Writing
Building in public.
Honest notes on using AI tooling to ship real products and income streams — plus the engineering decisions behind the builds.
The Real AI Side Hustle Is Live on Amazon
My first book is live on Amazon — the honest result of testing the '$10k/month with AI' methods every YouTuber sells. What the process took, and what's next.
Why I cut my AI book from 17 chapters to 11 before I finished it
I planned an 80,000-word book, then cut it from 17 chapters to 11 before the draft was done. The build-in-public story of why shorter got better.
I gave myself 60 days to bootstrap side income with Claude Code
A senior engineer's honest 60-day log of using AI tooling to ship real products — what actually got built, what it earned, and what I'd do differently.
How I Built This Site with Claude Code
A build log of charlesmcquain.dev — why I chose Astro and Tailwind, how I drove the whole thing with Claude Code, and the architecture decisions (and one nasty CSS bug) along the way.
Build-in-public, honestly.
Real AI-side-income numbers, the systems behind a solo content portfolio, and the engineering decisions along the way. No hype, no spam.
- Honest income numbers — the real kind, not cherry-picked screenshots.
- The exact AI workflows I use to ship products and content fast.
- Build-in-public lessons from a senior engineer — what works and what doesn't.