Articles
Field notes from building in public — the Pivot, brainstorms, whiteboards, and more.
Rio de Janeiro's "Homegrown" AI Model Caught Red-Handed as a Rebranded Copy-Paste Job
The AI world erupted today. IplanRIO, the IT division of Rio de Janeiro's municipal government, open-sourced the Rio 3.5 Open 397B AI model, billing it as a breakthrough moment for Brazil and the Glob
Architecting the Autonomous: Engineering the Loops That Drive AI Agents
The shift from prompting AI like Claude. Boris Cherny highlights this evolution, where developers manage continuous cycles that direct AI agents, focusing on architecture and to building automated loops marks a transition in software engineering toward intent-centric development.
The Economics of Token Exhaustion: Why Flat-Rate AI Subscriptions Collapsed
Subscriptions are so 2025 right, well... Trends seem to agree.
The 30-Day Head Start: Trump’s Frontier AI Executive Order
President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump has pulled a rather "radical" moves towards AI, and this week has been no different.
Why Prompting Skill Beats Coding Skill in the AI Era
After 307 days of live vibe-coding, I'm convinced the sharpest competitive edge isn't writing code — it's knowing exactly what to ask the model.
What Vibe Coding Live Every Day Actually Teaches You
After 308 days of building live on camera, Charles Botensten maps the unglamorous reality of vibe coding — the crashes, the bad-energy streams, and the one mantra that keeps him showing up.
China's AI Lag Is Closing — What That Means for Closed Source
China's open-weight models are closing the AI gap with the US faster than most enterprise buyers realize, and the bifurcation between closed and open source is already underway.
How I Learned to Think Objectively After 10 Years of Unlearning
Charles Botensten maps the decade-long process of moving from emotional, distraction-driven thinking to something closer to objective reality — and shows exactly where most people get stuck.
Why My 80-minute Live Stream Vanished and What I Did Next
An 80-minute live stream on 15 years of personal development recorded in total silence, and Day 308 of building in public taught me more than the content itself ever could.
How I Burned Months Building a Salesforce Replacement With Claude
After $50,000 and five developers, Charles discovers Claude can scaffold a working CRM in minutes — then spends months learning why that's only half the problem.
Why I Never Answer "What Are You Building"
Refusing to answer "what are you building" is a deliberate creative strategy, not evasion — and it produces better ideas than any direct pitch ever could.
Why My Vibe-coding Schedule Is Killing My Membership Funnel
Charles Botensten traces a live brainstorming session that exposed the real reason iCharles.com has no paying members: a schedule that produces zero reusable content.
Wiring for AI When the Layoffs Reach Your Door
Charles Botensten maps the skill set every displaced worker needs as AI reshapes who gets to participate in the economy at all.
Why I Pivoted From Daily Vibe-coding Streams to a Content Engine
After 38 days of live vibe-coding on YouTube, I realized I was the bottleneck in my own value chain — and I had to rebuild the whole model.
AI Samples, the inevitable doom of AI: AI Companies’ Relentless Hunt for Training Samples, the Privacy Minefield, and the Looming Shadow of Contamination
AI Samples - Ouroboros of AI model training.
AI Agent Failures: Why the Grand Autonomy Experiment Is Failing
AI agents handed unchecked spending authority caused €2.3M in fraud and $1.8B in refund abuse. Why the grand autonomy experiment failed — and the fix.
Claude Opus 4.8 Review: Incremental Upgrade or Hype Cycle Break?
Claude Opus 4.8 review: modest benchmark gains but limited real-world improvement over its predecessor. Is it a genuine upgrade or just another hype cycle?
Vibe Coding Gets Harder as Your Project Grows. Not Because the AI Is Dumb, but Because It Doesn't Understand Your Codebase
Vibe coding feels like magic early on, but as your project grows you spend more prompts giving the AI context than building. Here's why — and the fix.
China’s AI Reckoning: Efficiency, Domestic Chips & Impact
China is rewriting the economics of AI with high-performing models at a fraction of Western prices, accelerating domestic chip breakthroughs that blunt U.S. sanctions, and embedding intelligence across industry at astonishing speed
Why Closed Communities Need Drawing Games
Drawing games turn passive readers into active creators, pulling quieter members into a closed community in ways text threads never can. Here's how.