For most of my career, I've been an early adopter. In 2009, I started an educational blog for emergency physicians when medical blogs barely existed. I recruited rotating volunteers — faculty and residents — to contribute, grew it into an LLC, and launched virtual leadership cohorts years before anyone was running professional development on Slack. I self-published a book, Tricks of the Trade in Emergency Medicine, because I've never been a fan of middlemen when I can do it myselfI've never been a fan of a permission-based system..
The ideas came easily — creative workarounds, new educational formats, ways to solve problems that textbooks hadn't caught up to yet. But turning those ideas into reality required either learning technical skills I didn't have time to master, or finding collaborators available at 2 am when I'm winding down from a night shift. Neither was sustainable.
I've always had more ideas than I could implement. That was the ceiling.
Then came AI.
I'm not a coder. I have no formal technical training. But I've discovered that large language models like Claude understand what I'm trying to build when I explain it in plain language. First it was small things — crafting better recommendation letters by teaching the AI my specific guidelines and having it ask me the right questions. Then I learned n8n, an open-source automation platform, and started building workflows with guardrails strict enough to prevent hallucinations.
AI hasn't just increased my productivity — it's removed the ceiling entirely.
Now I'm building things I never could have built alone. I have a thought partner available at any hour, and a team of senior engineers and designers who happen to live inside my computer.
Hard to sit still when the ceiling's gone.Honestly? It's a little terrifying. In the best way.
This blog is where I'll share that journey. If you're someone with ideas but without coding skills, wondering whether AI can actually help you build things — it can. I'm proof. Come along for the ride.