Notes
How I planned my start in AI automation
I kept jumping between tools, so I stopped and wrote down a path before going any further.
I am a beginner in AI automation. Automation here means getting software to do a task for you, so you stop doing it by hand every time.
Before I had a plan, I kept jumping between tools. Each one looked like a reasonable place to start, and none of them told me what to learn first. So I stopped opening tools and wrote down a path instead. I decided to start with the basics.
What I decided to learn first
My first stage covers five things.
APIs. An API is the way one piece of software talks to another. When your calendar app shows the weather, an API is what carried it.
JSON. A format for organising information so software can read it. It is how most APIs send their answers back.
Triggers. The event that starts an automation. A new email arriving is a trigger.
Actions. What happens once the trigger fires. Writing a row into a spreadsheet is an action.
Choosing who I want to help. The one item on the list that is not technical, and the one I cannot skip by reading documentation.
I put the technical items first because the last one is easier to answer once I know what I am able to build.
The first thing I built
I built one automation that takes an email from Gmail and puts it into a Google Sheet. A new email is the trigger. Adding a row to the sheet is the action.
The first version worked and was still wrong. The whole email landed in the spreadsheet as one block of text. Every part of it sat in a single cell, which made the sheet no more useful than the inbox it came from.
I fixed it with a split tool, which takes one piece of text and breaks it into separate parts. I used it to pull out the sender, the date, and the message, so each one got its own column.
What that showed me
Computers need specific instructions. I had told mine to move the email, and it moved the email. I had not told it which parts of the email mattered, so it kept them all together.
That is the kind of gap I expect to keep finding at this stage. The instruction was not wrong. It was incomplete, and nothing warned me until I looked at the output.
Where I am now
I am still working through stage 01. One automation is running and the rest of the stage is unwalked, including the part about naming who I want to help.
The Roadmap has the full path and marks how far along it I have reached.