My first automated AI script was about 40 lines of Python.
I did not write it. I described what I wanted in plain English to an AI, it wrote the code, I read it back without understanding most of it, and ran it anyway.
It worked.
It ran on my Mac every morning at 6am. It pulled from my calendar and my Gmail, formatted a morning briefing, and dropped it into a document I could read over coffee. Simple. But mine.
Within a few weeks I had five of these running. Each one doing a small thing I used to do manually. None of them written by me. All of them built by me, in the sense that I designed what they should do, tested whether they did it, and iterated when they did not.
This is a different skill from coding. But it is a real skill.
There was a problem, though.
The scripts ran on my Mac. When my Mac was asleep, which is most of the time when I am travelling, which is often, they did not run. I had built automation that required me to be present for it to work.
Which, if you think about it, is not automation at all. It is just a delayed version of doing it yourself.
That realisation is what led me to the cloud. Three months, several late nights, and one genuinely embarrassing IT conversation.
More on all of that in the next few posts.
The question I get asked most: can you actually build things if you cannot code? This was my answer. More follows.