It started with one formula I couldn’t get to work.

I’m a physical therapist, not a programmer. I was wrestling with a Google Sheets formula and getting nowhere. So I opened an AI chat and typed out what I wanted, in plain words, half expecting nothing. The AI’s name was Gemini. It answered. I copied what it said, pasted it in, and the thing I’d been stuck on for ages just worked.

That sounds small. To me it wasn’t.

For my whole life, a problem like that meant either bugging a person who knew more than me or digging through search results until my eyes hurt. Now it felt like someone was sitting beside me, ready to help. The only catch was that the someone wasn’t a person.

It almost never worked the first time

Let me be honest about the part nobody puts in the highlight reel.

The first answer was often wrong. So I’d go back and say what broke, paste in the new version, run it, and when that failed too, I’d ask again. Back then there was no AI that quietly wrote and fixed the code for you. I was the one copying every snippet by hand, pasting it, testing it, finding the broken spot, and asking one more time.

Finishing one tiny feature took ten tries, twenty tries, easily. One thing I rebuilt close to two hundred times.

It probably looked like stubbornness. But I didn’t mind it. What didn’t work yesterday worked today. That feeling of inching forward was enough to keep me going.

From a formula to a button

Once the numbers started adding themselves up, I got greedy.

Even typing the formulas felt like too much work. I wanted one button. Press it, and everything sorts itself and calculates itself in a single click. I asked Gemini if that was possible. It told me about Apps Script — a little program that runs inside the spreadsheet itself.

So I made a button. One click, and scattered rows lined up in order and the numbers worked themselves out. Work my hands used to do, a button started doing instead. That was the moment the spreadsheet stopped feeling like a document and started feeling like a tool.

When the spreadsheet got too heavy

After that, I wanted to put our whole patient overview inside it.

Here’s the thing: this was really the job of our hospital’s medical records system — the EMR. But I work at a recovery-phase rehabilitation hospital. That kind of hospital was a fairly new idea at the time, created by a new regulation, and the off-the-shelf EMR simply didn’t have the features the work actually needed. The vendor probably didn’t even know what a recovery-phase rehab hospital was. I couldn’t wait around for software that didn’t exist. So I decided to build it myself.

I added the current inpatient list. I added the metrics we tracked. I kept adding one more thing, then one more.

And the more I piled on, the heavier the spreadsheet got. Add this, add that, and at some point the light little table I’d started with was gone, replaced by a clumsy lump that was a pain to even open.

This isn’t going to work, I thought.

Turning it into a real screen

So I asked again. Could this be made to look like an actual program, not a spreadsheet?

Gemini said yes — Apps Script could build something with HTML. I had no real idea what that meant. I just followed the instructions, step by step. A few days later, something that looked like an actual program appeared on my screen. It had buttons. It had a menu. You clicked, and the thing you wanted showed up.

It was the first thing I’d ever made that I could honestly call a “program.”

That was the very first version of what would eventually take over patient management across the whole hospital — a tool I came to call EasyConnect, an inpatient-status dashboard. Back then I had no idea it would go that far. I’d only removed one annoyance in front of me.

The takeaway

Look at what actually happened here. I never sat down to “learn to code.” I asked a question, used the answer, hit a wall, and asked the next question. The spreadsheet became a button. The button became an app. None of it was planned.

If you take one thing from this, take this: you don’t need to know where it ends to take the first step — you only need the next question.

The wall I kept hitting — a heavy spreadsheet, a tool only I knew how to use — was teaching me something I didn’t have words for yet. And right around then, I started noticing other people’s annoyances too, not just my own. That’s where this goes next.