Personal reflections, yearly reviews, goals, and lessons learned as a full-time independent hacker.
A podcast on the brain and dopamine got me thinking about what AI took from us. This week: why the dopamine was always in the journey, what neuroscience says about clear goals, and how to get the thrill back in bug bounty.
OpenAI just doubled the price of the plan we all rely on, and the others will follow. This week: what the Codex price hike means, where I think bug bounty is heading as models get expensive, and why I started vlogging my weeks.
Now that AI hunts for us, my days feel a lot emptier, so I went looking for other ways to fill them. This week: how the fun part of bug bounty is quietly disappearing, why I'm getting back into making videos, and the full blood panel I ran to actually understand my body.
This is Aituweek 100, almost two years of posting. A special retrospective: how I left for Asia at 23 with 3000 bucks to go full time on bug bounty, the lessons from dozens of started-and-dropped projects, and how I see what comes next in a world where AI changed the game.
The models are so strong we're becoming less researchers and more triagers. August was my best income month ever, and it's making me question everything. This week: the bug bounty bubble, why an RCE can feel empty now, and how I'm thinking about the long game.
I tore down my over-engineered home lab and rebuilt it around a single tmux on a VM, the kind of setup we could have run in the 2000s. Then GPT 5.6 pulled me away from Claude for a bit. And some honest thoughts on what finding bugs feels like now that the agents do the finding.
We spend all this time optimizing Claude, but nobody talks about what to do while it works. This week: how AI quietly turned me from a producer into a consumer, why infinite scroll leaves me empty, and the overpriced little device I bought anyway to fight back.
I figured out I've been using Claude wrong: telling it to "keep going" on a loop instead of guiding it like the intern it actually is. Plus why real human contact matters more than anything in bug bounty, and a few slow days off in the Vosges.
This year's hacker house: same crew, a villa in the south, and the first time we all met up since Claude landed in our lives. Now we all just point it at the scope, and we all surface the same bugs. The trip, the new hunting setup, and a whole lot of duplicates.
Last week I talked about fake productivity, and I'm still in it. But it made me think about the tools that actually work. This week: why I went back to a simple pomodoro timer, the agent platform switch that finally stuck, and how my voice-controlled Jarvis keeps getting better.