Building With AI: The Surprising Skill Beyond Prompting

“I’m not very techy.” That is the line I hear more than almost any other on the Promote Labs help desk. For a stretch of this year it was closer to my own truth than I would like to admit, even after fifty years around computers.

Not with ordinary tech, to be honest. With AI, and specifically with the job of getting it to build something rather than just answer something.

Have you ever asked AI a good question, got a useful answer, and then found yourself asking almost the same question again the following week? Then you already know the limit I am talking about. Building with AI fixes that. It stops you asking the same thing twice.

For months I used AI the way most people do. Ask, get an answer, move on to the next task. Useful, but it never did anything for me beyond that one moment.

Asking Is Not The Same As Building

Even after fifty years in computing, AI moves fast enough that keeping up feels nearly impossible for far more people than just me. Internet marketing itself seems to have turned into AI anything almost overnight.

People are told AI is so easy, that it will do almost anything for you. I think that is overrated. AI has a short memory unless you work around it, and it needs a specific instruction to give you its best work. Asking it one good question is already harder than it sounds.

That short memory is easy to miss until you notice it in your own prompts. Ask AI about your business on Monday, and by Thursday it has forgotten the details unless you remind it. Building gets around that by giving the system somewhere to keep what it has learned, so you stop re-explaining yourself every time.

Building is a step further again. It means that instead of asking AI the same thing each week, you set up something that keeps doing it for you.

A marketer scrolling through customer reviews every month, by hand, hunting for the same three complaints, is asking. A simple system that reads new reviews as they arrive and flags those complaints on its own, that is building with AI.

Neither needs you to become a programmer. It needs you to notice the job you keep doing twice, and ask a different question about it.

Start With The Job That Annoys You Most

Pick the task you already resent doing for the third time this month. Sorting new enquiries. Checking the same handful of pages for a price change. Turning a stack of comments into a short list of themes.

Think about checking a supplier’s page for a price change. You could open the page every Monday morning, compare it with what you remember from last week, and move on until the next Monday. Asking repeats that same five minutes forever. Setting up something that checks the page for you does the same job. It only speaks up when the price actually moves, so your Monday morning becomes free.

I have written about this in a few other posts I have shared recently. Clearing the small obstacles out of a job lets the rest of it move faster. Building with AI works on the same principle. Remove the manual step once, properly, and it stays removed.

A robot vacuum like Rocky shows the same lesson by accident. It maps the house and can work around clutter, but it moves far quicker once the small things are out of its way. Clear the dining room of stray chairs and bags before it starts, and the job that used to take ages finishes in no time. The principle holds here too. You can leave the obstacles in place and ask around them every time. Or you can clear them once and let the system move faster for good.

You do not need the finished version on day one. You need a rough one that does the annoying part for you, even badly, so you can see whether the idea is worth keeping.

Even With AI, Building Still Asks Something Of You

I am learning this the hard way with my own app, FlowMailAI. Something in an old Stripe webhook is pulling test payments into another app I use entirely by mistake, and the card statement still shows an old business name rather than my current one.

Much the same as setting up a system that builds something for you, the pieces have to be wired together properly. Otherwise the whole thing quietly breaks somewhere you cannot see.

A system that is almost wired right still fails quietly, which is exactly the difference between a system and a shortcut. A shortcut you notice straight away when it goes wrong. A system can be broken for weeks before anyone spots it. It is worth checking it now and then rather than assuming it will keep running itself forever.

I have worked out it is probably the webhook, but I do not know where it is stored inside the app to change it. I have asked a friend who is a far better techy than me for help. He is busy, so I am still waiting to hear back.

Even fifty years in, I still need to ask.

We will see how it goes.

Build A System, Not A Shortcut

The difference that matters most is this one. Asking AI for an answer on Friday afternoon is a shortcut. Building something that keeps giving you that answer every Friday, without you remembering to ask, is a system.

That shift changes what one person sitting at a kitchen table can get done in a week. In my case, that is a cortijo with the dogs under the table.

Say you build something that sorts new enquiries into three piles each morning, so you do not have to do it by hand. It will get the sorting wrong sometimes, a new type of enquiry it has not seen before, or a tone it misreads. That is not a reason to scrap it. It is a reason to glance at the piles each morning and nudge it when it drifts. That takes far less time than sorting everything yourself from scratch.

Building with AI turns a task into a system. Once something is built, your own judgement still decides what it should do, what it should ignore, and when it has got something wrong. AI gives you the material and the muscle. You still provide the sense.

Your Own Next Step With This

Pick one annoying, repeating job this week, the smaller the better. Ask AI not how to do it faster, but whether you could build something that keeps doing it for you.

Notice what changes when you do this. The enquiry sorting, the price check, the stack of comments, none of it needs you to remember it exists anymore. That is time back in your week, every week, not just the one time you happened to ask a good question.

You might get a clumsy first version.

That is fine.

A clumsy tool that saves you twenty minutes every week beats a perfect prompt you only remember to use once.

I am still waiting on that Stripe fix, and still building this app a piece at a time, some days patiently, other days less so. But I would rather be a little clumsy building something new than very tidy repeating the same question to AI every week.

Pick your own annoying task this week. Build something small to fix it, badly if you must.

Talk soon, Jennifer Caroline