I have spent three decades fixing computers on Kauaʻi and the last several years automating the systems behind them. The most useful thing I have learned is not how to automate — it is when not to.
This is a free, self-paced course, about 90 minutes end to end. It contains no product pitch and no tool tutorial. It teaches the judgement that has to come first: how to see the work you actually do, how to test whether automation would help it, and how to design for the day the automation breaks — because it will.
You will finish with a written readiness plan for one real task of your own, and a Robot Ready badge you can keep.
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You have decided a task is worth automating. This course takes it the rest of the way — from a repetitive job you do by hand to something that runs on its own, tells you when it has stopped, and can be handed to somebody else.
Roughly 75 minutes, self-paced, free. It is tool-agnostic on purpose: the pattern here works whether you build it in a shell script, a no-code automation platform, a spreadsheet macro, or a scheduler on a server. I care about the shape, not the syntax.
You finish by building one real automation of your own and writing up how it fails. Completing the course earns the First Automation badge.
Recommended first: Robot Readiness — it teaches how to choose the task. This course assumes you have chosen one.
An AI agent is a language model that has been given tools and permission to use them. That combination is genuinely useful and genuinely dangerous, and almost everything written about it is either sales copy or panic.
This course is neither. It is about ninety minutes, free, self-paced, and it covers the three things that decide whether an agent helps you or quietly costs you: how you brief it, what you let it touch, and how you check work that always sounds correct.
I run agents in production — voice agents that answer a phone, agents that classify and file media, agents that draft and publish. Everything here comes from that, including the parts where it went wrong.
Completing the course earns the Agent Handler badge.