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

I build production AI systems and teach software engineers to do the same.Every week I create real AI systems and automations that save time, save money, and increase leverage. Then I show you exactly how I built them. Complete code. Deployed to production. No theory.I've spent 20 years building software systems and leading engineering teams. Now I'm focused on applied AI - building systems that solve real problems and teaching others to do the same.I run two things:AI Engineer - A community where professional software engineers learn production AI through weekly live builds, code reviews, and hands-on projects. We build together: RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, automations.Leverage AI - Custom AI development for businesses when off-the-shelf tools aren't enough. AI systems, intelligent workflows, and automations that scale your business operations.📩 Get my free weekly newsletter: newsletter.owainlewis.com👥 Join the community: skool.com/aiengineer💼 Work with me directly: leverageai.co

Owain Lewis

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

Get an OFFICE. Pay for it.
Go into debt if you have to.

I visited a guy recently who “works from home.”

His office was:

- a wobble-ball "chair"
- two monitors jammed into the corner of the living room
- kids running around
- wife cooking two meters away
- toys, noise, chaos, distractions
- honey, can you take out the trash please

And he wonders why he can’t focus or scale.
Why nothing gets finished.

HERE is the TRUTH:

You are NOT building anything meaningful if your work environment is set up like that.

An office isn’t a luxury.

For $200/month you can rent:

- a quiet room
- a coworking space
- a spare office in someone else’s building
- anywhere with a DOOR that closes

And suddenly your productivity triples. WOW didn't see that coming! 

Your standards rise.
Your thinking sharpens.
Your business becomes real.
You're happy to get home once your day is finished. 

People say:

“I’ll get an office when I’m successful.”

No. It works the opposite way:

You get an office TO BECOME successful.

Environment is everything. Respect your work. Buy silence.

Denis Gramm

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

If nobody emails me that it’s broken — it’s NOT broken.

I spent SIX MONTHS building features nobody asked for
for users who didn’t even EXIST
for revenue that wasn’t coming

This was when I was building my first startup:

Pixel-perfect design.
Every page “needed” to exist. Cookie policy? VERY important.
Company address with a map widget? A MUST-HAVE
Perfect UI and UX (so I thought)
Perfect everything (so I thought)

Now?

If Sentry doesn’t light up - it’s not a bug.
If customers don’t ask - it’s not a feature.
If nobody misses it - it doesn’t exist.

Real example from a few weeks ago:

A user emailed:

“Hey, your payment gateway isn’t working.”

Of course it wasn’t working.
There was no payment gateway.

I processed his payment manually, wrote back:

“Payment processor was acting up on my side — fixed now.”

30 minutes later I added the integration.

The next customer paid successfully.

Done. Shipped. Nobody died.

Don’t build what nobody asked for.
Don’t polish what nobody will use.
Don’t delay your launch for imaginary problems.

If the pain is real, people will ASK.

Ship now.
Fix later.

Google had ONE JOB — beat Claude at coding.

Instead, they gave us Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview which is indistinguishable from Gemini 2.5 Pro.

In the coming days you’re going to read a lot of praise towards Gemini on LinkedIn from people who never wrote a “hello world” program.

So I’m going to save you some time.

“You are absolutely right” — still here.

No interactive debugging — still here.

Hallucinated “robust” fixes — still here.

Copy-paste the same code while pretending it was updated — still here.

So what do we get?

A model that sounds smart, but can’t work.

Not a match to my Codex + Claude combo.

Google had all the money. All the data. All the time.

And still fumbled the bag.

Sad.

Startups don’t get copied in weeks anymore. They get cloned in hours.

Someone posts on X that they got into Y Combinator.

The next day three different people ship the EXACT SAME product. Oh and it’s free. 

Good luck competing. 

Some dude launched an AI-powered MVP and showcased it.

And it had a couple of cool ideas to it.

Two days later, I copy those ideas and roll them out to prod.

The speed is insane.

I used to scroll Twitter to find one good product per week. Test it, form an opinion. 

Now? It’s an endless flood of apps. AI tools spitting out products every damn day.

New directories. New apps. New agents.

Most of them half-baked. Most of them pointless.

But it’s still impossible to keep up.

And this is before agents start building agents.

Where this is all heading? I have no idea. No one does.

Hold on tight.

Shipped a new endpoint at StayAPI 👇

You can now pull hotel reviews directly from Trip dot com via API.

- Real guest reviews (ratings + full text)
- Structured JSON, ready for analytics or search
- Pagination + filters for large datasets
- Easy to plug into dashboards or recommendation systems

If you’re already working with OTA data and missing Trip dot com reviews — this fills the gap.

Try at https://stayapi.com

DM for examples and integration tips!

Yeah… freelancers are cooked.

I barely hire anyone anymore.

And I’m saying this as someone who spent over $300,000 on Upwork over the years.

In the last 2 months I only hired one developer only to write a Python boilerplate so I could hand it off to AI and never need him again.

Closed the contract 
Fed the code to Opus 4.5 (which feels like alien tech).

That’s it.

Yesterday I asked Nano Banana to draw a simple “whiteboard style explanation” for one of my blog posts.

See attached. I was shocked it even worked.

It took 10 seconds to understand the request and output the image.

No revisions.
No back-and-forth.
No invoice.

Just done.

Who’s going to hire illustrators for blog content now?
Or $400/month diagram designers?
Or “brand visuals specialists”?

The market isn’t shrinking, it’s evaporating.

AI replacement is real. Anyone with working eyesight can see what’s happening.

If you’re a one-type-of-gig freelancer… I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

Get a job, maybe.
And after you get one — hold onto it with both hands.

THIS is how you make yourself UNFIREABLE in 2026

Not “more valuable.”
Not “harder to replace.”
UNFIREABLE.

FIRST Make a list of every SaaS your company pays for.
All of it.
CRM, dashboards, reporting tools, chat tools, automations - everything.

THEN Write down how much each one costs.
Most employees have no idea their company is casually bleeding $300… $500… $1200/month per tool.

AFTER THAT Pick the easiest one.

The one that:

- costs the most
- does the least
- has ONE feature you FULLY understand

NEXT - VIBE-CODE that feature.
Not perfectly.
Not enterprise-ready.
Not “rewrite the whole product.”

Just recreate the ONE feature your team actually uses — even if the code is dumb, ugly, stitched together with safety pins. 

Use whatever - Replit, LOVEABLE or n8n - AI will hold your hand.

Build it in a week after work.

SHOWTIME: Show it to your boss.
“Hey, we’re paying $500/month for this.
I built the part we actually use.
Costs $20/month to run.
I can add unlimited features and fixes.”

Watch what happens next:

Your boss goes BALLISTIC
That $500/mo subscription gets CANCELLED immediately.
Your app becomes “mission CRITICAL”
YOU become "the automation guy"
Every workflow now routes through you.
You get trust, leverage, and JOB SECURITY.

Congratulations.

You just became the person who SAVES the company money instead of the person who COSTS the company money.

And companies don’t fire the people who SAVE them MONEY.

They fire the people who can’t do what you just did.

That’s how you stay employed FOREVER.

That’s how you survive the AI wave.

taplio

The Battle

Owain Lewis

Denis Grammakov

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The Battle

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Denis Grammakov

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

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);}Denis Grammakov's LinkedIn Performance

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