Yes, you should still know how Apps Script, and programming in general, works…but this is how you need to be using LLMs to help you leverage these tools:

I had years of messily shared Google Sheets and Docs.

I’d initially shared a ton of them directly with people instead of through folders.

And I needed to remove some of those people all at once…

Doing it manually wasn't really an option so I asked ChatGPT to write me an Apps Script, and one prompt later, I had something that worked.

The full demo, including the ChatGPT conversation and the script running live, is in the video.

The premise was simple: build a script that takes a folder (or a list of folders), finds every file inside, and removes a specific email address from all of them.

It worked out of the box with just 83 lines of code.

But before I ran it on anything real, I asked a couple of follow-up questions. What happens if that email isn't shared on a particular file? And what about everyone else who has access? I needed those people untouched.

It had already covered these situations.

The script uses file.removeViewer and file.removeEditor so it catches both access types and it only targets the email address you tell it to.

The folder ID is just the string in the URL after /folders/. That's what you paste into the script. If you need to remove someone from multiple folders, you add them as a comma-separated list.

Got multiple people to remove? Same deal — instead of a single email constant, you just make it a list. The AI figured that out when I asked, and updated the script accordingly.

One thing I'd recommend: keep the logger messages in.

When the script runs, they print out exactly what it's doing: which files it processed, which ones it skipped, who got removed.

If something looks off, you copy that output back into ChatGPT and ask it what went wrong. I've had to do that on almost every Apps Script project; that’s just part of coding.

Fair warning: when I tested it the first time, the sharing UI still showed the old email address.

It looked like it hadn't worked.

But it turns out it was probably a browser cache/Google Workspace glitch rather than something wrong with the code - a browser refresh cleared it up after at first I thought something hadn’t worked.

So if you run it and something looks stuck, check the logs first, then refresh before you assume it failed.

This is the kind of thing that would've taken me forever to do manually; now it's just a script I run when I need it.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini…any of them can write this.

Coding for LLMs is easy; they are all excellent at it - especially small projects like this.

If you've got a task that's mind-numbingly repetitive, there's probably a script for it. You just have to ask.

Use whatever tool you’re most comfortable with and get good at it before mixing up the tooling for different uses.