Most of us were taught to trade time for money. In the AI era, that deal is changing. You can keep your judgment and your standards, and let a small system do the busy work. Think of it as a careful, well-trained helper you supervise. It gathers the information, makes a draft, shows you the plan, and waits for your approval. You stay the boss; the system does the routine steps. That’s the identity shift: not “I know AI,” but “my systems help me finish real work.” It’s practical, it’s safe, and it’s learnable—even if you don’t code. What this looks like in real life: Picture a normal week. You open your laptop and there’s a short note from your “digital co-worker”: For marketing: links to posts worth repurposing, a clean draft for tomorrow’s email, and a short summary of how last week’s post performed. For operations: yesterday’s tasks rolled forward, a few follow-ups drafted, and a friendly reminder about one stuck handoff. For education: a lesson outline from your curriculum doc, a first pass at slides, and a five-question check-for-understanding. For hiring: a shortlist from yesterday’s applicants, a brief summary for each, and two interview questions suggested for the role. None of it gets sent without you. Every change is logged. If something feels off, you adjust the rule and it learns. That’s a safe, useful system. Start where you already have skill: Pick one area you understand. If you’ve written social posts, start in marketing. If you’ve managed to-dos and handoffs, start in ops. If you’ve planned lessons, start in education. If you’ve screened resumes, start in hiring. You’ll move faster when you already know what “good” looks like. Now write a simple offer you can say out loud. One sentence is enough: “I help [who] who struggle with [pain] by setting up a small system that does [task] so they get [result].” Examples: “I help solo founders drowning in follow-ups by setting up a small system that drafts and schedules replies, so they get back to leads the same day.”

Expressing original thought is an exercise of freedom. To do so in whatever medium makes sense to you requires you to let go of whatever egoic pretense you might have. Whatever you think of yourself, has to stay at the door. You think another checklist or downloadable template will sculpt a personal OS that works for (and with) you? That vision of JARVIS, or like the movie Her, is not a far thought. It's not a technical limitation that's holding citizens from accessing AI in the capacity it was created for, it's faulty design. Fault of a movement, backed by consistent vision and effort. This doesn't happen with walls of texts. It happens in moments. Fear, pain, need for a solution. Capturing that is the art of sales, it's storytelling, not another CRM or SaaS. The average citizen only (financially and mentally) has access to a certain bandwidth of learning and expansion. The experience of hitting that bandwidth is one of pain, met with fear and frustrations. To become more capable of compressing time and doing more with what you have. Principles drive the behavior because if you contemplate that for more than a moment, you can see it's worth figuring out how, and by any means. This is what I think about as a solo founder, I started this mission with the readiness to dedicate my working hours to creating better AI-use in the world. This isn't novel, I'm not alone in that mission, you're here for a reason too. To want to learn. To want to make things easier.

Stop trying to become a developer. That sentence alone has probably saved me more time, energy, and sanity than any AI hack or automation trick I’ve ever used. Because here’s the quiet pressure a lot of us feel right now: > “If I want to stay relevant, I guess I need to learn to code…” > “If I want to use AI ‘properly,’ I probably need to become some kind of prompt engineer…” > “If I want leverage, I should be building apps.” I don’t buy that. My whole mission with Citizen Developer is simpler and way more practical: > You don’t need to become a programmer. > You need to learn how to design your own digital co-workers. Not “AI toys.” Not another dashboard no one opens. Actual digital workers that sit alongside you, take a slice of your workload, and report back to you with receipts. In this post, I want to show you how that starts. And it doesn’t start with “learn Python.” It starts with a Personal OS and one question: > “If I had a tiny team of AI co-workers, what would I actually have them do for me this week?” --- Stage 1: Personal OS – AI-First, Not Codemonkey Before we talk about browser agents, automations, or NotebookLM, I want to strip this all the way down. If you’re going to build a digital workforce, you need a lightweight operating system for how you use AI day to day. Not a complicated stack. Not a Notion template with 97 properties. Just four pieces: 1. One conversational model ChatGPT, Claude, whatever you like. This is your thinking partner: your writer, explainer, rubber duck, and first draft machine. You talk to it the way you wish you could talk to a patient colleague who never gets tired of your “one more question.” 2. One browser agent Fellou, Delegat8, or any computer-use / browser agent you’re comfortable with. This is your hands: * It clicks around websites. * It scrolls, copies, pastes, downloads. * It pulls out the boring data you don’t want to babysit. When I say “digital co-worker,” a browser agent is a big part of that picture. It’s someone at the computer, doing the tedious clicks, following your instructions.

Citizen developer is the movement of everyday professionals becoming builders of their own tools. I’m taking that a step further by helping them build and manage their own digital workforce—AI workers that give them back time, autonomy, and leverage. At its core, it’s about non-technical professionals building their own software and automations using low-code / no-code platforms, instead of waiting on IT or engineers. Gartner’s classic definition is: an employee who creates applications for themselves or others using tools allowed by the organization, even though they’re not in IT. So as a movement, citizen development has grown from 2022 to 2025, it's a stronger version of: - Democratization of building – moving the power to create tools from only engineers to everyday professionals. (Mendix) - Empowerment + speed – organizations get faster apps, less IT backlog, and more innovation from people closest to the problems. (PwC) - Still needs guardrails – governance, security, and consistency are important so it doesn’t turn into messy “shadow IT.” (Kissflow) So how do we do it? A workforce is a strong umbrella term. Another way to think of it is an organization chart of AI agents. Most marketing around this material is sensationalist around this right now. It's facetious, surface level and sometimes disappointing. This can't be conveyed in a single page entry. Citizen Developer as a concept is meant to empower you to be able to: 1. Design your own digital co-workers 2. Own their infrastructure, not just rent it 3. Turn professionals into problem-solvers, not ticket-writers - Workforce readiness asset (McKinsey) 4. Wrap it in governance and documentation (Industry-standards, 100 hours worth of certs in 10 minutes) 5. Create a new kind of professional identity - Have the industrial output of systems doing fully functioning work tasks on your behalf with every guardrail necessary in place.

See how specialists around the world are using this innovative tech for good (or worse!). We welcome critiques as there truly is an array of use cases that live beyond using AI to search. You can ideate, create, and contribute meaningfully if you set these up using frameworks that empower intelligence. The black box effect is a real problem in the AI space, tune in here weekly for real world examples and demystify what's happening. ---------- September 2025 ---------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7P1-YIkPpo Free 1.5 hour preview that's also available in the classroom (chunked and cleaned up)