I wrote a blog about sitting at LHR recently and watching planes take off. That’s been a fun thing for me to do when I’m stuck at the airport. I can see a plane roll down the runway every 35-45s during busy times. This time I was sitting by a window in the hotel, working and watching.

There was a moment when I realized no planes were taking off. I looked and saw a vehicle rolling down the runway, and then realized there were two, one from each direction. It was an runway FOD inspection, looking for anything that might damage a plane.

It’s a little thing that has to be done regularly at an airport.

How many of you do little things in your job? Do you clean up old logs/backups/ETL source files? Do you double-check security for old/expired accounts, unused databases, forgotten audits/traces, etc.? Maybe do you check the status of patches across your database estate? Is there something else you should do semi-regularly?

I’ve seen many people (including myself) lose track of things over time because there are so many. My phone (or pager) has rung so many times because a system ran out of disk space due to old files that accumulated over time. Those log files might not be be large, but after years the size can add up. And they’ll fill up a disk at night, not during working hours.

This is where AI might help. I’ve written many little scripts that helped me clean things, but they were often brittle and focused on a specific task. Generalizing them would take too much effort, and might not even be possible. After all, sometimes I’m not even sure what the general case would be when building the utility.

AI coding agents can help us in this space. Ask an AI for a script to remove old backup files, leaving the last few. Perhaps you want to look for unused accounts. You can ask an AI to setup an audit to scan for login times (script one) and then process the results to get the last login time for each account (script two). The action might be to disable accounts that haven’t logged in for six months (script three). Set these scripts to run ad hoc or on a schedule as needed. Just be sure you have a calendar entry to remind you to check the results.

Each of these scripts isn’t that complex, but across many systems, perhaps with slightly different requirements and situations, you might not have time to adjust each script or even build them. However, if you can think about a small utility, an AI can help you build it. Just be sure you also ask the AI to set up tests to ensure the script works as intended. This is especially important since you’ll likely be asking the AI to refactor or change the code and want to prevent regression bugs.

Doing the little things at work can eat up a lot of time, but building small utilities can help you can ensure that your systems run smoothly. And ensure you still get home in time for dinner.

Steve Jones

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