I wanted to work from home for twenty years. It took AI to get me there.

My name is Roméo, I'm 43, and I've been writing code for twenty years. I work from home, in the French countryside, for clients in France and in the United States. Said like that it sounds simple. It took me twenty years.

It started with bank cards and the French national health card at Gemalto: well paid, not much real code. Then an insurance company, where I finally got to build. Then Switzerland, by accident of life: my partner was posted there, so I lived next door. I had never written C#, so I locked myself away for a month, passed the Microsoft certification, and found a job. I stayed seven years. I learned an enormous amount, I earned very well, and I managed a team of six developers spread across Switzerland, India and New York. The textbook success. Just not mine.

The real trigger was the kids. We decided to move back to France, and I went independent. Or so I thought. A friend found me a client in three days, “come try a week”, and I stayed seven years, on their site, an employee in all but name. I negotiated my Fridays off and six weeks of holiday, inch by inch. But I wasn't home. I thought I was independent. I wasn't.

Three years ago, AI opened my eyes. What a single developer can do changed scale. I quit everything, came home, and had to find my own clients. That's where the real story starts, the one I tell on my YouTube channel: a free app that aired on prime-time national TV with 30,000 users and almost zero revenue. An e-commerce business selling smoke generators that runs, with the very real customer support that comes with it. An American client I met on Reddit, whose monthly AI show I host. Apps for a road carrier, a building contractor, a work-integration workshop. And years of unpaid after-sales support, because I don't know how to say no.

Today, what pays best, and what I like most, is training. Teaching an independent to build their own site, to be found on Google, to use AI on their actual work. They leave able to run it alone, there's no after-sales, and they keep a half-day with me for the next update. My first trainee had never opened a code editor. Her site is live.

I'm not a guru. I have no $10,000-a-month formula. I have a portfolio of projects that feeds my family, numbers I publish, mistakes I tell you about, and twenty years in the trade to spare you mine. My partner is a teacher, my two kids play football and do majorette, and I built my village's website back when I was a municipal councillor. That's the scenery.