One Year of AI Maker: Learning in Public, Going Human, and What's Next
Published on 02.04.2026
One Year of AI Maker: What Happened and What's Next
TLDR: Wyndo reflects on a year of publishing the AI Maker newsletter — growing to 15,000 subscribers with over 80 deep dives — and announces a pivot toward video content, live expert conversations, and monthly Q&A sessions, plus a pricing increase for new members starting April 16th.
Summary: There's something refreshingly honest about a newsletter that started with no strategy whatsoever. No subscriber goals, no monetization roadmap, just a person who was curious about AI and decided to write about it to force themselves to actually understand what they were learning. And that loop — curiosity feeding the writing, writing feeding the curiosity — turns out to be a surprisingly durable engine. A year in, the AI Maker has reached 15,000 subscribers, cracked the top 70 in Substack's technology category, and maintained a near-weekly publishing cadence across 80-plus deep dives. That's a real track record, and it's worth acknowledging.
But the more interesting part of this retrospective isn't the numbers — it's the honest reckoning with what writing alone can and cannot do. Wyndo spent hundreds of hours watching YouTube videos while learning AI, and he identified a persistent gap: videos show you the surface of a workflow, but the prompts, the blueprints, the actual wiring underneath almost always stay hidden. That gap is real, and it's something any practitioner who's tried to replicate a demo workflow has felt firsthand. The pivot to video isn't just about reach, it's about closing that gap between what you see and what you need to actually build something yourself.
The framing around "being more human" in an AI newsletter is the kind of thing that can easily slide into empty brand speak, but there's a genuine argument here worth taking seriously. As AI-generated content scales, the marginal value of another polished tutorial approaches zero. What can't be replicated at scale is unscripted conversation — two or three people thinking out loud together, surfacing the half-formed ideas and real-time course corrections that get edited out of finished articles. The planned expert conversation series, where practitioners walk through their actual workflows on screen and those conversations get turned into blueprints, is a smart format precisely because it captures that rough-edge thinking.
The new content structure combines the existing weekly written deep dives with video walkthroughs, expert practitioner conversations, and monthly member Q&A sessions. Paid members get access to the video content, the blueprints derived from expert conversations, and the live Q&A. For context, AI Maker Labs already houses 90-plus thinking prompts, Claude and MCP implementation guides, ready-to-use Claude Skills, and automation blueprints — so the paid tier has genuine substance behind it. The pricing adjustment — from $10 to $15 per month for new subscribers starting April 16th — is positioned as a reflection of that growing library, and existing paid members are grandfathered in at their current rate.
Key takeaways:
- AI Maker grew to 15,000+ subscribers and top 70 Substack technology in its first year, publishing 80+ deep dives with a near-weekly cadence
- The creator identified a persistent gap in video learning: demos show the surface but hide the prompts, blueprints, and system wiring that make things actually work
- The newsletter is expanding into video walkthroughs, expert practitioner conversations with accompanying blueprints, and monthly member Q&A sessions
- The core argument for going more "human" is that unscripted conversation surfaces insights that polished writing edits away — a real tension worth thinking about
- Pricing for new members increases April 16th ($15/month, $120/year); existing paid members are locked at current rates
Why do I care: As a senior frontend developer who consumes a lot of technical content, the gap Wyndo describes between watching a demo and actually being able to replicate it is something I feel constantly. Most AI workflow content is either too shallow to act on or too specific to generalize. The blueprint-plus-conversation format he's describing — where an expert walks through their real workflow on screen and that gets distilled into a reusable blueprint — is one of the more practical approaches I've seen articulated. Whether the execution delivers on that is an open question, but the format logic is sound. The pricing change is straightforward and the grandfathering of existing members is the right call. The real test will be whether the video and conversation content maintains the analytical depth of the written deep dives rather than drifting toward surface-level demos.