AI in real small-business operations: automation, costs, and what actually breaks.
business-ai
A business AI assistant drained $100 of API credit while the owner swore he barely touched it. The real drivers: a 30-minute heartbeat, premium models on background jobs, and one retry storm.
business-ai
Many receipts are HTML mails without attachment. Render them to PDF with Playwright, and dodge the Gmail label gotcha that reprocesses a thread forever.
business-ai
An LLM misread credit card statements by up to -2,000 EUR. Now statements are parsed line by line with pdfplumber and the model only reads single receipts.
business-ai
A daily AI agent job kept failing with "unknown flag --readonly". The flag never existed. Why agents invent flags, and why --token=x beats --token x.
business-ai
An AI agent's long-term memory file grew to 70 KB and the bootstrap cut it at 71%. Two automatic writers caused it. How I split curated vs. archive memory.
business-ai
A self-hosted AI assistant went silent on a document request. Not the model, not permissions: poppler, ImageMagick and Ghostscript were missing.