“Can I pick your brain?”The RAG review is €200.
A founder you met once wants thirty minutes on their retrieval pipeline. A junior wants you to “glance at” a notebook. Both are real work: you read the code, you draw the diagram, you tell them what breaks at ten times the load. This is the setup that prices it: a sixty-minute review with intake and a written verdict, an async repo review with a three-day deadline, and a mentorship group that runs on two live sessions a week instead of a Discord role.
Free to start. You keep 80%. Unanswered reviews refund themselves at the deadline.
Europe/Berlin · Google Meet · free reschedule until 24 h before
The review they book
instead of “picking your brain”.
One session type with two intake questions: the stack at its scale, and the problem in their words. That is enough to read the repo before the call rather than during it. Your evening windows, a fifteen-minute hold while they pay, a Meet link in both calendars. Price it where independents already are: premium AI mentorship runs $250 to $1,000 a month, and a single 60-minute review at €200 is the entry to that.
How bookings workThe deliverable is
the written verdict.
Five parts of the system, a score each, one sentence of evidence, and the one change to make first. Written within the hour after the call, sent from the booking. It is what they paste into the team channel, what justifies the €200 to whoever approves it, and what makes a refund dispute almost impossible: the work is on the page.
Everything else is guesswork until you can measure it. Eval checklist attached.
Five products,
switched on in this order.
Sessions first, because that is what the “brain-picking” already is. Then the async form for the quick looks, the group priced like the mentorship it is, and the letter that keeps a fast-moving audience reading.
- 1Day one · Bookings
Architecture or ML-system review €200 · 60 min
Intake: stack and scale, the problem. Written verdict within the hour after the call. A 30-minute follow-up as the second session type for teams that come back.
- 2Day one · Forms & Requests
Async repo / notebook review €79 · 3 days
Repo or notebook link, one question, target of the work (production, portfolio, interview). Written reply within three days or an automatic refund. Cap it at five a week; code review is the heaviest delivery in the cluster.
- 3Week two · Community
Group mentorship, two live sessions a week €99 / month
Architecture review on Tuesday, project or CV teardown on Thursday, an office-hours channel with a one-day reply norm. Yearly plan on; cap at 40 with a waitlist.
- 4Week four · Newsletter
One paper or incident, broken down €12 / month
What broke, why, the fix, the pattern. The code and the eval harness sit behind the paid tier. The agent drafts from your notes; you edit.
- 5Week six · Leads & CRM
LLM evaluation checklist free
A one-field download in your bio. Contacts are tagged by stack and role target; you email the segment when the next group cohort opens.
#19 — The agent that deleted a customer's calendar (and the eval that would have caught it)
A scheduling agent with write access to Google Calendar was asked to “clear my afternoon”. It cleared the customer's afternoon. Every afternoon, for a year.
Not the model. The tool schema allowed a date range with no upper bound, and the eval set had zero destructive-action cases.
Bounded tool arguments, a confirmation step gated on the count of affected events, and the 40-line harness that replays the incident as a regression test.
Every write tool needs a dry-run mode and a blast-radius check. Here is the checklist we use before any agent gets a write scope.
AI-engineering listings are up 60% year on year. Next group cohort opens 12 October, cap 40. Two review slots left this month.
What the weekly issue
actually contains.
One paper or one production incident. What broke, why it broke, the fix and the pattern behind it. The incident and the diagnosis are free, which is what gets it forwarded in team channels; the code and the checklist are the paid part, which is what gets it renewed. Once a month, a short market note and the slots you have left.
AI is the leakiest newsletter category: paid readers churn around thirteen percent a month because the content dates fast. Incidents and patterns date slower than tool reviews, and a yearly plan is the other half of the answer.
Group mentorship,
not a Discord perk.
Group mentorship at $99 a month with two live sessions a week is a proven format in this niche, and 1:1 mentorship at $120–450 a month is the alternative buyers compare it with. Run the group as a fixed twice-weekly rhythm with a cap and a waitlist, and it is the mentorship tier that popular mentors hit “no spots left” trying to deliver one to one. ApplyForm grants and revokes the Discord role or Telegram access as people pay and cancel; you run the two sessions.
- TuesdayLive architecture review, 60 min
One member's system on screen, scored against the five parts above. Recorded; the recording goes in the archive.
- ThursdayLive project or CV teardown
A repo, a notebook or a CV, taken apart in front of the room. Members volunteer a week ahead.
- Always onOffice-hours channel
Production LLM problems, answered within a day. Anything that needs the repo open becomes a €79 form.
- MonthlyHiring-manager or founder session
Someone who ships or hires in the field. The reason people stay after their own system is fixed.
Numbers from
the market.
$250 for one call plus async, $400 for two calls with incident priority, $1,000 for four calls with the whole team. A €200 review is the first step onto that ladder.
Most plans sit at $150–300; the platform adds 20% on top, and popular ML mentors show “no spots left”. A capped group of forty at €99 is a different business.
The proven group format in AI: architecture reviews, CV teardowns, a weekly job digest, $899 a year. The €99 community above is the same shape with your name on it.
The leakiest category despite the interest, because the content dates. Incidents and patterns hold better than tool roundups; sell the yearly plan.
Demand for the mentor is year-round, unlike the spring-heavy general tech market. The CV teardown on Thursday fills itself.
The supply exists and most of it earns around $500 a month there. Keeping 80% of a €200 review and a €99 group changes the arithmetic.
Market figures from published industry and platform data, September 2026, rounded. Your prices, volume and retention will differ.
“Code review
eats my evenings.”
It does, which is why the async form is capped at five a week and the form closes itself when the cap is hit. Scope the intake hard: one repo or notebook, one question, and what the work is for. Most reviews take forty to sixty minutes when the question is specific. The session is where the open-ended conversation belongs, and it has a price that reflects that.
Ask for a sanitised repo or a minimal reproduction, never production credentials or customer data, and say so in the form description. You review what they choose to share; the submission stays theirs, and you take no obligation beyond the written reply. Delete the attachment when the review is sent.
Incidents and patterns are not. Write about what broke and why, keep tool-specific content in the office-hours channel, and sell the yearly plan so a bad month does not become a cancellation.
Most employers permit paid mentoring outside work hours; check your contract and keep the calendar to evenings. Use public problems and your own material, never your employer's internal systems, and say so on the page.
Make “pick your brain”
a €200 review.
Tell the agent your LinkedIn, X or GitHub handle. It reads what you publish, proposes the review, the repo form and the group with prices from the market, and sets them up when you create the account.