even enjoyable.

That’s sth I find extremely interesting and inspiring, so I’ve decided to use this concept and adapt it to a real-world problem, of wealth generation.

This is provoked me to ask a few questions, mainly: What’s the difference, between people playing economy-based game, vs real-life asset accumulation?.

The unconfrotable answer

Life is a badly designed game.

And humans prefer to play games that are designed well.

10 things that games & life have in common.

Good games reward us for the same behaviours, that life does:
Patience, gratitude, emotional control, learning from mistakes. Look around.

Study the behaviour of successful people and you’ll see some patterns.

They understand what actually matters to make progress fast.

Here are a few game principles that games and life share - and most people ignore:

1. Compounding Is the Core Engine

2. Early Progress is Boring by design

3. Skill > Luck over time

4. Assymetry is the real game

5. Resources allocation beats the raw effort

6. Meta knowledge separates elites from the rest.

7. Progress is non-reversible until it is.

8. Identity drives outcomes

9. Long-Term players win

10. Most people quit early

Let’s deep dive into them! 👇

. Compounding Is the Core Engine

Nothing meaningful is linear. Look at games. XP, skills, gear, territory, influence all compound.

If you already block 98% of incoming damage, an extra 1% doesn’t reduce damage by 1%. It cuts what’s left in half. That’s compounding.

In life, if you’ve 50% income for expenses, doubling expenses means 1.5x more money available for investments. That’s the same math applied.

XP feels slower at higher levels because the progress bar stays the same while the required points explode. Progress didn’t slow - your scale did.

Life works the same way!

Earning first $100k takes forever, but second? It’s way easier. The jump from $1M to $10M is only 10x. While getting your first million if you have a dollar? One million times.

The compounding effect gets crazy when it comes to your health, reputation and network too. Help enough people for long enough and the effect becomes exponential.

Here is a useful rule to Remmber:

Small advantages held long enough dominate big advantages held briefly.

Unfortunately, people quit both right before compounding starts to matter.

2. Early Progress Is Boring by Design

Every system tests patience first. You start with a grind.

Posting daily for a year.
Mining diamonds by hand in Minecraft.

Most of the information and possibilities are hidden from you.
You know nothing, you don’t have an idea how to optimise, your tools are weak & cheap. You’re forced to do repetitive quests.

In Real life, you start with low income, low savings, low returns, and invisible progress.

Games simplify feedback. Even when progress is slow, you can measure it. Life doesn’t give you that luxury. Slow feedback gets mistaken for wrong direction.

Veterans, however know, that the early phase is not about winning - it’s about surviving long enough to scale.

3. Skill > Luck Over Time

Luck matters short-term. Skill dominates long-term.

You can win once by luck. You can’t win consistently without skill. That’s why professionals don’t rely on luck - especially when stakes are high.

They build skills so that when opportunity shows up, it becomes leverage.

Markets follow the same rule. Builders, disciplined investors, and operators destroy gamblers over time.

If you want to be successful, remember:

Variance hides skill in the short run and reveals it in the long run.

Most people confuse a lucky streak for mastery - then blow up. This is extremely visible among the crypto market degenerates. 95-98% of traders here looses in long term! How crazy is that?

They all believe they’re so skilled and smart, and yet, they loose life savings without understanding the math of probability. Every here and there one person gets lucky, and earns tons of money, and masses confuse that with a mastery.

Completely ignoring the fact, that every time someone else succeeds.

To win, work on the skills and just use luck when it happens, never depend on it.

4. Asymmetry Is the Real Game

Maybe you have heard a term: unfair advantage. What they mean, is assymetry.

Most of us have something that gives us a unique starting point for any effort we take. Most of good games will also use this trait. You start with different, and the goal is to use this for you advantage.

Both life, and games, reward smart positioning, not equal effort. In games you can exploit mechanics, stack multipliers together, build synergies between different elements or classes.

In real economy, you can optimize taxes, use the loans, build scalable products, create multiple tiers of your business to apply upselling to existing clients...

When you think about health:

• you can take supplements,

• go to the gym,

• complement it all with a proper diet,

• add profilactic physiotheraphy on top,

• and have healthy relationships...

and all those results will start to compound without you even knowing how and when.

If you understand this, you’ll quickly realize, that grinding harder is inferior to finding better multipliers!

This is why grinding is overvalued. Some grind is necessary, but pros are looking for assymetries, amateurs keep grinding.

5. Resource Allocation Beats Raw Effort

You always have limited resources. Always.

In games, you may need to balance time, stamina, mana, gold, inventory slots or whatever else game will support.

Life hides it though!
Thinks like time, energy and money are more or less obvious.

The reset most of people NEVER NOTICE!

For example, everybody is fighting for our attention. We leave in the world of constant distractions, and our attention is crucial if we want to achieve our life goals. We also should fight for it and we have the best capabilities to do so.

Another, often unnoticed currency is trust. You build your credibility by consistently showing up where others give up. This is why people tell you: “post everyday, it’ll change your life”. It’s not about posting, but building trust, which takes time.

But energy & attention is a resource, you need to manage very carefully, therefore

Saying no is as important as acting.

Bad players spend resources reactively. Good players invest them deliberately.

Where to allocate resource though?

6. Meta-Knowledge Separates Elites

Chances are you’ve heard about Minecraft, even if you haven’t played yourself.

There are multiple classes of players.

1. Newbies - try it out, play occasionally

2. Amateurs - play for fun, optimize & automate to some extent, but not pressure.

3. Professionals - use extra tools, play for living, speed up through early game to have real fun without resources limitations.

4. Gods - world champions in speedruning, technical geniuses, and so on. They constantly break the game, and developers look for such people to find bugs to patch.

The Level 4 people are reading the source code of Minecraft and build communities of hackers, spending days and nights looking for ways to cheat the system.

The difference between them and normal professionals is unbeatable. They know exactly how the game works under the hood. They track patch notes and code changes. They attend events and hard-test everything that comes out, looking for exploits to use in own favor.

This is the real advantage. Knowing how the system works, not just playing inside it.

That gap is unbridgeable through effort alone.

How to use it in wealth building?

If 98% of crypto traders lose, I don’t “try harder.” I study why. I analyze behavior, psychology, cycles, inflows, incentives. I build systems that exploit impatience and emotion. I am aware of cycles and aware of how long-term game favours the players.

The Key point here, is that Rules aren’t neutral. They favor certain behaviors.

Elites study why the rules exist, and they deploy behaviours that increase the probability to win.

7. Progress Is Non-Reversible Until It Is

When you rush for progress, you level up - until you die or get wiped.

In games, you’ll manage risk, by looking for players with similar skill set, to maximize profits while minimizing the chance to fail. Games will punish you with permadeath, resets, gear loss or XP progress drop when you make mistake.

Catching up will cost you time.

In real wealth building, mechanism is very similar. Knowing that money makes money, you want to avoid bankruptcy, reputation damage, debts.

Knowing that you need energy spread across time, you want to avoid health collapse, and avoid extreme risks of accidents or contusions.

That leads us to a very important lesson:

Defense matters more than offense.

Even in Chess, where it’s way easier to attack than to defend, ability to know where to take a draw is crucial to progress to higher ranks.

Staying in the game beats bold moves that risk elimination.

However, not everyone can defend in the exactly same way.

8. Identity Drives Outcomes

One more shared trait of life and games is knowing that who you become determines what you can access.

In games, usually this is solved by guilds memberships, professions, races, reputation. Over time you develop a build in the certain direction, that determines your strategy.

In order to access everything, you are forced to work on collaborations.

Life is no different.

In wealth building you invest your time into skill stack, networking with people you choose, and resources you accumulate. It is very similar to what you have in games, just you can’t start a new character from scratch as easily. Commitment compounds.

Most people will fall into the trap of looking at one very successful character, and immediately try to copy that. It doesn’t work.

You don’t get rich by doing rich-people actions once.
You get rich by becoming someone for whom those actions are normal.

And that’s only possible through a long-term commitment.

9. Long-Term Players Win

Long term players always win. The question is by how much.

Both - games and life - punish short-term thinking brutally. To show you the difference, here is a chart of unrealized profits for long-term hodlers of Bitcoin.

Green means that a lot of wallets holding Bitcoin for a long time is in almost constant belief or euforia (blue). There are very short periods, where Bitcoin’s price drop low enough that most of long-term hodlers is on loss.

Now if we’ll compare that to short-term hodlers, you won’t believe. They’re almost never on profit. They live in constant fear, anxiety and depression, with very, very short periods of minimal profits just to get back to emotional hell again.

All that makes us to the very simple and important truth.

Speedrunning works only if you already mastered the game.
Shortcuts work only if you can survive it.

Remember. Time in the game > timing the game.

Knowing this will almost ensure your success, because most people will not stay.

10. Most People Quit Early

This is the biggest shared mechanic. In every single ongoing effort, most people will drop off.

On the X platform, only 0,05% of accounts have more than 1k followers. Not because its impossible, but because it’s uncomfortable, unclear, and unglamorous early on.

Games mask this with dopamine spikes every once a while, life doesn’t.

It’s even more cruel, hiding from you everyone and everything who is unsuccessful. Social media will only show you posts with dozens of comments and hundreds of likes.

Restaurants shows you only people who are able to go there and eat outside.

Everything that is out of the bubble is hidden for you, leaving you with the impression you’re not doing ok.

And there is no cure for that.

Life is just a badly designed game.

But once you understand the mechanics, you can build a game inside it — and win.

Stay in the game.

The game is simple. People make it complicated and confuse rules together, making it hard for them.

You don’t need to.

Stay in the game. Learn the rules. Stack advantages.
That’s how you win - quietly, predictably, and without drama.

So far, I’ve shared how I see wealth differently[^1] and how I navigate trade-offs in life[^2]. Now I want to share what I think of as the “operating system” behind it all.

At the center is wealth. For me, this is the crossing point of everything else that matters.

Everything else - family, freedom, fulfillment, financial growth - is a part of it. Over the years, I’ve learned that building systems around different areas that support each other, gives the exponential growth - while neglecting one pillar ruins the progress in everyhting.

It’s inspired by ikigai, the idea of finding purpose in what you do. For me, wealth is not just about activity - it’s about living that purpose while keeping balance across everything else that matters: relationships, time, energy, and financial security.

Right now, I think of wealth as having a balance across a few core areas in my life:

• Living the life I actually want

• Spending time with the people I love

• Doing work that feels meaningful and valuable

• Having enough resources to support all of that

With that clarity, my choices feel simpler. I’ve realized it’s not about chasing everything at once - it’s about setting boundaries and letting systems carry the load.

It was never easier than today, with the era of AI assistants, endless automations and infinite access to global knowledge.

If you are keen to see more about this concept, check the deep dive article I’ve published a few weeks ago[^3], and I’ll explore the practical examples of building those systems in the articles to follow.

Where I’m heading next?

Currently I’m putting more energy into building scalable value while keeping the balance I’ve built so far. Long-term, steady progress, no shortcuts, no burnout.

Follow along! No burnout. No shortcuts.

-- Seb

Last time I shared how most people think in terms of this OR that when building a meaningful life. The truth? You don’t always have to choose. Wealth, health, freedom, and family can coexist - but only if you set the right boundaries and make disciplined trade-offs.

Family-first example:

I am on my way of figuring out how to give people the value equivalent to $1M. However, I do it within certain boundaries.

For example, I prioritized what can’t be rushed. Marriage, parenting, and relationships were non-negotiable. While peers focused solely on climbing the career ladder, I invested time in family, trusting that financial success would follow. The result? My career and income accelerated precisely because I put family first - not in spite of it.

Prioritizing what can’t be rushed:

Without a focus, we get overhelmed and paralized. This is why, when it comes to priorities, I tried to create a system that prioritizes what gets indefinitely harder over time.

• Energy in your 50s is easier to preserve than in your 80s → start early.

• Financial compounding works at any age → focus first on the irreversible.

There are people that became milionaires (or bilionaires) within a few years. But no one raises their kids quickly. None. Null. Zero. There’s no shortcut.

So I aim for the green area. Ambitious, but not extreme.

TODO: I’ve published the full deep-dive on the blog — feel free to read it here: [Insert link].

However, keep in mind, that The point isn’t idealism - it’s discipline. Real-world results come from sequencing priorities, not chasing everything at once.

Next time: “How health, energy, and systems make this sustainable.”

Stay tuned!

-- Seb

This is my first email, so I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Seb, and I help software engineers and ambitious professionals build real, sustainable wealth - without sacrificing health, freedom, or time with family, and without burning out along the way.

I’m doing it mainly by sharing own learnings and journey, rather than coaching directly.

I want to ask you: what comes to mind when you hear wealth?

Most people think: money - and that’s just normal. Here’s a snapshot of how people perceive wealth:

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please reply to this email and let me know what wealth means to you. 🙏

What I’ve noticed, countless books, courses, and posts reinforce this narrow view. But for me, it has always felt incomplete. Money without health, freedom, or wellbeing isn’t real wealth - it’s a trap, often costing energy, relationships, and time for numbers on a screen.

When I was a kid, I read one of Robert Kiyosaki’s books - most likely Poor Dad, Rich Dad. One sentence stuck with me for life:

> “Poor people think like: this OR that. Rich people think like: this AND that.”

I embraced it early: if I don’t have to choose, why would I? Since then, my mission became simple - build wealth without losing health, ideally improving it, while sharing the journey with people I love.

Check out my full essay on this topic—I’d love to know if you find it interesting!

Next time: I’ll share how I navigate trade-offs when life forces hard choices. Stay tuned!

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My approach to wealth generation

What comes to mind when you hear the word “wealth”? I bet it’s money. About 90% of people associate wealth with financial terms.

Research consistently shows that financial association dominates how people perceive wealth.

Countless books, courses, and posts reinforce this narrow view. Yet this equation has always struck me as incomplete.

Money without health.

Having money is undeniably better than not having it - better doctors, better specialists, better care. And in a pragmatic sense, professionals paid directly by you often have a stronger incentive to keep you in good shape.

So simple and pragmatic.

Money also matters when you can’t be healthy. Being able to afford an environment adapted to your needs can define your quality of life, regardless of limitations.

Still, the real win is having both money and health.

When I was a kid, I’ve read one of Ropert Kiyosaki’s books, most likely Poor Dad, Rich Dad and there was one sentence that stayed in my head for the rest of my life:

Poor people think like: “this OR that”, rich people think like: “this AND that”.

I embraced this early: if I don’t have to choose, why would I?
My mission became simple - pursue wealth without losing health, and ideally, improve it along the way.

Since then I’ve tried to find a solution to how to pawn my way to the wealth by at least not-loosing health on the way, and if possible, get healthier in the process.

Money without freedom

There are many ways to earn well. The one I respect most: create value, or create value at scale. It gives you income and freedom.

But there is other way too - you may trade your freedom in exchange of more money, and this is what most people do.

A loan is the perfect metaphor. You get the cash upfront, but the price is years of commitment.

Taking big loans, climbing corporate ladders that own your calendar, or signing your life to a high-paying but soul-crushing role - all are classic examples of the second path. You may end up wealthy on paper, yet exhausted, with children who grew up and you barely able to recall when and how.

Preserving - and ideally expanding - your freedom while building wealth is harder, but infinitely more valuable long-term.

Money without wellbeing

We’re constantly fed the idea that we have to join the global race to get rich.

Young people drop everything to chase their first million:

• No time for relations

• No time for the rest

• No time for travels

• No time for living how we want

They often reach the goal only to realize what they sacrificed can’t be bought back.

I want to be rich. But I want to be rich while building memories with people I love, traveling, and living fully—both as a young man and as a grandfather energetic enough to chase my grandkids.

It’s harder than just making money. I know. And I choose it anyway.

Money With Everything Else: My Definition of Wealth

Japan has a concept called ikigai - a philosophy about finding a purpose worth devoting your life to.

In this approach, your ikigai is described by intersection of:

• You are or can be good at

• You love to do

• Others need it - so you can feel important

• People can pay you for doing - so you can cover your living.

This is way closer to what I aim for, when think about wealth, but not quite there yet.

Ikigai is beautiful, but it’s still activity-centric. True wealth, to me, is broader: it’s living your ikigai while maintaining the sustained balance of everything that matters.

You can have ikigai without wealth. You can be passionate, useful, and fulfilled - and still struggle financially.

So I think of wealth as balance across the core parts of my life:

1. Living the life I actually want

2. Having time for the people I love

3. Doing work that feels like ikigai - fulfilling and valuable

4. Possessing enough resources to sustain all of the above

It’s a harder definition. But it’s clear - and clarity removes friction and prevents unintentional sacrifices.

Setting up boundaries & definitions.

This perspective puts me in a small minority. Most people want to be rich, but I’d argue, a few can define exactly what that means.

I know what exactly I aim for.

I have setup multiple areas of my life that I want to keep in balance and constantly work on, focusing on whichever one slips.

Example 1: Family first, money to follow

There are people that became milionaires (or bilionaires) within a few years. The odds of doing it though, are smaller the more we want to restrict the time.

However, there are no people who raised their kids quickly. None. Null. Zero. There is no shortcut.

Most people delay decision about family until they can afford it - risking to never have it.

I refuse to choose between being rich and having a family - so I aim for both. But I prioritize what can’t be postponed: relationships, marriage, parenting.

So I prioritized family early—got married and had kids while my peers were grinding for promotions. I trusted (correctly) that the financial piece could compound later; plenty of people have built wealth in their 30s, 40s, and beyond after starting families.

Ironically, becoming a husband and father made me better at everything else.

Parenting books and team-management books teach the same principles. Applying them made me a better engineer, a better leader, and a more grounded person.

My career took off. Finances followed - slower than if I’d focused on nothing else, but steadily and sustainably.

My career and income accelerated because I put family first, not in spite of it.

If you look for an advice, prioritize what can’t be rushed.

Example 2: Health in the Middle

Balancing all these areas is demanding. Early on, my health started slipping, so I dove deeper into how to maintain it—not repair it later.

My wife turned out to have a superpower here - deep expertise in nutrition, supplements, non-toxic living, and recovery protocols (amplified by maternal instinct).

She became an expert in areas I’d never willingly study.

With her beside me, not-loosing health became much easier than I’d ever anticipate if I’d choose to race for finances first.

Together we built systems that make staying healthy almost effortless. Health became a shared asset rather than another item on my to-do list, and I’ve realized, that chasing wealth together is easier and much more fun.

Priorities

Priorities become simple when your rules are clear. The world is unpredictable, and no plan is guaranteed - but you can stack the odds in your favor.

I want all aspects of wealth but when everything matters, you still have to sequence. My simple rule: prioritize what cannot be done (or done well) later.

Example:

• Energy in your 80s is smaller than in your 50s → have kids early so you can enjoy grandkids.

• Financial compounding works at any age → trust the process and focus on the irreversible first.

I trusted myself to figure out the financial side later. Plenty of people already did it and left roadmaps behind.

Summary

I now have strong foundations in health, family, freedom, and fulfillment. The financial pillar is the one that has lagged slightly - intentionally.

It’s time to pour more energy into Sustainable Business and scalable value creation while protecting everything I’ve built so far.

Join me as I build wealth the balanced way. No shortcuts. No burnout. Just progress. I’ll be sharing the journey as it unfolds.

Welcome aboard.