A colleague reached out to me for a pairing session on his project. I explained upfront that my hourly rate far exceeds most LLM subscription costs. He understood — while LLMs have their place, he needed help clarifying requirements and making real progress.

His existing setup: several machines pushing data to cloud, a looker studio dashboard connected to a placeholder google spreadsheet. To start, he wanted to make this dashboard live.

His requirements:

1. A live dashboard
2. Python based: his comfort zone
3. Daily data pulls: sufficient for non-temporal data

The solution was obvious, I have used it before: A GitHub action that runs daily, pulls cloud data and updates his spreadsheet — instantly making his dashboard live. I understand that I am contributing to the Github actions phenomena:

The trickiest parts? Wrestling with Google's Sheets API authentication and configuring GitHub secrets properly. But once those pieces clicked, everything flowed. Four one hour focused pairing sessions, that's it. He got a working solution plus he understood all the moving parts to continue experimenting on his own.

Four hours, serverless, an elegant solution. This is what going back to first principles looks like.