Last year, the author struggled to build a data pipeline due to a lack of understanding and experience, but their journey took a positive turn after enrolling in a course on ELT with dlt, which provided clarity on essential concepts like pipeline definition, API authentication, and data handling. Armed with newfound knowledge, they successfully created a pipeline to extract and analyze sleep data from their WHOOP band using dlt, and later experimented with Cursor, an AI coding IDE, to streamline the process. Though Cursor required some manual intervention, it significantly reduced setup time and demonstrated the potential of AI-assisted coding. Overall, the experience proved empowering, transforming the author's perception of pipelines from a daunting challenge to an achievable task, encouraging them to continue exploring AI-driven workflows.