My code is plain English.

Jacob Malherbe · Nov 10, 2026 · First posted on X ↗

I run an ad agency. Five people. More than $250M in Meta ad spend managed for law firms since 2015.

In February 2026 I couldn’t write a line of code. I still can’t.

Today my business runs on about 270 tools I built myself with AI. My inbox, my phones, my campaigns, my client reports. I didn’t buy them, and I didn’t hire a developer to build them.

This isn’t a developer story. It’s a business owner story.

Here’s what changed, how I do it, what still breaks, and where I’d start if I were you.

I’m a business owner, not a developer

I’m a sales guy who learned marketing. I got into legal marketing during the 2010 BP oil spill and never left.

For 15 years, every tool I wanted went the same way. Find a developer. Write a spec. Wait. Pay. Get something close to what I asked for. Pay again to fix it. Or buy software built for a thousand other businesses and bend my business to fit it.

So most of my ideas died in a notes app. Not because they were bad. Because building them cost more than they’d save.

Around February 2026 that math flipped. I started building with Claude. One tool worked, so I built the next one. Then the next.

What runs my business now

Forget the tech for a second. Here’s what the tools actually do, by the jobs every business owner knows.

Inbox

An agent sorts every email before I open it. Real mail goes to my inbox. Junk gets cleaned out and unsubscribed.

Phones

An AI receptionist answers the agency line. It also blocks the spam callers I told it to block.

Campaigns

A dashboard watches our Meta campaigns. When I launch a campaign or swap a landing page, an agent rewrites the copy and headlines to fit each image and builds the ads. Another tool helps me make budget calls when we scale.

Client reports

Clients see their numbers on their own dashboard. Next step: they’ll be able to ask for custom changes right on the report, and an agent will build them.

Sales

An agent finds attorney posts on LinkedIn and drafts comments. Another finds forum threads where we should be mentioned and drafts a reply. Neither posts on its own. I do.

Intel

An alert tool watches for new lawsuits so I hear about new litigation early.

To be straight about the “270”: it’s about 270 small programs on Cloudflare. Some are agents, some are tools, some are websites, and some are old test builds I’m now deleting. It’s not 270 AI employees. But every one I keep does a job someone used to do by hand, or nobody did at all.

How I build a tool: the sticky-note method

Every tool starts the same way. I write what I want like I’d say it to an employee on a sticky note:

“When a lead comes in, send it to the right team. Tell me if it fails.”

That’s it. That’s the spec. Then:

1. I hand the note to Claude, I love the word “Expand”. It writes the software and puts it live on Cloudflare by itself. I gave it that access once, and now it ships without me touching a terminal.
2. I use it like a customer. I open it, click around, and try to break it.
3. I say what’s wrong in plain English. “The button is in the wrong place.” “It sent that lead to the wrong team.” Claude fixes it.
4. Repeat until I’d pay for it. Then my team uses it.

Two things made this work at business scale, not just for one tool:

• Claude remembers my business. It reads my rules, my clients’ setups and my past decisions before it works. I don’t re-explain my business every morning.
• There’s a map of everything I’ve built. Once you have dozens of tools, you forget what exists. So does the AI. One registry lists every tool, what it does and what it connects to, and it gets checked before anything is changed.

The full technical setup is in my pinned post. You don’t need it to understand this one.

What it costs and what still breaks

Nobody posts this part. Here’s mine.

One empty account can stop several “employees” at once. On Sept 22, and again on Oct 1, my inbox agent just stopped sorting. Both times the shared AI account had run out of credits. Every tool on that account went quiet together. Lesson: don’t put all your tools on one account with one payment.

Silent failures are the dangerous ones. On Nov 5 my daily morning post didn’t go out. No error. No alert. I only caught it because I looked. A human employee tells you when they’re stuck. Software usually doesn’t. Build the alert before you need it.

The AI bill is real. Every tool that “thinks” costs money each time it runs. I use the cheapest model that does the job, and I’m close to running a model on a computer in my office for the boring work.

It’s too easy to build too much. When a new tool costs an afternoon, you make tools you don’t need. I’m auditing all of it now and deleting what never earned its keep.

It does what you say, not what you mean. Clear instructions are your job, not the AI’s.

Compare that to the old way: a developer, a contract, weeks of waiting, and a tool I couldn’t change without paying again. I’ll take these problems.

What my day looks like now

I spend less time doing the work and more time deciding what the work should be.

Most of my building time is writing sticky notes, testing what comes back, and saying “no, not like that.” That’s not engineering. That’s managing. I’ve done it my whole career.

Two rules I hold myself to:

• I’m always the first client. Every tool runs in my own business before anyone else sees it. If it doesn’t work for my team, it doesn’t ship.
• There’s always a free version. Every tool I put out publicly has one.

The side effect nobody warned me about: once you can build, you stop shopping for software. A lot of what I now offer other people started as something I needed myself on a Tuesday.

If you own a business, start here

1. Pick your most annoying weekly chore. Not a startup idea. The thing you or your team does by hand every week and hates.
2. Write the sticky note. One or two sentences. What should happen, and what should happen when it fails. Give it to Claude and SAY Expand.
3. Let the AI put it live, not just write code. Copy-pasting code you don’t understand is where most owners quit.
4. Use it for a week before you build the next one. Fix what annoys you.
5. Write down how your business works. Your rules, your clients, your decisions, in one place the AI reads every time.
6. Assume it will fail quietly. Add an alert for anything that touches money or customers.
7. Delete more than feels comfortable. A tool nobody uses is still a tool you have to watch.

My code is plain English

I didn’t learn to code. I learned to describe what my business needs so clearly that a machine can build it.

That’s not a tech skill. It’s the skill every good business owner already has: knowing exactly what you want and saying it plainly.

If you’ve been waiting for a developer, a budget, or the right software, stop waiting. Write the sticky note.