George's Blog

Since the early years of my career I have always built custom tools to solve problems. In 2004, I created a script that automated the malware cleanup of a Windows XP computer and it also sent an email report to the technician that contained the results of the scan and cleanup. Funny thing about tech evolution, but not only did the subsequent Window Vista release break it from then on, malware removal services have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Since then, I focused on learning low-to-no code solutions for creating tools and websites because it just made sense. It’s not that I don’t know about the code part, it’s just that it’s never been a priority to learn it well enough to do it without assistance. You’d think that’s counterintuitive, but the truth is there has always been a push to create solutions for app and website development without knowing how to code. I always created things to solve a problem, make something easier, or free someone from a task so they can do other things.

AI’s changed everything though, and for the better. I know AI gets a lot of flack from people who seem to think it’s a magic black box that you type in natural language and it does something(they often believe that AI work is somehow “cheating” and “easy”). Realistically, it takes a lot more than that to build software with AI. Unless you are aware of security and design best practices and know the basics of the programming language you are vibecoding, then you will end up with a product that ultimately fails because you can’t properly support it. This is one of the concerns of all sorts of new sites and services popping up claiming to be tools to solve all sorts of problems. As I have been searching for a new job recently, I’ve noticed a lot of really similar AI job-hunting tools that seem like copies of each other (RemoteHunter vs Swooped, for example). I don’t know which of those 2 came first but they are very very similar, and both cost money to use. I’ll have to gripe about WeWorkRemotely another time.

While many of my first vibecoded tools were Python-based, and served as tools to solve very specific problems- one scanned an IP to see if a VPN server is present, another scans an entire codebase and uses AI to check it for any vulnerabilities after it runs a definitions-based scan from an open-sourced tool. It was a nice little win whenever a new tool was created that solved problems. I created web-based tools like that too- one was a SendGrid log checker that was made available to customer service staff who didn’t need to have direct access to the company SendGrid account. These tools also freed me from having to do those tasks for others.

What should I automate and why?

A common thing you’ll hear from IT folks is that if there’s anything you know you’re going to do more than twice, you should automate it. But there are many other reasons to automate tasks. Within a business, interdepartmental collaboration is crucial and many tools aren’t designed to work with others out of the box. This means that methods to automate can get extremely complicated once you start adding more moving parts. The list of things you can integrate and automate with AI is endless, but I’ll list some of the ones that come to mind the most often:

• Chatbots
• Spreadsheets can be turned into entire interlinked app(s)
• Phone calls (customer service and sales that are inbound or even outbound)
• Social Media campaigns and management
• Anything that is repetitive and predictable to complete but is something that takes time (Pareto Principle*)
• …and so much more! If you can think of a need for something, you can probably do it with AI

*The Pareto Principle states that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. To increase productivity, you should identify the 20% of tasks that yield 80% of the results- then prioritize them.

Basically, as a consultant, one would need to analyze the existing situation and learn all of the pain and friction points and plan a way to streamline it all. It takes a lot of feedback, a lot of time, and a lot of patience. AI can be used as a force multiplier that enables an individual or small team to do orders of magnitude more in production when the right strategies are employed. When I rebuilt my website, I used Relume, WebFlow, and Antigravity to produce in 2 days that would have taken me all month to do by hand. These time savings are very real and the important thing to remember is that AI is not a magic box that makes life easier. It’s a system you have to learn, and everyone will build a different solution tailored to their own specific needs.

If you need AI solutions, feel free to reach out to me via my contact form.