7 ms·

I would also be interested in what you use AI for. Is it marketing? bureaucracy?

by redrove 1mo ago

mattmaroon 1mo ago
Yes. Bureaucracy for sure when I throw festivals. ChatGPT pulls permits for me. (I think that uses a lot of tokens because of the browser control?) Manages the admin side along with some tools I built in Lovable via mcp servers. Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc. Reels/posts production and managing ad spend. Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful. ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0. ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.
- redrove 1mo ago
  Thanks for the very detailed answer! Would you say ChatGPT does everything you need today or do you still see some gaps? i.e. things you think it should be able to do but currently doesn’t, or things that still take too much effort on your part to setup chatgpt to do it.
  - mattmaroon 1mo ago
    Huge gaps. I expect the tooling to get better for non-programmers. Codex and Cowork are great, but you still feel like you’re trying to hammer the square peg through the circle hole often when using it for non-programming tasks. The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet. I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.
    - rene-veerman 1mo ago
      how'd you get it to run? not even upgrading ollama could get it installed on my end :(
      - mattmaroon 1mo ago
        Oh I’m just using ChatGPT, I haven’t dives into getting anything to run locally yet. That’s on the off season project list.
        rene-veerman 1mo ago
        i see. i'm eager to use the self-run versions of real code-assisting AIs you see. ah well, patience. more patience. <grin>.
        mattmaroon 28d ago
        Me too.
  - mattmaroon 1mo ago
    Also, I have certainly gone down some unproductive rabbit holes figuring out what to do with it. Time spent on it is an investment, just like automating anything. You spend hours upfront to save them on an ongoing basis. But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting. Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds. I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox. Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.
- ipdashc 1mo ago
  Makes sense. Thanks for the post!
  - mattmaroon 1mo ago
    Do you work in the space?
    - ipdashc 1mo ago
      Nope, not at all. Was just curious what you were using it for that was so unrelated to computers, but what you said makes a lot of sense
      - mattmaroon 1mo ago
        Ah. Yeah. I can’t wait until the tooling for non-programming tasks catches up to the tooling for programming. I’m sure it will happen. Most of the software world started off aimed at developers (because they made it) and then found its way to us muggles.

I would also be interested in what you use AI for. Is it marketing? bureaucracy?

by redrove 1mo ago

I would also be interested in what you use AI for. Is it marketing? bureaucracy?

Yes. Bureaucracy for sure when I throw festivals. ChatGPT pulls permits for me. (I think that uses a lot of tokens because of the browser control?) Manages the admin side along with some tools I built in Lovable via mcp servers. Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc. Reels/posts production and managing ad spend. Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful. ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0. ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.

redrove 1mo ago
Thanks for the very detailed answer! Would you say ChatGPT does everything you need today or do you still see some gaps? i.e. things you think it should be able to do but currently doesn’t, or things that still take too much effort on your part to setup chatgpt to do it.
- mattmaroon 1mo ago
  Huge gaps. I expect the tooling to get better for non-programmers. Codex and Cowork are great, but you still feel like you’re trying to hammer the square peg through the circle hole often when using it for non-programming tasks. The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet. I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.
  - rene-veerman 1mo ago
    how'd you get it to run? not even upgrading ollama could get it installed on my end :(
    - mattmaroon 1mo ago
      Oh I’m just using ChatGPT, I haven’t dives into getting anything to run locally yet. That’s on the off season project list.
      - rene-veerman 1mo ago
        i see. i'm eager to use the self-run versions of real code-assisting AIs you see. ah well, patience. more patience. <grin>.
        mattmaroon 28d ago
        Me too.
- mattmaroon 1mo ago
  Also, I have certainly gone down some unproductive rabbit holes figuring out what to do with it. Time spent on it is an investment, just like automating anything. You spend hours upfront to save them on an ongoing basis. But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting. Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds. I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox. Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.
ipdashc 1mo ago
Makes sense. Thanks for the post!
- mattmaroon 1mo ago
  Do you work in the space?
  - ipdashc 1mo ago
    Nope, not at all. Was just curious what you were using it for that was so unrelated to computers, but what you said makes a lot of sense
    - mattmaroon 1mo ago
      Ah. Yeah. I can’t wait until the tooling for non-programming tasks catches up to the tooling for programming. I’m sure it will happen. Most of the software world started off aimed at developers (because they made it) and then found its way to us muggles.