By skyforbes 
What I learned transitioning from casual prompting to building full production-grade AI tools.
1. The Day I Realized Prompts Weren’t Enough
I used to think writing clever prompts in ChatGPT was automation. It felt powerful — getting code, documentation, and summaries on demand. But over time, I noticed something: I was still the one gluing everything together.
AI gave me output, but it didn’t act.
That realization hit hard the day I spent an entire afternoon manually copying responses from GPT into scripts, formatting JSON, and re-uploading files. I was automating nothing. I was just moving faster — not smarter.
That’s when I decided to stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a system.
2. Building My First “AI Workflow”
My first real automation started simple: a local Python script that talked to OpenAI’s API.
I wanted something that could take a folder full of messy documentation, summarize it intelligently, and organize the results into a clean, searchable format.