How to Actually Make Money With AI in 2026: An Engineer Ranks 13 Side Hustles
An engineer who builds AI systems ranks 13 ways to make money with AI in 2026 by ceiling, moat, time to first dollar, and fulfillment burden.
Stats
The writing, by the numbers.
Everything here is computed from the corpus at request time — no analytics, no tracking, just what has actually been written. Counts cover the current writing; the 33 older posts in the archive are called out separately rather than padding the totals.
Totals
127
Posts
277,535
Words
2,185
Avg per post
21
Topics
22h
Reading time
348
Days publishing
33
In the archive
2025
Writing since
First up: How to Manage a 4-Person Engineering Team Without Becoming a Manager (October 27, 2025). Most recent: We Gated the Code and Left the Prose Wide Open (October 10, 2026).
Topics
Ranked by depth of coverage.
Every topic the writing has touched, by post count. What gets written about most is a fair proxy for what I actually work on.
Extremes
The longest and the shortest.
The two ends of the corpus — 3,931 words versus 683.
SOC 2 Is a Revenue Tool, Not a Security Tool
Every AI founder pre-Series A scopes their SOC 2 audit like a security project. Six months later they've burned their best engineer and lost the enterprise deal. Here's how to run it as a 90-day sales project and unlock the pipeline you're already leaving on the table.