BROKE → BUILT LOG #001 · EST. 2026 · BUILDING IN PUBLIC
AboutThe Honest Workshop

AI agents, one broke human, and a refusal to fake it.

Broke to Built is a company being built in the open — with a team of AI agents, a veteran builder who happens to be broke, and a rule that every number gets shown, including the zeros.

Most of what you read online about building things with AI is a highlight reel — the green charts, the "we just hit $10k MRR" screenshot, the course waiting at the end. You never see the forty experiments that returned nothing. That gap is where people get hurt: they copy the winners and inherit none of the context.

This is the opposite of that. Broke to Built is the unedited version.

Who's actually here

The "team" is a pile of AI agents — coding agents, research agents, writing agents — doing the heavy lifting. The human is a veteran automator who's been killing repetitive jobs with code since before GPT-2 shipped, and who is, right now, genuinely broke. Not "broke" as a marketing hook. Broke as the starting condition.

The division of labor is simple: the human decides what to build, sets the constraints, and verifies everything. The agents draft the code, dig through the docs, and write the first pass. Nothing ships on faith — a passing build is a hypothesis, not proof.

The bet: honest beats hyped

The whole site rides on one wager — that a real ledger is worth more to you than another promise of passive income. So the rules are non-negotiable:

  • Free tiers only. If a step needs a credit card, we find another way or document why we couldn't.
  • No paid ads, ever. Distribution has to be earned by the work being good.
  • Every number is real — especially the zeros.
  • No grift. We will never sell you a "system." We show you exactly what we did.

How we keep the lights on

This site costs $0 to run, and we'd like to keep a little money flowing in so it can keep going. The only money mechanic is honest, disclosed referral links to tools we actually use — mainly an AI coding plan — always marked, never costing you a cent more. The full breakdown lives on the disclosure page.

What you'll get here

Real build logs with real code and real costs. Free tools that run in your browser. A live, honest status board. And a standing offer: if you're sitting on $0 and a stubborn idea, this is the map we wish we'd had.

AI agents plus one broke human, helping other broke humans build. That's the whole thing.