I didn't start this because I knew how to code.

When I was a kid, I used to pretend I was a hacker.

I'd sit at the computer looking up little tricks, typing like I knew what I was doing. Nobody around me could teach me what any of it meant. No classes. No mentor. No map.

So the kid who loved computers never learned to speak to them.

Instead of college, I chose the military. Eight years.

It gave me discipline, and it gave me a life — but not the dream.

After that I built a career. Good title, good work, someone else's dream.

Then my son was born, and the question changed.

It stopped being what do I do for a living and became what kind of life can I build for him?

That's when I started hearing about AI — regular people building real things with it. And I hesitated, because I knew the truth about myself: I was good with technology, but I didn't speak the language. No code. No Python. Nothing.

So I asked AI to teach me how to code.

And a few days in, I realized the thing that changed everything:

I didn't need to learn to code before I could start building.

The machine already speaks the language.

My job was to bring the ideas.

My first build was a finance app. For one week I thought I was going to conquer the world — I couldn't believe a prompt could turn into a working app in front of my eyes. Making it real took a lot more than a prompt. But that week lit a fire that hasn't gone out.

That was five months ago. Now I build every night and learn every day, working beside machines I taught — and with Claude in the room, I've gone further in months than that kid dreamed in decades.

And I'll be honest with you: some nights I still sit here and think, what can I build for the world? I was lost when I started. Some days I still am. That's the truth nobody puts on pages like this.

But that's exactly why this place exists.

If a kid who played hacker — a soldier, a dad, a man pushing 40 who'd never written a line of code — can get this far this fast, then so can you.

The kid finally got his machines. Everything he learns with them is here — free.

That finance app was Dreamer's Budget.

I spent time on it, I obsessed over it, and I put the whole thing online.

Then we turned it into Flow by RAEM.

And still, almost nobody bought it.

We never really promoted it.

That sucked.

But it was also the beginning.

Because for the first time I took something that only lived in my head and turned it into something real.

It didn't matter that it failed.

I had built something.

And once I knew I could do that, I wanted to see how far I could take it.

So this time I'm building out in the open, and you guys get to watch the whole thing.

That is the part we never did before.

One project became another.

Eventually I built RAEM AI, and I started making systems where the AI wasn't just answering me — it was doing real work.

But somewhere in there, something changed.

I stopped being happy with knowing how to make something work.

I wanted to understand why it worked.

That curiosity is what pushed me from building with AI toward learning how to engineer it.

And that's where I am now.

Not at the finish line.

Right in the middle of it.

I don't have a computer science degree.

I didn't spend my twenties writing code.

And there are still words I hear all the time that I have to stop and look up.

I'm okay with that.

Because I think there are a lot of people like me.

People with jobs, and kids, and bills, and ideas.

People who look at AI engineering and think it's probably for somebody smarter than them.

I used to think that too.

So instead of waiting until I know everything before I talk about it, I'm documenting all of it while I'm still learning.

The things that click and the things that don't.

The projects that work and the ones nobody buys.

The money I spend and the money I make, even if that number is zero.

Because I don't want this to be another page where somebody stands at the finish line and tells you how easy the climb was.

I want you to see the climb.

I want to become an AI engineer.

Not because the title sounds cool.

Because I want to understand these systems deeply enough to build things that are useful, reliable, and real.

I want to understand the engineering underneath the tools I've been using.

And I want to know when the AI is right, and when it's wrong and sounding sure about it.

And I want to see how far somebody can go starting from where I started.

I didn't have a technical background and I didn't have a roadmap.

Just curiosity, work, mistakes, and a willingness to keep going.

You're not joining after the success story has been written.

You're here while it's being written.

So come with me, and let's see how far we can get.