The beginning of a journey

Not long ago AI stopped being a distant headline and became a desk tool. I’m not “starting from zero.” I have a degree in Information Systems. I never coded as a job. I worked in sales and commercial representation, then in quality at an American multinational, with field procedures, new-product training and audits. Later I studied financial markets in search of asset diversification, a dividend portfolio and cryptocurrencies. That is not investment advice. Today I work as a ride-hailing driver and I build AI agents for my company. I’m coming back to tech, coding with AI’s help, after a career in sales, quality and process.

I decided to write this in the open, for free. I don’t want to forget what I’m doing, and I want someone who isn’t technical to follow without translating jargon. On this site the reader will find simple guides, behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m putting together, and also the mistakes and the costs, without makeup.

Why would someone who came from sales, quality and process have anything to teach people who aren’t technical? Because that career trained exactly what the tool does not do on its own: write the steps down, train new people without leaving them lost, and explain in plain language what still feels complicated.

I want to practice four ways of creating with AI. They are not magic levels. They are four different doors, each with a daily use and a caution.

The first way is asking. In practice, it is talking to the tool the way you ask a question at a counter. I use Grok in the app and inside X. It is for looking something up, drafting an idea, asking for an example, or unsticking a sentence. Day to day, that replaces part of the endless search and the loose notes. The caution is simple: an answer can sound sure and still be wrong. I still decide what counts, what to check, and what to throw away.

The second way is handing work over. Here I don’t only ask for a paragraph; I ask for a task. With Grok Bot I give a goal and an agent tries the steps. One of them is called Darth. Day to day this is for repeated work: organizing, following up, drafting, gathering what I already know I have to do again. Handing over is not walking away. It’s asking for execution and then checking. The caution is not treating the result as finished just because it arrived formatted. If I don’t review it, I only swapped one extra job for another.

The third way is building. In Grok Build I describe what I want and we try to get to an app. It is for turning a small idea into something you can open and use, without starting from code. Day to day that helps when the need is concrete: a flow, a screen, a way to store or show information. The caution is how clear the idea is. If I’m vague, the result is too. I need to say what goes in, what comes out, and who it is for, or the tool fills the gaps its own way, not mine.

The fourth way is programming. That’s Cursor, real code, and what’s already live: this site in Hugo, published through Cloudflare and built with Gemini and Claude, inside Google Antigravity. For the company’s daily work I use Hermes Agent on the laptop and in the cloud, with task agents and a newsroom that helps me write. Programming, in this sense, is when the conversation becomes a file, a page, an agent or a site that still exists after I close the chat. The caution is the same as any craft: understand what was done well enough to fix it when it breaks, and not pretend “AI handled it” if I don’t know what is running.

None of this replaces judgment. It shortens the distance between “I know what I want” and “it’s live.”

If all of this sounds basic to people who already live in software, good. This piece isn’t for them. It’s for people who drive, sell, run a process, or only have an hour at night and still want a decent tool without feeling stupid.

I’m curious. I look things up and I study new tools. I want to help. I teach for free what I’m doing so people who aren’t technical can use what makes daily life easier. No course for sale.

Follow along on X, @RodrigoesPorto, and here at rodrigoesporto.com. I’ll post here as I go, with the wins, the mistakes and the costs.