Director, Software Engineering | Actionable content for leaders in tech. Software engineering, engineering leadership, online business.

15+ years building production systems. Former Director of Engineering at Oracle, leading public cloud services and working with engineers from Microsoft, AWS, Google, Netflix.

My mission: help businesses and engineers build AI systems that create real leverage.

We're entering a world where AI agents do the work and humans direct. The question is which side of the gap you're on.

Tool user: Prompts ChatGPT, starts from scratch every time.

System builder: Has agents that research, write, and code - creating output while they sleep.

Most AI content teaches you to copy paste. I teach the patterns underneath - so you can build any system, for any problem.

One person with the right systems can do the work of 10. I help people become that person.

What I do:
→ AI Engineer: Community for AI engineers. Courses, resources, downloadable AI projects
→ GradientWork: Custom AI development for businesses
→ Newsletter: Free value every week

📩 newsletter.owainlewis.com
👥 skool.com/aiengineer
💼 gradientwork.com

Owain Lewis

Over 650 Google and OpenAI employees signed an open letter backing Anthropic's stand against the Pentagon.

Here is what they are asking. 

That their companies refuse the Department of War's demands for permission to use AI models for mass domestic surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.

The backstory. Anthropic agreed to 98% of the Pentagon's use cases for Claude. Cyber operations, combat support, intelligence - all approved. They drew the line on two things: mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon's response was a 3-day ultimatum. Agree or get labeled a "supply chain risk" - a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries. Never before applied to an American company.

Now the people actually building these models at Google and OpenAI are saying the same thing Anthropic said. 

Not these two things.

I agree with them. The technology is advancing fast but AI models are not reliable enough for life and death decisions. There is a fundamental unpredictability in these systems that we have not solved. 

Giving them the ability to make kill decisions without a human in the loop is not a technical limitation we can hand-wave away.

This is one of the most important conversations happening in tech right now.

What's your take?

I build AI systems that help businesses scale | Founder, GradientWork

Freelancer → agency owner → SaaS founder.

Now running Botster.io → an all-in-one tool that helps digital businesses extract, monitor, and weaponize web data.

Posting SaaS learnings, automation tricks, technical deep dives.

If you’re building anything online - you’ll probably find something useful here.

If you're looking to automate your business - text me, DMs are open.

Denis Grammakov

I just cancelled another $1,000/year Firecrawl subscription.

Moved all my scraping in-house. 

Not because Firecrawl is bad (it's great)

But because writing scrapers that update themselves with AI is now stupidly easy.

I describe the case.
Claude drafts the plan.
Codex pressure-tests edge cases.
Deploy.

That’s it.

In about an hour of coding I replaced 5 scrapers that were eating the entire subscription doing millions of requests.

Now they’re running on a single VPS, chewing through cheap proxies.

Clean. Controlled. Profitable.

And the best part?

The scraper is 100% mine.

No "buy more credits". Just code.

I’ll keep a couple $19/mo hobby plans around, they’re great when you need to blast 1,000 random URLs and extract some universal fields fast.

But all the low-hanging fruit WILL be trimmed.

$1,000/year tools starting to look very optional.

Denis Gramm

Solofounder @ Botster & StayAPI // B2B Web Scraping & Workflow Automation // I blog about my journey and findings

Legacy SEO tools are starting to look like a joke.

What am I paying $150/month for exactly?

Almost all my traffic comes from Search + AI.

Yet every month I open Ahrefs and it confidently shows me a big fat NOTHING 

except for a list of spam links, of course 

Thanks 🙏 

All of that while the site is growing and getting traffic.

Feels like a relic from the “10 blue links” era of Google.

No wonder new SEO / GEO SaaS startups are wiping the floor with these guys and raising funding left and right.

While the old dashboards are still pretending it’s 2016.

When they go extinct nobody will miss them

Cancelled my Cursor subscription.

Not using it anymore.

I rarely even look at the code - and even more rarely fix it myself.

When I do, VSCode is still perfectly fine.

Models are accessible directly and they work much better.

So I mostly live in Warp with a bunch of terminal windows open.

Plenty of free or better alternatives anyway:
Conductor, AutoClaude, and of course native apps.

AI gave us so many free and great solutions, there's no point in paying extra.

I had a few ideas for the updated StayAPI homepage.

Only one problem: 

I know NOTHING about animation.

(My top achievement is adding a snowflake script to my website in 2002)

So I described my ideas to Claude.

10 minutes and a few iterations later - done.

I suggested using some libraries but Claude said 'nah' and rawdogged it with pure vanilla JS + CSS keyframes.

EXACTLY how I imagined it!

How long would it take to find a freelancer for this?
How long would it take them to code this? 
How much would it cost?

Rhetorical questions.

After 90 days I’m still using OpenClaw.

Here are 4 things it actually does for me daily.

1 - Lead generation assistance

I built a pipeline on top of the Apollo API.

Now I can search, filter, enrich and deduplicate leads for StayAPI with a few Telegram prompts.

They get formatted and pushed straight into my Instantly campaigns.

2 - CRM connectivity

OpenClaw manages my Zoho Bigin CRM.

Once I get a new lead, OpenClaw picks it up, creates the person and company profiles in Bigin, and adds the proper deal card into the pipeline.

It then watches the cards, adds details as deals move through stages and makes sure they don’t go stale.

CRM stays the source of truth without me touching it.

3 - Project management autopilot

It monitors multiple Trello boards, watching over the development team and sending me updates and end-of-day summaries.

I can see which tasks moved and which ones have been stagnant longer than they should.

OpenClaw even pings devs by leaving comments and cross-manages boards across different languages (!!).

4 - Dev operations

It’s connected to my GitHub as a collaborator and helps me add or edit issues through voice or text messages via Telegram.

So bugs and feature requests go from
chat → GitHub → backlog

without friction.

At any point in time I can ask it any question about any codebase of mine and it will respond with a text or a voice message.

___

SO

Is it overhyped?

Not for me.
The quality and speed of my work went up.

Is it for everyone?

Definitely not.

Tokens get randomly spent.
Context gets lost.
App connections break.
There are plenty of bugs.

Is it worth trying?

You bet.

Is it true a 1000 agents can run your business? And do you need to buy a Mac mini?
No and no.

Hooked up AppSignal to my SaaS so errors automatically become GitHub issues.

- issue created 
- I get a notification 
- invoke Claude through a comment
- worker fires up Claude
- issue gets resolved 

Then I test and deploy (if I feel like auto-runs aren’t enough), and that handles weird bugs I don’t have time (and interest) to dig into.

Magic 🪄

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The Battle

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Denis Grammakov

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Owain Lewis's LinkedIn Performance

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