The rules and the tool list are useful once you’re moving. But the question I actually get most is smaller: okay, so what do I do on day one?

Here’s the plan I’d actually give someone standing exactly where I stood. Thirty minutes a day. No studying. Four weeks.

Week 1 — Just get comfortable talking to it

Don’t try to learn anything yet. Open an AI chat and talk to it about whatever’s in front of you — ask it to recommend lunch, ask it an Excel question, ask it something you’re a little embarrassed to ask a person. It doesn’t matter what.

The only goal this week is to feel, in your own hands, how far “just ask” actually reaches. That feeling — oh, it can do that too — is the entire foundation. You’re not building anything yet. You’re finding out what’s possible.

Week 2 — Pick one annoyance

Choose one thing you do over and over that genuinely irritates you. Don’t reach for something ambitious. The smallest, most frequent annoyance is the right one — not the biggest problem you can imagine solving.

Describe it to the AI in plain words and start talking through how it might be reduced. You’re not building yet, just figuring out the shape of the fix together. This is the same question that opens half the stories on this blog: what’s the one repetitive thing that wastes your time every week?

Week 3 — Build the smallest possible version

Take whatever you landed on in week 2 and move it into a spreadsheet. Ask the AI to write the formula. Let it automate one calculation you used to do by hand.

It doesn’t need to be impressive. One click producing something that used to take you ten minutes is a complete win for this week. This is exactly how a single stuck formula eventually became a real tool — it just never stopped at “one formula.”

Week 4 — Show it to one person

Show what you made to a single coworker. “Want to try this?”

If it makes their day even slightly easier, you’ve already started for real. That one small reaction — someone else’s relief — turns out to be the biggest fuel there is for building the next thing. Noticing other people’s annoyances, not just your own, is where this whole habit actually turns into something bigger than a personal trick.

What to expect a month from now

Nothing dramatic. You will not feel like a developer. You’ll just have one small, working thing that didn’t exist thirty days ago.

That’s exactly where I started too. One small thing, kept going, quietly became twenty-two.

The plan only works if you actually pick something this week — not the ideal project, just the nearest annoyance. Everything else follows from that one small, unglamorous choice.

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