I Didn't Write a Single Line of Code. I Built It Anyway.

I Built a Full Stack App for $0.50 - Here's What That Taught Me About AI

I'm not a traditional developer. I don't have a CS degree. I learned to code at 13 on Visual Basic 3.0, spent 9 years in the U.S. Army including 3 combat deployments to Iraq, came home, spent 15+ years as an automotive technician, and somewhere in between all of that never stopped learning technology.

I run a homelab that would have been considered enterprise infrastructure in the late 90s, It's amazing what's changed in 26 years. Self-hosted git, SSO, secrets management, a zero-trust network architecture, local LLMs, workflow automation. I built all of it myself. I am not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you this so you understand where I'm coming from when I talk about AI.

The Problem

I needed an invoicing application for my side business as a home mechanic. There are plenty of automotive invoicing solutions out there — Mitchell1, Shop-Ware, Tekmetric — but they're built for full shops with full shop budgets. Subscriptions running $100-300+ a month for a guy doing side work out of his garage doesn't make a lot of sense.