My Experience Automating Company Work with AI (Excel Grunt Work Edition)
Every Monday, I had to receive raw data and manually organize it. I gradually asked GPT to write code to automate just this one task. I didn't know any Python, but it took 3 weeks and I got it working.
To cut to the chase, I saved 6 hours a week. At first, the code kept throwing errors and I almost gave up, but when I copied and pasted the entire error message and asked, it got fixed.
Things to watch out for:
- Don't paste company data as-is (security)
- Even AI-written code must be run yourself and the results verified
- Don't use code you can't explain
Next, I'm thinking of attaching a scheduler to it and making it run fully automatically.
8 answers
Agreed—6 hours a week is a big deal. Just thinking about you having to deal with that every Monday morning... you did great.
Copy-pasting the whole error message is the real key lol. Once I realized that, my coding speed tripled.
Well, I don’t know about that. Considering the three weeks you spent wrestling with GPT, does it really come out ahead on an hourly basis? After a month, it’s definitely a win, but the early stretch was probably pretty rough, lol
Don't write code you can't explain <- this is really important. I did the same last year: I rushed to tack something on, and when the original filename changed, it fell apart, so I ended up rewriting it from scratch. In the end, what sticks with you is only as much as you understand.
Since security came up—do people ever just paste in internal data column names or sample values as they are? I rename just the column names to a, b, c and replace the numbers with random values before asking. If you turn this into a habit, it's pretty safe.
For setting up a scheduler, use Task Scheduler on Windows, or cron on Mac/Linux. But be careful: once it starts running automatically, no one will know if it errors out. I recommend setting it up so you get email or Slack notifications when it fails.
Source? Where did the "6 hours per week" figure come from?
The thing I envy most is that you pulled it off in three weeks without knowing any Python. Honestly, learning how to verify things is harder than writing the code itself, and you managed to do that. If you dabble a bit in pytest or something next, you'll be even more solid.