How to Apply Coding Agents to Non-Programming Tasks

good at completing coding tasks, such as fixing a bug in your application, implementing new features, and so on.

However, I would argue coding agents are equally good at many other non-programming computer tasks. This can, for example, be:

• Navigating websites to input information
• Keeping track of your budget
• Finding the lowest price on goods that you want to purchase

In this article, I’ll take you through the application areas outside programming that I use coding agents for, discussing how I do it, the tasks I apply it to specifically, and the mindset that you should have when it comes to getting the most out of coding agents. In short: this mindset is that basically everything can be done with coding agents, and you should attempt to complete all tasks with them.

This infographic highlights the main contents of this article. I’ll discuss how to perform office work using your coding agents. Image by ChatGPT.

Why apply coding agents to all tasks

First of all, let’s cover why you should apply coding agents to all tasks and not just programming tasks. The simple reason is that coding agents aren’t just good at programming. They’re basically good at most computer tasks, so most tasks that you have to complete through your computer, which is obviously a wide variety of tasks.

It’s also worth mentioning that when I refer to coding agents, I mean systems such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and so on. Obviously, there are varying levels between these applications, and I have my favorites, but overall they’re all starting to get very capable and can perform a lot of work that you require them to do.

Now, of course, you can apply coding agents to a lot of tasks, and it turns out that they are really effective at performing a lot of those tasks. So I would argue there are two main benefits to applying coding agents to tasks:

• It’s, in many cases, faster, and you can complete work in parallel so you can, in total, get more work done
• It often automates boring or repetitive tasks, so you don’t have to do them yourself, which is obviously a good thing

Which non-coding tasks I use coding agents for

In this section, I’ll discuss some tasks that I use coding agents for that are not programming tasks. Obviously, programming tasks are the main use case I have for coding agents, but whenever I have to work on other tasks, coding agents are the way I usually do it.

• Budgeting
• Making reports (HTML)
• Making presentations
• Accessing information on websites
• Sales
• Researching topics online
• Learning new languages

These are just the first ones that came to mind since I’ve been performing these tasks in the last few days. The overall mindset you should have is basically:

When you receive a new task, you should immediately think how can I solve this task using coding agents?

Budgets, reports, and presentations

It turns out that most tasks, at least the ones that you can complete on your computer, can be done by coding agents. If you want to get an overview of all your finances, you can download all the transactions and upload them to your coding agent and have it create a budget. After it makes a budget, I typically make the coding agent present me with my finances in an HTML report, which gives me a great overview.

Now, if I want to make a presentation, for example, if I’m discussing a programming topic or if I’m just making another presentation, I’ll typically have the coding agent create a PDF presentation. This is great for several reasons.

First of all, the coding agent is very capable, and it will one-shot create a PDF, and then you can continue iterating with the coding agent afterward to make the presentation exactly how you want it. The second good reason to have a coding agent create presentations is that you can show the coding agent previous presentations that you’ve had, such as previous PDFs or PowerPoints and so on, and you can ask it to imitate the style. This will basically make the coding agent create a presentation in your style, which makes it a lot faster and more efficient at creating the presentation in the way you want to have it.

This logic of showing previous work is something you should apply not only to making presentations but also to any other thing you do. Because if the coding agent has seen your previous work, it’s a lot easier for it to complete tasks you ask it to do that are similar to that previous work.

Accessing websites

Continuing on the tasks, I also typically have my coding agent access information on websites if I need to do that, navigating the websites for me so I don’t have to navigate them and so on. This is made very effective because I have the coding agent with a separate profile in a browser, where it has the logins it needs.

So, for example, if I want to make a new API key or if I want to change some settings, download some data, and so on, I don’t do that manually on the site because that takes a lot of time. I ask my coding agent to do it; it does that work in the background and comes back to me when it’s done. This is great because it allows me to complete other work in the meantime, and it saves me from performing the frustrating work that is often navigating certain websites. That is simply something I don’t want to spend time on.

And note that some websites will have in their terms of service that you can’t use agents on them, and also some will block you from accessing the website, for example with a CAPTCHA that requires a human to access the website.

Sales and research

Another thing I use coding agents for that is not programming is sales. So, for example, if you want to research prospects or if you want to have a CRM system, you should have your coding agent do it. I highly recommend you create a separate folder on your computer where you do all of the sales if you have any sales responsibilities. You have your coding agent work in that folder and complete all the sales stuff in that folder.

This has several benefits. First of all, when you do all your work in one folder, the coding agent can generalize knowledge and remember what it did last time, so it’s more productive the next time it does the same work. Secondly, coding agents are simply very effective at working on sales. For example, they are very good at researching online, finding information about prospects, setting up reminders, and keep track of all the information you have on all your prospects and customers.

It’s worth mentioning that I also use coding agents for generic research online, not necessarily related to sales. For example, I’m buying new curtains now, and I need to find some complete blackout curtains online for as low a price as possible. In this case, I describe my use case to my coding agent, which is the width and height that I require of the curtain, and that I require fully blacked out curtains. The agent then does research online, presenting me the price of the curtains in a table view, and links to the relevant websites, which saves me an incredible amount of time researching a topic I know nothing about from before.

Learning new languages

Lastly, you can also use coding agents to learn new languages. Of course, there are a lot of language learning apps online, but I find that having a coding agent teach me a new language is great for several reasons. First of all, I create a new folder on my computer where the coding agent does all the new language learning, so we have a daily overview of every word that I learn. We can repeat the words that I struggle with, which it notes down, and it can set up reminders for me to work on it every single day for around 10 minutes. The coding agent will then know all my progress on learning the new language and help me become better.

It’s also worth noting that coding agents know most of the world’s languages inherently (i.e. in their weights). They, for example, know Norwegian fluently, which is a language spoken by around 5 million people. So, if your language is above that size, I can almost guarantee you that most LLMs online speak that language fluently. Note that the agents might struggle with some slang and so on, which is hard for them to know, but in my experience they’re very good at most languages.

The problem-solving mindset you should have with coding agents

In the last section, I covered some specific tasks that I use coding agents for and told you how I did it specifically. Now I would like to talk about the generic problem-solving mindset that you should have with coding agents to work effectively with them.

I view coding agents as a way I interact with basically any tasks that I work on. There’s rarely a reason for me to work specifically on a task all by myself without any help from coding agents; usually, it’s very beneficial to me to receive input from a coding agent on the task because:

1. I might have forgotten some context, and the coding agent can help remind me about that.
2. All other work can simply be done or automated through the coding agent. So, for example, I might explain it one time, and then the coding agent can just complete it for me with reminders in the future.
3. I can do more tasks at the same time, simply becoming more productive.

Of course, there are some tasks that I recommend you perform manually yourself; for example, answering messages from close friends is obviously something you shouldn’t automate away. Everything I’m talking about here is, of course, tasks that are simply work that you want to get done with no deeper meaning.

Another thing is writing articles, which is something I also urge you not to use AI to write. This is because, at least personally, I think articles are an output of your thoughts, and the whole point of articles is to share what you’re thinking, which makes it a task that I think shouldn’t be automated with coding agents.

A counter-argument to using a coding agent is that some work should be done by hand or requires human creativity. My response to that would be that you’re still completing this work yourself, right? The coding agent is just basically an enhancement of yourself. Yes, it can perform work for you, but you are the one instructing it on how to do it. And when it works autonomously, it’s working based on your spec and prompts, right? So I just view it as an enhancement of myself.

Furthermore, I would argue quite the opposite on the creativity part. I would argue that coding agents allow you to have more creativity because you can express the creative ideas that you come up with better. One specific example to this would be with coding, right?

Let’s say you have a lot of ideas for what an application would look like. In this instance, with coding agents, you can get these ideas into the world by actually developing them quickly, whereas previously you wouldn’t be able to do that in such an efficient manner. You would probably have to choose one idea to work specifically on, see if that’s good enough, and continue. Now, with coding agents, however, you can get all of your ideas into an application that you can access online and basically get more of your creative outputs into the world.

Conclusion

In this article, I discussed how you can apply coding agents to non-programming tasks. I would argue coding agents should basically be applied to all tasks that you do on your computer. If you do any work digitally, then there’s a high chance a coding agent can automate it or complete it to some extent. Now, of course, you’re still in control of the coding agent, and you’re the one instructing them what to do and how to do it, but they’re just an enhancement of you and all the work that you can complete. I covered some specific non-coding tasks that I apply coding agents to, such as budgeting, making reports, making presentations, sales, and research online. And I find that coding agents are extremely effective at performing these tasks. Now, I urge you to go look at all the tasks that you complete on your computer, programming or not, and see how you can complete them using coding agents. I believe having a mindset of how can I use coding agents to complete this task is a great mindset to have and will allow you to be more productive in getting work done on your computer.

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