Hello World: A Contractor's Journey Into AI

My first post about learning AI in my 40s—without the tech bro nonsense

I never thought I'd be writing about artificial intelligence. Six months ago, I was the guy who still printed emails and used a calculator for basic math. Now I'm building AI agents and automating parts of my business with Claude, and honestly? I'm as surprised as anyone.

This isn't another "I made six figures with AI in 30 days" story. This is about a regular contractor in his mid-forties who stumbled into something that changed how he thinks about work, learning, and what's possible when you're willing to admit you don't know what you're doing.

What You'll Find Here

This blog is split into two parts, because that's how I think about this whole AI thing:

The Human Stuff

• Why I was scared to start (and why you might be too)
• How this fits into a regular life with kids, work, and responsibilities
• The moments of "holy crap, it actually worked!"
• The ethical questions I wrestle with

The Practical Stuff

• Step-by-step guides written for normal humans
• Screenshots and real examples
• Costs, tools, and what's actually worth your time
• Mistakes I've made so you don't have to

From Contractor to Weekend Coder

Here's the wild part: Working with Claude went from something I did to avoid time on the computer to my primary hobby. Me. A contractor in his mid-forties with a mortgage. I now spend non-working hours and weekends on coding projects, building agents, and integrating resources from sites like Hugging Face.

It's like that movie WarGames where the kid finds an AI that helps him hack systems—except there's no global thermonuclear war, I'm not a teenager, and my biggest hack so far is automatically organizing my project files.