I'm Not a Developer. Here's What I Built.

Amy Westlake
May 12
3 min read

The Situation

I used to spend hours reviewing slide decks before a big release.

Hundreds of slides. Checking fonts. Checking colors. Checking whether someone had used the wrong shade or swapped one typeface for another. Easy to miss. Tedious to catch. Necessary every time.

I hated it.

There was also the meeting notes problem. Zoom AI Companion sends a summary to your inbox after every meeting. What I watched people do, what I was doing, was forward the email. No validation. No long-term storage. Gone the moment it left your inbox.

I'm not a developer. I don't know how to write code. I've never taken a programming class.

And yet.

The AI Move

It started with frustration, not ambition.

I didn't sit down one day with a plan to build an automated meeting notes system. I sat down and thought: there has to be a better way to do this.

So I described the problem. Out loud. To an AI.

That's it. That's the whole move.

What I wanted was a system. Notes land in a Google Sheet where I can review them — and I do review them, because AI gets about 90% of meetings wrong in some small way. Wrong names. Small talk in the summary. Action items that don't belong. I fix what needs fixing, mark it validated, and it flows automatically into a Google Doc. Newest meeting at the top. Everything in one place. Formatted well enough to share with stakeholders without embarrassment. At the same time, it pulls out the action items (each one as its own row) and sends them into Smartsheet, where I manage my tasks.

That whole system started with this prompt:

"I want to build an automated way to generate meeting notes... I have no idea how to make this work or what exactly I'm trying to do."

I meant that. I told the AI to ask me questions before we figured out the how. It did. By the end of that first session, we had a direction. Then we started building.

The Shift

Here's what nobody tells you about vibe coding: it breaks.

A lot.

Error messages. Output not appearing where expected. Scripts that run but don't do what you described. I'd go back into the thread, explain what happened, and ask it to help diagnose the problem.

The key word is diagnose.

I learned this the hard way. If you let the AI jump straight to a fix, it patches the symptom. You run the new code. It breaks somewhere else. You patch that. Eventually you're stacking band-aids on band-aids — and the original wound is still there, just buried deeper.

The better move: ask it to look at the problem first. Really look. Explain what should be happening versus what is. Make it think before it rebuilds.

That changed everything.

And then, at some point in every single build, it works.

The first time a script runs clean, or an automated output appears and it's actually right — there's this moment of genuine disbelief. I can't believe that actually worked. Then you run it again just to be sure. Then you start wondering what else it can do.

That feeling hasn't gone away. I still get it every time.

The Pattern

You don't write the code. You describe the problem.

That's the whole thing.

Vibe coding isn't a workaround for people who can't code. It's a different way of building — one that starts with the problem instead of the syntax. I don't know what Apps Script is. I don't need to. I know what I was spending time on that I shouldn't have been, and I know how to describe it.

The builds I've made range from a single-function script that flags branding errors in slides, to the multi-part meeting notes system I just described. Different complexity. Same approach.

Describe the problem. Ask questions before you build. Diagnose before you fix.

The Implication

Start with something you hate doing manually.

Not something ambitious. One task — copying data between platforms, checking something repetitive, formatting something you do every week. Describe it to an AI like you're explaining it to a person.

See what it gives you. Run it. If it breaks, describe what broke. If it works, run it again.

That's how all of mine started.

What I'm Testing Next

The meeting notes system is one piece. I've also been building a broader personal productivity system — meeting context, status reporting, task management — so it actually thinks with me through the week, not just at the start of it.