Every app charges you clicks to find what you came for. A designer who never met you decided where each button goes. The command line skips that guess.
The old barrier was memorizing commands. That barrier is gone. Your coding agent already knows them. I never typed one while setting up the routine below. The agent wrote each command, told me in plain English what it would do, and waited for a yes.
Three tools I use:
- clasp pushes Apps Script to Google. My agent wrote a script that reads my inbox a few times a week and flags what I owe people. Filters move mail. They can't decide whether I owe someone a reply.
- DuckDB queries a spreadsheet where it sits. Ask which vendors got paid twice last quarter. The agent writes the query and hands back the rows. Nobody types SQL.
- pandoc converts documents in bulk. Forty Word files to PDF is one command, not forty rounds of Save As.
The rule I use: when the same clicks repeat every month, look for the back door.
One warning. Google shows a screen listing everything the script can read, edit and delete. Read it before you approve.
The longer version, with the exact prompts for each tool: https://medium.com/@brnthood/cli-for-when-you-want-to-take-the-back-door-a2433d9c6363?sk=b06a664c5aa32908e7614687d2723e77
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