Vibe Coding with Copilot: Automate SQL Reports to Email (No Python Experience, and what broke!)
In this video, I walk through a real “vibe coding” session where I used Copilot to help build a Python automation—even though I don’t consider myself a Python developer. The goal was simple: run a SQL Server query and automatically email the results through Outlook. But along the way, we ran into very real issues: Python not running in VS Code, missing packages (pandas, pyodbc, pywin32), SQL Server connection failures, TCP/IP being disabled, and SQL Server Browser not running. None of these were coding problems—they were environment and configuration issues that don’t show up in tutorials. By the end, we had a working automation that connects to SQL Server using Windows Authentication, executes a report query, emails recipients with either an HTML table or a “no records found” message, and includes the record count in the email subject. This video isn’t about writing perfect Python. It’s about using curiosity, Copilot, and persistence to turn an idea into a working automation—and understanding what actually breaks in real environments. This is what “vibe coding” looks like in the real world—not magic, just momentum.