I had a conversation with Jamie Pichora that helped me understand something I've been seeing but couldn't quite articulate: there's a whole category of founders being unlocked by AI coding tools.
There's this specific type of executives, people who know complex Excel formulas, maybe SQL, who've worked with developers or have an engineering background. They understand how script should work at a high level, but they don't know programming syntax. They can't actually code.
Jamie is the CEO of GelaSkins, a 19-year-old e-commerce company with 220,000 SKUs. He's a mechanical engineer who describes himself as "technical in a sense, but unskilled." He's worked with developers for 20 years and understands architecture, but has "zero syntax ability."
He was paying $500 a year for a Shopify app that basically did one thing: hide custom products from search results (helpful when you have 100k SKUs). It wasn’t working great for his situation and he was annoyed he had to pay that much for only a feature of the app. One day, he spent 3 hours with Cursor building a script that ran overnight, woke up the next morning, and uninstalled the app. Turns out, it worked perfectly.
The thing that would have taken him "weeks, if not months" to figure out on his own took hours with AI tools.
But this isn't hype about "everyone can code now". Our conversation is clear on the nuances. Some things look simple but are actually way more complicated than they appear. And there are definitely limits to what we should build versus simply buy.
What I found valuable is his framework: he focuses on either immediate subscription savings or massive error reduction for tasks he does constantly. Things like the daily metrics script that pulls from Shopify, Google Ads, Meta, and GA4, filters out bot traffic, and sends him a Slack summary every morning.
But most importantly, I like his vision. His aim is to make the business feel "lightweight and smooth and free" instead of bogged down by what he calls "pieces of detritus that build up in the business."
If you've got deep expertise in your domain but can't code, and you've been stuck between hiring a developer for $10k or just living with annoying manual tasks. Watch this conversation. Jamie's examples might change what you think is possible.
And this isn't a one-off success story. I’m talking to executives like him every day.
Check out the full interview with Jamie Pichora here: https://youtu.be/g8dEoYEm8lA