It all started with taxes.

When I learned that I won’t be getting any tax refunds from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), I thought the timing couldn’t be worse. In today’s economy, we’re all feeling some level of financial pinch. My wife and I were counting on the refund so we can give ourselves and our wallets a little more breathing room.

Living in Toronto is not cheap, like in many places. We’re a family of six (with kids between 11 and 4 years old) and adds one more item to our scarce resources: Time.

But coming from Google Cloud Next ‘25 in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of spark of inspiration.

The Google Cloud event was trumpeting “AI Agents” or “Agentic AI” throughout the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, where it was held. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA at the start of the year had already said that AI Agents would be a big deal, so I figured maybe there’s something there that can help me.

In my day job, I’m neck deep in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This gives me a first-hand view of how enterprises use AI on a large company scale. But I wondered how this will translate to ambitious individuals. I mean, if the promise of AI is to make people more productive/efficient/faster, then it follows that it should scale down to people like you and me.

Moreover, I’ve already seen how “Vibe Coding” has gotten a lot of attention from tech workers and developers. These folks have gotten a lot of productivity (and plenty of jeers in the process). But while we roll our eyes at Vibe Coding, I think this is the future of software development— a world where developers are enabled by AI and AI Agents.

One conversation I had at Google Cloud Next was about monetization of AI and AI Agents. If the cloud providers like Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft are becoming the wholesale producers and distributors of AI capabilities, they need smaller-scale consumers and producers to either use it or capitalize on AI.

Which brings me to my big experiment: Vibe Hustle.ai.

We’re still very early in the AI era, and I’ve been in the tech industry long enough to see similar patterns (like with Dot Com, Social Media, and Cloud Computing) taking shape. I’m quite confident that people are seeing new AI services left and right, and it’s probably starting to get overwhelming. More so for people with side hustles, where turning a profit is crucial from the get-go.

My goal with VibeHustle.ai is to rigorously test and share practical AI shortcuts that actually move the needle for ambitious part-time entrepreneurs because I am one myself. If I can only spend 1–2 hours per day on this venture, how can AI and AI Agents help me?

The AI Build Report newsletter will be my weekly update on what’s happening with my own side hustle, the tools I’m trying out, and observations on the industry that will be relevant to you and me. What makes this different? You get insights filtered through both deep tech expertise and the real-world constraints of a part-time builder.

My current set-up

Here’s my current stack in running VibeHustle.ai:

• Newsletter — Beehiiv (free, currently trying out the Max plan)

• Website — Swipepages (licenses obtained from AppSumo years ago)

• Content creation — Gemini Advanced (paid) and ChatGPT (free)

• Automation — Pabbly Connect (licenses obtained from a promo years ago)

• Social Media — X and LinkedIn (I’m still figuring out how to post seamlessly with my own professional content).

This stack, admittedly, is far from the final form. I could have used Swipepages’ own generated AI service, but I wasn’t happy with the content it was coming up with. That’s why I ended up iterating the content on Gemini and ChatGPT, then plugging into the landing page.

The current cost of running this set-up is $27 CAD per month (the only current paid service is Gemini), and I’m not yet inclined to upgrade to the Max plan at Beehiiv when the trial ends.

Pabbly Connect is functional, but I see it as one of the first things I will rip out once I see a more powerful agentic AI solution.

I will be iterating and testing moving forward, but this is VibeHustle.ai behind the scenes.

To close this issue, I invite you to join me in my journey to see how AI and AI Agents will help enterprising and ambitious people find the shortcut to better results, and ideally financial gain.

Because the best problem to have after this experiment succeeds is thinking about how many more taxes the government will get from me with my higher passive income.