A marketer at GitHub, who used to work as an engineer, wrote up the step-by-step checklists he followed every time he ran an event, then used an AI coding assistant to turn them into an automated system. What used to take a couple of days of manual setup now starts from a single form.
What this actually means for you
The specific tooling he used is developer software, and it is not something you need to care about. What is worth borrowing is the shape of the problem he described, because most small businesses have the same one.
His list was: duplicate a page, build tracking links, draft an email, update two boards, download a list every morning, tidy it up, post an update, then export everything afterwards and load it into the customer database. None of those steps are hard. The risk is in the repetition. Paste the wrong link once, misspell a campaign name, skip a morning, and every report downstream is quietly wrong.
You likely have a version of this. A new enquiry comes in through your contact form, and then someone copies the details into a spreadsheet, adds them to the mailing list, creates an invoice draft, and sets a reminder to follow up. Or a quarterly promotion means editing three pages, updating the booking system, and sending an email.
The first move is not automation. It is writing the checklist down. He explicitly started by documenting his runbooks (the written steps he followed every time) before anything got automated. That document is valuable on its own. It means the job can be handed to someone else, and it makes the gaps obvious.
The second thing worth noting is his test for whether something can be automated: does the tool offer a way in for other software to talk to it? Most modern booking systems, email platforms and payment tools do. Older or cheaper ones sometimes do not, and that is a real constraint worth knowing before you commit to a tool.
What to do
Pick the task you do most often and write down every step, in order, as if training a new hire. Keep it somewhere findable. Next time you speak to whoever looks after your website, ask whether the tools you already pay for can talk to each other, and which steps on that list could disappear.
Reported by:
