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Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery
My wife was planning to open a micro-bakery. We looked at production management software and it was all either expensive or way too generic. The actual workflows for a small-batch manufacturer aren't that complex, so I built one and open-sourced it.
Craftplan handles recipes (versioned BOMs with cost rollups), inventory (lot traceability, demand forecasting, allergen tracking), orders, production batch planning, and purchasing. Built with Elixir, Ash Framework, Phoenix LiveView, and PostgreSQL.
Live demo: https://craftplan.fly.dev https://craftplan.fly.dev (test@test.com / Aa123123123123)
GitHub: https://github.com/puemos/craftplan https://github.com/puemos/craftplan
- johng 8mo agoThis is really awesome, congrats!
- jack_pp 8mo agoCan you estimate how many hours went into this? Did you use agents?
- deofoo 8mo agoA 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
- protocolture 8mo agoI think I have needed this for 3d printing for some time
- pimlottc 8mo agoThis is definitely a nit but is there any reason you need 2 decimal places accuracy for percent complete?
- deofoo 8mo agoNope, might change it based on the feedback
- sukh 8mo agoLooks well thought out. We wrestle with website, real ERP and building Notion connectors for production orders in make to order scenarios so there’s definitely a pain point.
- deofoo 8mo agoYeah. Notion is not a bad idea but you'll need to maintain the connections. In fact i did model the idea first in notion
- ggm 8mo agoI think this is a very nicely thought out approach. I particularly like it doing allergen tracking. Obviously you're at the mercy of supplier/supply-chain integrity but if you do e.g. wind up with ground cumin contaminated with god knows what, this is what will get you where you need to be.
- deofoo 8mo agoYeah. Craftplan support batches so you can easily track down a bad batch
- cyberax 8mo agoAs someone who struggled with ERPs, this is super-nice and clean!
- deofoo 8mo agoThanks!
- xianshou 8mo agoNice! 5 bucks says you can swap this in for your average software kanban and it does a better job.
- Vivtek 8mo agoOh man. My wife's biscotti business will benefit from this. Nice work!
- deofoo 8mo agoAwesome. Please send any feedback, it will make me so happy to get another person to benefit from it
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- fergbrain 8mo agoThis looks amazing! How long did it take to get to this state?
- deofoo 8mo agoFew weeks. Elixir + Ash + LiveView is the best productive combination
- mandeepj 8mo agoIs the logic behind "Usage Forecast" and "Reorder Planner" hard-coded somewhere? I'm not seeing any configuration for that, so I had to ask the question.
- deofoo 8mo agoRight now it's hard-coded. But based on your feedback I'm going to make some of it configurable
- nsriv 8mo agoLove to the point of invention! This looks and feels great. I'm an Elixir newbie and wondering if I should start with learning Ash or stick with Liveview until I know more. Any thoughts on what Ash solved for you over Phoenix Liveview?
- victorbjorklund 8mo agoDef start with Phoenix first and then try Ash.
- zmhanham 8mo agoAsh 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 :)
- zmhanham 8mo agoOK HN, time for us to build a full open source general purpose ERP in Elixir based on Ash XD
- thedangler 8mo agoThis is unreal. Nice work How long did it take ? I tried to use ash to build a simple app and couldn’t get it to work lol. I’m an elixir noob
- deofoo 8mo agoA few weeks (mostly weekends)
- edoceo 8mo agoI love this. I know another small batch baker who also thought it was cool (we'll dig more when sober). BOM+cost is rad. Eager to try forecasting a weekend-rush situation. My only nit, as a legacy internet goober is, use example.com for these throw away addresses; it's reserved for that purpose.
- deofoo 8mo agoThanks! Would love to hear your feedback. I'm a solo developer so iteration is really fast
- joeyguerra 8mo agoI love that you can just "curl download the docker compose file and docker up" to run. Awesome UX.
- mh- 8mo agoRather offtopic question: what browser are the screenshots taken in? The window chrome looks familiar but I can't put my finger on it.
- jeremyjacob 8mo agoLooks like Arc Browser.
- lateral_cloud 8mo agoNice work. My wife will love this. Only minor gripe is the production schedule doesn't play nicely on mobile. Text leaks between columns.
- rbabtista 8mo agoThis is very cool! How did you make a dashboard this good?
- uint8_t 8mo agoJust amazing. I had a need for something like this but wound up building it out in Mathesar. That, too, is an amazing project, but my business logic has to remain separate. Jeepers, you're even getting into labor accounting - well done!
- dabedee 8mo agoHonestly, well done and thanks for sharing it. I also really appreciate the fact that you included multiple screenshots of the UI, as well as some of the agent plans. Reading the code and project structure, it feels like you put in the work.
- spockz 8mo agoThis is amazing! My wife is also planning to open up a bakery and I was thinking of building something similar. Hadn’t thought of that daily production workflow, just the ingredients and recipes into cost/labour/profit parts. Some small things: When trying to edit a product (almond cookies) on the phone, I cannot scroll the pop-up so cannot go to all fields or the save button. When calculating the total calories it prints kg as the unit instead of cal. On the overview page of materials for a product it only shows “grams” per ingredient without the actual number.
- larodi 8mo agoGood, I will with great pleasure now reiterate my point about people now producing their own code, even complex stuff, rather than downloading potentially malicious and foreign code. Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS. Go ahead - I'm ready to be down-voted again and again until folks realize it is inevitable, as is inevitable that many companies in the area of business software are going down down down.
- deofoo 8mo ago100%
- ramshanker 8mo agoNot 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 !
- lelanthran 8mo ago> 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.
- mschild 8mo ago> No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?utm_source=tldrfintech https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?...
- peterpost2 8mo agoThat is one good-looking website. Seems like the live demo website is about to die though.
- deofoo 8mo agoYeah, didn't expect so much traffic. Going to pump some RAM
- randogp 8mo agoAwesome, does it support Semiproducts? For example I'm making my own jam (sugar + fruit) and then I use this again as a material in different finished products, say cakes and croissants.
- deofoo 8mo agoNice idea, i think i can make it work. Give me a day or two
- fud101 8mo agoThis is incredible work. Can we get a blog post?
- deofoo 8mo agoMaybe? What would you like to hear about?
- artemave 8mo agoAnd I built e-commerce for my wife's micro-bakery https://thonon-les-pains.fr/ https://thonon-les-pains.fr/ (most of it - like product and order management - is behind auth). I don't think it's useful to anyone - not white label, not open source - but still funny :)
- deofoo 8mo agoLove that. I was thinking to add e-commerce layer
- lm28469 8mo agoThe best part is the domain, I grew up close by (Le filtre pain/biscuits/gluten est pété sous safari)
- MonkeyClub 8mo agoYep the wordplay made me chuckle too :)
- simonklitj 8mo agoI don’t live nearby, but thank her for baking gluten free!
- rancevent 8mo agoGénial comme nom :)
- builderhq_io 8mo ago[flagged]
- viviansolide 8mo agoYou've done a great job! It's simple, well documented, and uses appealing technologies. I'm sure your wife's business will take off.
- hkt 8mo agoThis is why technical people make the best spouses
- Abimelex 8mo agoawesome and thank you for open sourcing it! Maybe consider renaming it, since there is CraftNote, an app with similar scope in construction business.
- shane_kerns 8mo agoThis is a great piece of software, with much thought put into nitty gritty details. Aside from the gripes around the mobile experience that some have outlined here, I would say you've put much thought into this piece of software. Your wife is lucky that she has a talented software developer for a husband. AI or no AI, I think this is a very clean and beautiful piece of software. This doesn't seem like its Vibe coded, because AI doesn't write such clean code but maybe AI is improving and I'm just bad at telling which is which. Nonetheless, keep up the great work and thanks for sharing. I'm downloading it just to learn from your codebase. Its not like before AI came around talented devs didn't create working side projects to help their loved ones out.
- billynomates 8mo agoAI 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.
- zmhanham 8mo ago> If you know how to write clean code. If we're assuming that: I find it less time consuming to just write the code, understand it 99% (since I wrote it), and debug the rest, than it is to try to describe it to the AI, understand a fraction of what it spits out, and spend more time understanding it and fixing it. If you can just write clean code just do that. Also, you will improve your skills even more the more you do that (shocker). So the next time you have to do that it will be even easier. This is called learning a skill. Sorry for the rough tone, reading that back haha. But still posting because I'm just passionate about it, it's nothing personal though.
- billynomates 7mo agoReading is much faster than writing, that's a given. You can generate the rules in less than an hour, then never have to write a line of code again. But maybe you have trouble writing prompts. Spend some time learning how to do that and it will be even easier. It's a skill ;)
- alexcroox 8mo agoLogin submission hangs forever, guessing too much traffic
- rubymamis 8mo agoLive demo not loading for me - hug of death?
- bryanzborges 8mo agoIncredible
- sentrysapper 8mo agoYou can tell this was written with love. Regardless of what tools were used to make this, I think we could all do more of this for the people important in our lives.
- leowoo91 8mo agoIt 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!"
- dhatawesomedude 8mo agoThis looks great! Love the screenshots, although I'm unable to login to the app. Likely due to the extra traffic this post has gotten. How long did it take you to build this ?
- deofoo 8mo agoYeah, trying to pump more memory. It took a few weekends over a long period of time
- nottorp 8mo agoThe question is, does the bakery still produce bread, or does it now randomly produce bread, ice cream or frogs?
- JoBrad 8mo agoI’d consider the latter scenario a feature :)
- ssenssei 8mo agoomg its built with elixir... Everytime I see my favorite language pop up I'm a little happier.
- theturtletalks 8mo agoI'm actually building open-source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable marketplace. I'm nearly done with the restaurant one (alternative to Toast).
- dude250711 8mo agoWell done Claude, good job!
- Soerensen 8mo agoThe approach of building for one specific user (your wife) rather than abstracting too early is underrated. You end up with something that actually fits the workflows instead of a generic tool that needs heavy configuration. Elixir + Ash is an interesting choice for this domain. LiveView particularly shines for internal tools like this where you want the interactivity without managing a separate frontend build. Curious how the AI code generation worked with Ash specifically - the declarative nature seems like it could either help a lot (clear patterns) or confuse models that expect more explicit code. The BOM with cost rollups is the feature that would have saved me hours in a previous project. Most small batch producers I know either overprice everything out of caution or underestimate costs because tracking ingredient pricing through recipes is tedious in spreadsheets.
- deofoo 8mo agoElixir + Ash is so good, and AI works very well with it because it can understand the domain you are working in. LiveView is amazing, not just for internal tools. I would even say that in most cases it will outperform flashy UIs, because it focuses on actual users who work with the app every day, not people who just want to be impressed for a minute
- toddmorey 8mo agoI love this so much. I do worry about the hidden cost of maintaining these software stacks that have a userbase of one. Things like hidden vulnerabilities, bugs, and edge cases that could bring a business down for days. But I do think the days of just having to learn, tolerate, and accept any commercial software stack for your business because it's too complex to build yourself are over. What vendors remain will have to absolutely meet users with their unique requirements and budget.
- lp4v4n 8mo agoCongrats, deofoo. Very interesting. How much of it was developed with AI? If you had to give us a percentage of how much of the code was written by yourself vs AI, what would the parity be?
- babu_mick 8mo agothis is sick, my wife complains about her franchise's mandatory technology portal bs etc. I was thinking I could definitely whip up something better and you've inspired me more.
- hcrisp 8mo agoYou built your wife?! This robotics stuff has gone too far. Next you will be telling me that you threw your cow over the fence some hay!
- gglitch 8mo agoJust doing it in Emacs is also an option. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952
- alejoar 8mo agoYou could have called it craftpan (pan = bread in spanish :D)
- harwoodr 8mo agoLooks like it shares many characteristics with LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System)...
- ewalk153 8mo agoAssuming this was user tested in hand with your wife, it’s nice to this kind of project built for a real user. So often, these tools lack usability because they’re built generically any use case. Here, it was designed for your wife’s bakery. The process to build a site/app like this will only get easier and more defect-free over the coming months.
- syntaxing 7mo agoFirst time hearing the term micro bakery. Is there an equivalent for restaurants? Like a micro restaurant? Seems like a fun idea for my retired parents.
- globular-toast 7mo agoI really like this UI. Just ordered an Elixir book. I'm excited to learn this stack in the coming weeks. Hopefully it'll encourage me to build an app I really want for personal use. I can't bring myself to use the stack I use for work at home.
- masterbit 7mo agoSuper cool. My wife and me recently analyzed a small bagel shop that was open for sale in Berlin. Unfortunately it didn’t work out for us. But such a software would have been incredibly useful. Former owner did everything in .xls.
- Jide_Lambo 7mo agoI relate to this alot. I've been working in B2B SaaS for years and saw the exact same gap in customer success tooling. The serious tools start at $10k - $50k per year and take months to set up, and everyone else that can't afford them use spreadsheets. There's almost nothing in the middle. What's funny is the actual workflows usually aren't that complicated. The complexity is artificial. It comes from the vendor trying to serve every possible use case. When you build something focused on the real workflow, it turns out you can get 80% of the value in a fraction of the time and cost. The open source angle is smart tool. In B2B, the "let me just try it" factor matter so much. If someone has to sit through a sales call just to see if the tool fits, most small operators will just stick with their spreadsheet.