Something weird is happening in the AI space right now. People are helping each other.
Not in the vague “rising tide lifts all boats” way that people slap on LinkedIn posts. Actually helping. Sharing configs, debugging each other’s setups, pointing people to tools they didn’t build, telling strangers “you should start a channel” with zero expectation of getting anything back.
#The DM That Got Me Thinking
I’m in James Goldbach’s Skool community, Agent Architects - a paid group of builders working with Claude Code, multi-agent orchestration, and agentic workflows. I pay $97/month to be in a room with people who are as deep into this stuff as I am. I’m currently #1 on both the 7-day and 30-day leaderboards there - not because I’m trying to win anything, but because the conversations are genuinely that good. When a community makes you want to show up every day, you show up every day.
And James - the guy running the community, the guy with the audience - told me I should start my own channel. Just like that. No pitch, no angle. A creator who makes content about AI agents, looking at what I’m building, and saying “you should be sharing this.”
That hit different.
In most industries, someone with an audience telling a paying member to start competing with them would be unthinkable. In the AI builder community right now? It’s Tuesday.
#Why This Moment Is Different
I’ve been in tech for 25 years. I’ve seen hype cycles come and go. Web 2.0, cloud, mobile, crypto - each one had its gold rush energy, and each one eventually turned into a zero-sum knife fight for market share.
The AI era feels different. And I think it comes down to one thing: the surface area is so massive that competition doesn’t make sense yet.
Nobody has figured this out. Not OpenAI, not Anthropic, not Google. The people building autonomous agent fleets, the people making AI-powered SaaS tools, the people creating content about all of it - we’re all exploring different corners of a continent that nobody has mapped.
When the territory is that vast, helping someone else find their path doesn’t take anything away from yours. It makes the whole map bigger.
#What Collaboration Actually Looks Like
It’s not formal. There’s no consortium or working group. It looks like:
- Someone posts their agent architecture on Discord and three strangers help them optimize it
- A creator with an audience tells a paying community member to go start a competing channel
- Paid communities like Agent Architects where the weekly live streams are spent working on member projects, not the host’s projects
- Open-source tools getting built not for clout but because someone needed it and figured others would too
- People sharing their actual revenue numbers, not to flex, but so others can calibrate expectations
This is the stuff that doesn’t scale - until it does. Communities built on generosity tend to outlast communities built on gatekeeping.
#The Case for Sharing Everything
I’ve started building in public. Not because it’s a growth hack (though it probably is). Because I genuinely learn more when I share what I’m doing.
When I posted about running autonomous AI agent fleets, the responses taught me more than the original experiment did. People asked questions I hadn’t thought of. Suggested approaches I hadn’t tried. Pointed out blind spots I couldn’t see.
That’s the multiplier. You share one thing, you get back ten.
#Competition Will Come
I’m not naive. This collaborative window won’t last forever. As the market matures, as revenue concentrates, as the stakes get higher - the knives will come out. They always do.
But right now? Right now is the time to build relationships, share knowledge, and help people who are two steps behind you - because someone two steps ahead of you did the same thing.
The AI builders who will win long-term aren’t the ones hoarding secrets today. They’re the ones building networks of people who remember that they helped when they didn’t have to.
#Start the Channel
James was right. I’m starting a channel. You can find me at @letsgochristo on Instagram - and if you’re building something interesting with AI, you should be sharing it too.
The audience isn’t the point. The community is.
Let’s go.