Blue Collar Builders Episode 1: How an Industrial Piping Engineer Built His Own Software Without Writing a Single Line of Code

Building Software Without a Coding Background

AI tools have made it possible for people with no coding experience to build their own custom software. 

They've effectively removed the middleman, whether that's a developer, or software you've been using that wasn't really made for your field to begin with. The only thing you need going in is a clear understanding of your own work and where it slows down.

Corey is a great example of what happens when someone who knows their trade deeply gets access to the right tools. 

Within roughly eight weeks, he had built a working piece of software his company now uses daily. And he did it without a software background, and without a single person in his network who had done anything like it. 

"I don't really have anybody to bounce ideas off of", he said. "...Other than the AI."

He taught himself by pasting screenshots of his screen into the chat and asking the AI to tell him exactly where to click next. When he got stuck, he told the AI he didn't know anything and asked it to explain from the beginning, and that was his entire support system.

What AI Can Do for Your Trade 

When most people think of AI in the trades, they most likely picture chatbots answering customer calls or automated dispatching. That's a real use case, and a useful one, but AI goes well beyond that, and what you can do with it is really only limited by how clearly you understand the problem you're trying to solve.

In Corey's case, he used it to make something that simply did not exist for his trade, and the software he built now handles in minutes what used to take ten times as long. 

Historically speaking, software for the trades has been built by people who have never set foot on a job site. The people who understand the work, the edge cases, the shortcuts, how information moves from one part of the operation to another, have always had to either make do with tools that don't quite fit, or spend time manually bridging the gaps. 

AI has completely flipped that concept on its head. What previously required a team of software engineers to create, a tradesperson can now build themselves. 

Using AI vs. Building With It 

Corey's anecdote about his coworkers using AI to find recipes is genuinely funny, but it also shows how most people know AI exists without really knowing what it can do. 

So if blue collar workers are already familiar with AI, and are capable of working in technically demanding environments, what’s stopping them from creating tools for themselves? 

We believe it comes down to one thing: they simply have not seen what is possible when you actually use it to build something for yourself and your team.

Dalton Mills Gives Tradespeople a Foundation to Build On 

Corey didn't have a coding background. He had years of experience doing this work manually, which meant he knew exactly where the time was being wasted and what a correct output looked like, and that's what his software reflects.

The people with that kind of knowledge are in every trade, and Dalton Mills was made specifically for that gap; For the tradesperson who has the idea but needs a solid foundation to build it on. 

Dalton Mills gives people in the trades the core infrastructure that every field service business needs. When a trade professional comes in with an idea for a tool, a workflow, a calculator, an estimator, a form, whatever it is they have been doing manually and know could be automated, they can build it on top of something that already works. They focus on the part that comes from years of doing the work, while everything else is already there. 

If you work in the trades and you have an idea for something that would make your operation run better, Dalton Mills is the platform for you. Apply for early access here.