Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery

I'll down vote just for the whiny attitude and superior tone.

I think the real question here isn't whether roll your own software will replace large complex 'configurable' systems, but whether companies that roll their own will replace the companies that don't.

ie are the efficiency gains of having something that's exactly tailored to you enough to create a competitive advantage.

It's back to the old idea - of software eating the world.

So for example in the UK - there is a relatively new 'energy' company called Octopus - it's grown and grown and finally overtaken the old established players.

In reality it's not an energy company - it's a software company - that used it's expertise in software to overtake it's energy supplier competitors - it was able to provide innovative products in the market because it controlled it's own software - rather than 'big vendor says no'.

I think it's telling that the founder originally left school at 16 to write computer games, before coming back to do a degree etc.

ie the question is - for any particular industry what's the benefit of custom software. Does a bakery having it's own give it enough of an advantage?

I'm the main dev in a small IT company, my backlog is filled with requests, it's not always easy to prioritize and plan, some of those small projects are ignored for months, yet their business value are sound.

I've observed a new trend, managers who are frequently in the wait list started to use AI to generate small local apps. They still rely on my input when it's complex, or when implementation could generate risks or need resilience and would ask for small code reviews when they are unsure of the generated code quality.

The result is win win, I have more time for high value projects the executives want to prioritize, and managers can innovate faster almost on their own.

> “…big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.”

My work uses these services and it’s interesting to see the divide between companies who have documented APIs (some also with “marketplaces”), and others who have many thousands of dollars partnerships license requirements to get API access.

Or companies who are very restrictive about what they will let you do with their API, presumably in an effort to control the ecosystem around their products—whether it’s because they fear being open would devalue their product, or they have a strong notion of their market position and won’t admit any integration which upsets their governance.

First slowly then all at once. [1]

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/software-applic...

I think some the prevalence of AI is actually turning the bias on this. It would actually be a return to the roots of the start of early business computing - and sort of picking up where excel et al left off. I don't think it's AI the tech itself, it's the confidence for companies to build a customized software stack and maintain it is what AI mostly contributes.

> Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.

Wait, what?

The big ERP vendors aren't under any threat, the small ones are.

No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system that has effectively zero consultants who can come in and perform the deployment with tested integrations to their accounting system, their 200 suppliers, their customer systems and their 3rd party auditing systems.

But, small businesses who were not going with a 12m contract for 5 consultants, and who dont have any need for integrations to suppliers, customers and 3rd party systems can do their own systems.

It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general.

All magnetic coding is going to do is further entrench existing large systems because new systems, whether AI generated or not, will be too numerous for any one of them to gain traction.

> rather than downloading potentially malicious and foreign code

So I shouldn't download and use this right? I can't verify if it's potentially malicious or not

Not just that, previously many orgs outsourced to consultancy, now when the consultancies also start outsourcing to AI, sooner all business may cut the middleman and have inhouse it teams outsourcing work to AI instead of consultancies !

100%

You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software?

So still, for ransom business much cheaper and better to buy software from SaaS vendor.

In this case it was better ONLY because the client is the wife of the developer.

And even now, if he sells this to other businesses - it will be MUCH cheaper to buy his subscription than homebrew the same version of it - as if it starts selling it he will be adding features and support which requires time (which is money).

The truth is that I put a lot of work in at the beginning to define the data structure and flows by myself. AI was very useful later to experiment with how to build the views on top of it and to fix some issues.

I still had to think hard about how to make this simple and easy for someone who does not have deep knowledge of this manufacturing domain.

*Lessons learned:*

  1. Data structure is almost everything, then comes business logic
  2. You must have deep domain knowledge of what you are building
  3. Iterate fast on the views built on top of the data structure

*PS*

All mobile fixed had been resolved and deployed ;)

AI will write whatever kind of code you want it to write. If you know how to write clean code and you can describe that in a prompt, it will give you clean code that is indistinguishable from that of a talented dev.

I’d consider the latter scenario a feature :)

"That's a great idea! Do you want me to create a PRD, a million markdown files and some useless Playwright tests?" -- Claude

AI Agents Assemble!

It can still be a LLM-induced marketing stunt to catch attention though. "Hey let's add a bakery story so people can relate to it!"

Super! Will get these fixed asap

Fixed!

Thanks! Would love to hear your feedback. I'm a solo developer so iteration is really fast

Yeah, trying to pump more memory. It took a few weekends over a long period of time

I don’t live nearby, but thank her for baking gluten free!

The best part is the domain, I grew up close by

(Le filtre pain/biscuits/gluten est pété sous safari)

Love that. I was thinking to add e-commerce layer

A few weekends. At the end I used AI to get JSON:API and GraphQL working, plus the docs website, a few UI changes + bug fixing

Right now it's hard-coded. But based on your feedback I'm going to make some of it configurable

Nice idea, i think i can make it work. Give me a day or two

Nope, might change it based on the feedback

Awesome. Please send any feedback, it will make me so happy to get another person to benefit from it

Oh man, going to fix that ASAP

Fixed!

Yeah. Craftplan support batches so you can easily track down a bad batch

Ash can be used in conjunction with Phoenix, they aren't mutually exclusive. Ash is really just a framework for modeling your domain(s) and getting a bunch of helpful functionality for free (e.g advanced querying capabilities, pagination, data validations, json+graphql apis, and more) Then you could use those functionalities with phoenix to build a full web app. Or you could use something else other than phoenix, it's up to you :)

Def start with Phoenix first and then try Ash.

Yeah, didn't expect so much traffic. Going to pump some RAM

Looks like Arc Browser.

A few weeks (mostly weekends)

Yeah. Notion is not a bad idea but you'll need to maintain the connections. In fact i did model the idea first in notion

Few weeks. Elixir + Ash + LiveView is the best productive combination

Maybe? What would you like to hear about?

Thanks!