Laptop Crash? Here’s How AI Helped Me Get Back to Work Fast

A few weeks ago, my laptop gave up on me. I had to send it to Mac Care, and when it came back, everything was gone. Since the issue was with the motherboard, there was no way to recover my old setup.🙆‍♀️

At first, I felt completely overwhelmed. Over the years, I’ve carefully built my working environment by installing tools, setting up configurations, and tweaking everything to make my QA and WordPress work easier. And now it was all gone.😫

In the past, setting things up has been a nightmare. What I thought would take “a few hours” usually stretched into 2–3 days. Why? Because installing one thing often threw an error. That error needed debugging. Which then required installing something else. Which sometimes broke something I had already installed. The cycle repeated until I ended up frustrated and drained.

This time, I expected the same.

AI-Powered Terminal

While thinking about how painful the setup was going to be, I decided to experiment with something new. AI is buzzing all around, and I recently used Wrap (not to that extent), an AI-powered terminal. So I thought to give it a try and see if that helps.

So instead of manually going through installations and debugging every error, I downloaded Wrap and gave it a single prompt:

My Mac is completely blank after a logic board replacement. I want to set up a local WordPress development environment from scratch. Please install and configure everything I need, including: Node.js, npm, Docker Desktop, Git, Composer, WP-CLI, and other things (if required).

Then, clone the WordPress develop repo into Documents and run all necessary setup commands listed here.

Let me know if you can help me setup all things? If yes, will you be able to identify what else we would need on top of above things because I only shared visible things I need but there can be more stuff because Home brew itself is not present at the moment.”

To my surprise, it just… worked.

The Result

What used to take me 2–3 days was done in 30 minutes.

No endless error messages. No dependency nightmares. No digging through different threads! It was indeed a smooth, automated process. Watching everything fall into place with a single command felt almost magical.🪄

What I Learned

1. AI can eliminate the frustration associated with repetitive tasks.
   Instead of spending days on something I dreaded, I was back to being productive in less than an hour.
2. Experimenting with new tools pays off.
   I could have stuck to the “old way,” but trying Wrap saved me days of wasted time.
3. This is just the beginning.
   If AI can simplify something as complex as setting up my local environment, imagine what it could do for other parts of testing and automation.

Disclaimer

This post is not sponsored, and I’m not advertising any specific AI tool. I’m simply sharing my personal experience of how AI unexpectedly saved me time after my laptop crashed.

Closing Thoughts

Losing everything on my laptop was stressful, but it turned into an opportunity to explore how AI can make my work easier. What felt like a setback ended up becoming a big productivity win.

I’m excited to explore more ways AI can fit into my QA work.

Have you tried using AI-powered terminals or similar tools? How was your experience? I would love to hear your thoughts on the same in the comment box below. 💬