Comment by transitorykris
9 days ago
I own a small bar and inventory management is either spreadsheets or saas products meant for larger operations. With the exclusion of some very small changes (e.g., deleting dead code) it’s 100% written using Claude Code. Initial design was generated from markdown documentation I wrote, and each change has been careful and incremental. A few blind alleys lead in the wrong direction, but was always easy enough to back up and try a different approach.
Database migrations and anything related to calculations have had a fair bit of hand holding. Beyond tests it writes I do still test by hand for confidence.
It’s coming up to a year of use. Claude Code credits has still not exceeded the cost of a paid product. I don’t count my time here because this doubles as keeping my technical side busy, and it’s been enjoyable.
This is a strange space in software. I have a tiny tissue culturing lab in my home and wanted to manage media batches and their ingredients, cultures using the batches of media, inventory for media ingredients, and general inventory for running things. Cleaning, cutting, measuring, etc. I couldn't find anything which would allow me to keep stock of what I've got in the structure I needed, let alone while also project things like "I've got enough inventory for n batches of y media". And all of the half-measure inventory software was expensive as hell.
I also built a solution for myself that was largely vibe coded. The underlying schema for inventories, batches, orders, cultures, etc was done in advance to help guide Claude along with documentation, but I'd guess 75 percent of the code is pure Claude.
It has worked really well for a while now. Since it's just me using it and I'm able to roll with issues it causes or verify outputs on the fly if I want to, it's totally fine not being super polished. It meaningfully increases my productivity by allowing me to manage things in a way that fits my mental model and business.
Like you, the cost of the project has been less than a subscription. And the subscriptions wouldn't even do what I needed.
You're doing tissue culture at home?! That's impressive. I imagine you've got some background in bio - what projects are you working on?
Tissue culture is a thing in the Cannabis world for efficiently reproducing and storing different varieties. I think it can also be used to create non-infected plants from plants infected with hop latent viroid.
I think the main issue is maintaining sterile conditions but its doable.
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Haha, no background. I might be the least educated person I know. I just enjoy learning new things, and this happened to stick with me. It's a very gratifying thing to do.
I culture plants which are popular in aquariums and terrariums. It's a nice way to get a break from software and science where I spend my days, get my hands dirty, enjoy refining different skills, make some money, and meet different types of people.
I happened to go to brunch at a fancy restaurant on New Years Day. They were still updating their wine inventory with a spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets can work but get clumsy really fast. Bottle cost can vary as costs change (case discounts, price changes.. and holding inventory of an item across multiple purchases), audit logging (spelunking into the undo history), multiple staff interacting with the system.. All solved problems, just not at the price point or UX we need at this scale.