The Cat And The Microwave
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
I like to think the people on my team are smart. After all, what manager doesn’t like to feel validated for their amazing hiring decisions?
I just haven’t realized how smart they really are.
We’ve been talking for months in this newsletter about how marketers should venture into building products. Not becoming developers. That is unrealistic. But using the incredible tools available to build small internal applications that cut time, save resources, or make the end product better.
I knew one of my team members was building automations to speed up landing page creation. What I didn’t know is that in the evenings, he’s been building an app just for himself and his wife to track their baby's milk intake, bowel movements, and naps. As it turned out, he was not the only one doing this. Another team member built a mobile app for herself to track fasting during Ramadan.
Neither of these people are developers. They are marketers (and they are good at that). They never wrote or even read a single line of code in their lives. Yet they are building tools in and out of work.
What does this have to do with the cat and the microwave? Let me tell you another story.
Our very own Peter at the AI-Ready CMO is definitely no developer either. When he first told me a few months back that he “deployed” something to “Vercel” from “his GitHub”, I thought he was joking. I didn’t know he was aware of GitHub's existence.
But he was not joking. He was coding — without knowing how to code.
Turned out, you don’t need to know how to write software to… write software. What you need is a good understanding of the topic, some logical thinking, and the patience to iterate. The models can do everything else for you.
Or as Peter has put it:
I don’t know how a microwave works. I don’t particularly care how a microwave works. All I know is that it makes my food warm and that I shouldn’t put the cat in it. And that’s exactly how I approach coding.
Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself.
Buy a Claude Code subscription for $20 and simply start talking to it. Tell Claude you’re not a developer, and you don’t know anything about how to write code. It will patiently ask questions about what you want to achieve and give you something immediately usable in half an hour. This is how the baby tracker was “developed”. Or even better, just open Kimi and do the same thing on the website for free.
Marketing as a profession is changing. Skills that were necessary just a few years ago are much less important today. On the other hand, some new ones are becoming indispensable.
I believe using the microwave is one of them.
— Torsten and Peter
PS: We have a free and short tech literacy course for CMOs. Worth getting it here. Once done, we also recommend taking the Claude Code Essentials course. Also free.
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