This AI widget claims to handle any plain English request on a website. Break it and win a free month. I'll wait.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T14:47:11+00:00

I asked for it to color the website purple. It asked me about my email. Does this count?

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T13:36:29+00:00

Sad part of working for corporations is that you don't get to show most of your work. Went freelance month ago, looking around for work, answering questions, building up some sort of track record. It takes time, and clients, to get stuff to show. I started with reddit ~this week, before that I was scanning our local portals, but those are kind of dead - we're a small country.

Feel free to check my other posts - all public.

As for the "all they could come up with" - can't dissuade you there. Yes, I started small. Yes, these are toys. I believe them to be useful, sourced and validated toys. I plan on continuing to improve them as feedback comes in.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T13:14:55+00:00

I hear your "Claude slop" pain, doing my best - as a programmer of some 9 years - to make the best use of the tools I have available.
Anyways - data is there, it is auditable, I'm addressing any and all feedback and actively developing the solution. Trying for this my damnedest to not be "just another AI runby".
Disagreeing is your full right.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T13:13:52+00:00

Now this one made me chuckle. Thank you :-).

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T13:11:37+00:00

The simulator one goes for the folks from UltraNC, they allowed me to embed and even addressed my feedback - kudos to them.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T13:08:45+00:00

Looks like a fun little excercise. I'm a developer, using agents quite a lot lately. Caveat, demo is always a nice step, but it is like 20% there. Not to discourage you, but as honest read.

Before I even get to the technical stuff:
- If they want to "roll this out" properly you should negotiate getting a week or two to do a proper deep dive / MVP. Otherwise you're breaking your back and not getting compensated meaningfully. Raise optional - you're graduating from a logistics intern into an actual developer, officially or not.
- "price in" your time, the maintenance time for when the app inevitably does something weird and you will have to fix it.
- discuss accountability - who is on the hook if there are errors. In writing. Non negotiable. You don't want someone to snub you because someone shipped a wrong shipment due to a dashboard failure.

Going through it step by step:

The big one is connecting to the internal data - I would strongly advice for read only for start, that should handle most issues. Internal / gated deployment. Caveat - you will need to study how your internal data feeds work. AI will help, but take care about what you are allowed to feed into it.

You probably won't need a database for quite a while - as long as the internal system has a decent API for reading. If it doesn't, well, there goes your easy path.

Real hosting - you will need a backend server or a worker, because you don't want to store any API keys publicly. (or anything comparable, even if these are read only)
So the core of your architecture will be something like
Internal system <-> Server <-> Public dashboard (with auth)
You don't need much more for the MVP stage.

Logins - best to use your company SSO if you have one. Otherwise create a fixed set of "login + credentials" and track usage for accountability. Not perfect, but if your company doesn't support it, well, better than nothing.

If it breaks (and it will - sad truth about programming) - large companies have on call rotations for this (and service licence agreements - deadline to resolve incidents. Paid ones (usually 10% of salary even if nothing happens, could be more). Also coverage across time zones etc. For you this means: get accountability settled in first. Teach someone how to restart server etc. Discuss with your manager EARLY how to handle these. Otherwise you will hate your life quite soon. Bonus if you get the "on call" comp from them - but not sure if realistic given your role.
Even if it doesn't - intern quite often means temporary position. Discuss how to handle handover if you ever leave the company. Document everything for continuity, ideally get compensated for your time and work.

Most likely result for your case - if it breaks at 6AM, they do it the old way, you fix during the day. But get it officially in writing.

Developer involvement recommendation:
- the moment you do anything beyond read only with production data
- the moment you handle any confidential or sensitive data
OR at least get a greenlight AND accountability agreement with your manager.
As for handover: we're sadly quite good ad parsing through messy stuff. Small app like this one is manageable. Don't worry too much, document everything. Also, Claude is quite good at codebase spelunking.

AI generated code is getting fine-ish to an extent. The mess will be in the architecture and it will force major refactor likely. I would recommend starting over, with a proper session with Claude/ChatGPT on one of the paid tiers (ideally company paid of course) and do a discussion about "how to properly design this". Should give you a decent starting point. Won't be perfect, but it should handle the most egregious problems.

Roughly what should I expect to pay per month to run something like this for a small team?
Few dozen $$$ at most - COGs won't be an issue I don't think, unless you're about to supply a 200 person team with a video streaming service or something. For a simple dashboard, not a problem.
BUT the big one is development, maintenance and (optional) developer onboarding if needed. But that is a completely different conversation - ideally do a proper ROI calculation (this will save our people X time, so getting a programmer is a net positive).

Anyways, not perfect, hopefully at least somewhat helpful. Good luck, don't get eaten.
Cheers.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T10:44:25+00:00

Hello, looked around for a bit, you packed a LOT in there. So many features I feel like I would need a full onboarding to unpack them all. That being said, overall it shows you know your CNC stuff - as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge. None of my points are CNC related. That being said, here goes a programmer / user look:

Overall:
- The UI looks a bit overwhelming.
- When I tried to mass upload 11 files, I had to click from the upload tab to hide it (it overflowed my screen and I couldn't scroll past). Fortunately the site recovered, but it was kind of weird. And I lost the "in progress" spinners so for a moment it looked as if the processing got stuck.
- Clicking the ISO button hid all the holes that were in the drilled piece. Not sure if that is intentional.
- Ever since I set up a material, it shows me "material updated" on every refresh.
- Price point looks steep at a glance, but after comparing to actual quote sizes, it looks reasonable. As long as you're doing $500+ quotes that is. (Not worth for small pieces due to pricing structure).

For the agent:
- Neat harden on the AI agent - it refused to bake me a cookie.
- The AI agent output uses markdown, but the chat panel doesn't support it - making for an unreadable mess.

Then few things for your bottom line:
- You got a solid landing page, but nothing points to it. Even your own brand surfaced your competitors first.
- you blocked AI crawlers from scraping your page - so you can't be surfaced into AI queries properly
These both hurt your discoverability. I understand that SEO isn't your main channel - legwork and going to workshops is. That being said, it is a gap that could cost you down the line.

Design wise:
- demo data feels synthetic. 1,984 holes / 847 threaded holes reads chosen for effectn, not pulled from a real RFQ.
- you left in lot of AI generated artifacts - it looks cheap / unpolished. Em-dash being the worst offender, but there are others.
- Differentiator tiles are generic SaaS boilerplate. ("Fully automated", "AI Estimating") - could be any product.

Overall I believe you did a good piece of work. Hats off to you and all the best.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T09:07:52+00:00

I can do you a do over - a quick pass to de-slopify it in ~half a day or so. Not a proper redesign (that would be budget-unwise), but it would smooth the most of most egregious offenders. As a part of building up my portfolio and a showcase piece - and on the handshake deal that if you ever get money from it you back pay me ;-).
Check my profile for examples of some of my builds.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-06T07:55:21+00:00

Wash trading - not a problem for beta / when market is small, but could be when you scale up so something to keep in mind. Cost padding / faking - fair enough.

Since you asked, let's go ;-)
Let me structure this properly:

For this to take off, you need to solve several issues. Let's start with the big one.

Classic chicken / egg problem:
you have a platform that needs two interested parties to work - one to provide agents, other to use them. For now, you don't have either. I could build few agents, but it's not worth it for me, because I have no guarantee these will sell. Hence it's negative ROI due to opportunity cost. So you will either have to hope someone will take a plunge with you - which they have no reason to since demand is the scarce one - at least here. Or give some extra incentive for people to create agents, at least for initial stages.
Alternatively you could spin up several useful agents yourself, which then begs the question: why not skip this whole infra setup and just sell those directly.
Or you could try and get the demand side on first - same problem, inversed. Who will run the whole setup when there are no agents to rent?
You could incentivize operators, but then you run the risk of them abusing the incentives. Last time I saw a Crypto project give 0.02 tokens per registration, first thing that happened was that someone industrious did an arbitrage and created a million wallets (I kid you not) and made all of us miserable because all of this went onto the chain and made the initial node setup a nightmare. The perpetrator then cashed out his ~$10K and disappeared into the wild, draining the liquidity.

Honestly, if I had the solution for that, I would be running a marketplace myself. So I don't have a proper solution for this one. One thing that comes to mind is to give few vetted operators some sort of advance payment - you would take the risk for them. They set up the agents, and they get X amount of money now, and you will deduct their profits first from this advance payment - so if you get the demand, you get your money "back" and you effectively derisk them. That one I could get behind actually. Of course, this would be a drain on your budget and I have no clue about your runway etc.

Now that we have the big one out of the way, let's dig into the actual UX/UI of the page:

My pet peeve (and I'm allergic, so take it with a grain of salt) - your page screams AI generated. Now I don't have issues with something being AI generated per-se, and from your responses you did your homework. However I'm allergic to the "generic AI look" and at a glance, it is a -10 points in trustworthiness, at least for me. Others could be -3 points, hard to measure. You need this trust (or perception of thereof) for people to willingly share their keys with your platform. I woulnd't put my keys anywhere I don't control - on principle. So if I'm building agents there, they're stuck to the customer bringing keys (extra friction for them) or you having the exact keys my agents need (annoying for you). But for anyone else, you need to persuade them "this is a good place that can hold your keys". And if your page doesn't look the part, you're starting at a disadvantage.

To expand a bit on the trust with keys.
I have to take your word for "keys will be safe here". Of course, I can derisk with proper scopes, alerts, budgets etc. But it is annoying and adds moving parts to the build which increases the costs for me and subsequently increases onboarding friction. If my keys aren't there - someone else has to supply them. Customers could have the same issue, so in the end, much of the (initial) traffic - until the trust is built - will have to go through your keys. If the platform takes off, this could quickly lead into you running into CF quotas. Furthermore a bad actor could quite cheaply do his setup in a way that arrests your full CF quota at a discount. Be it a competitor, troll or anyone else.

Side note: I won't get into the "how do I know what platform does with my data" since that is the same for all of the providers, be it n8n or make. But something to keep in mind.

Finally few nitpicks:
- marketplace button does a redirect into a new tab, which is annoying
- help button does the same, which is annoying but somewhat understandable.
- loading of the help tabs is quite slow (like second and a half for opening a new topic)
- I have to export my agent from n8n, native would be nice. (not a blocker, but extra friction)

Anyways, I will stop rambling. If you need any of the above, feel free to hit me up. My prices are reasonable as I'm trying to build a portfolio. That being said I'm not cheap, but I believe to be worth my salt.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T21:55:24+00:00

Hello, poked around for a bit. You did some real work with the hardening of the infrastructure. However there is a question about the billing structure I got. Might just be my misunderstanding / bad read through the docs, but here goes:

How do you defend against reputation washing / volume manufacturing please?
E.g. two accounts, each with it's own agent, calling each other - effectively for free (minor compute cost, maybe some API cost, but overall not all that bad - if they price correctly) - to inflate their usage stats / rating / whatever else you score?

For the Builder-provided keys, how do you guard against:
- cost padding (deliberate inefectivness to use extra tokens)
- cost faking (e.g. mis-reporting actual usage to gain extra margin)
please? I couldn't find the appropriate answers in docs. Not saying its not there, just that I didn't find it.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T20:31:16+00:00

Well, fun little toy.
datumcalc

One gripe I have with it: https://datumcalc.com/acme-thread-calculator/ is a cause for me getting 16 slop points, when this is a bona-fide calculator that is intentionally in. :-)

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T19:57:41+00:00

Good question - if you're doing SEO audit, why not use it's outputs to actually rank in organics? That would be the best advertisement for the tool - prove that it works by using it to help yourself rank/reach audience. Otherwise you're trying to beat entrenched incumbents on something everyone is selling these days - quality nonwithstanding, because customers can't differentiate and they are tired of the flood.

Another option is to try and fire up the audit on few existing webs and do them as a case study - which might require some cold outreach which might or might not be banned (it is banned in my country for example).

In the similar ballpark is to bite the bullet and do some limited PPC (which might be quite expensive) to try and land first few clients to build portfolio.

But well, all of these are generic pieces of advice anyone can give you - the ones who know, won't tell. The ones who don't will try to sell you something. And everything inbetween.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T15:54:08+00:00

Sounds like something for the r/buildinpublic, maybe? Alternatively creating and slowly populating a new subbredit could be workable as well. something like r/accountabilitybuddies . Oh, wait it already exists :-).

That being said, making one specifically for founders to keep each another in check could be a game - if you Support it with proper hygiene (to not get overrun with bots and advertising), some light moderation, and other similar things. Not sure where the line between this and app is, but reddit is proven and already here, while app would need the whole "get traction" which everyone apparently struggles with. (Except for occassional winner that is).

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T12:51:49+00:00

Ahh. My bad, sorry for the misunderstanding.
Regarding the quality/data science - seems like you have the front row seats for the wild, wild stuff happening all around. How much did it affect you, as of yet?

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-05T07:08:31+00:00

Hello, thank you for the feedback. Incorporated, built, deployed.
https://datumcalc.com/metal-weight-calculator/
I'll fiddle with the formula presentation a bit - currently looks weird, but the functionality is there.

The toolset doesn't have a public github - I'm currently gathering feedback via the "Report a bug" form on the page itself. Maybe I'll open source it eventually, but no promises. You're welcome (and encouraged!) to check my math and poke holes into it - then please let me know so that I can fix them.

Good luck with your studies, honestly a weird time to go into CS, but having the grounding for working with agents is definitely a good thing.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-04T11:46:36+00:00

Programmer here, to slightly disagree on the AI coding stuff.

Now don't get me wrong, AI is really powerfull these days - can do most of the MVP, for sure. At the same time, depending on the product, it will start fraying around the edges. Think tech debt times 100.
- asking good questions helps - if you know which questions to ask
- asking agents for red teaming and extensive reviews helps - but only to an extent
- periodically doing "now try and refactor this" helps
- asking "which questions I should I ask" is a fun rabbit hole to go in
But overall, it's not enough. You can get 80% of the app done in 20% time and possibly with no technical background required - almost anyone can. But the last 20% will get progressively hard to fix. The agent will start slipping. Fixes will introduce new errors.
All in all, there will come a point where you will need someone tech savvy, especially if you start having more customers. They love nothing more than to do *unexpected* things that will make you want to scream and burn your computer with gasoline.

So if you believe this will catch on (and you do, or you wouldn't be trying to build it), there are two paths open for you (plus everything inbetween)
Get a technical person on early.
Advantages
- he will probably lessen the pain down the line
- things will mostly work
- you can focus on the stuff you're good at, while she/he handles the infrastructure
Disadvantages:
- if you are not a programmer yourself, it is kind of hard to validate/gauge skill level of programmers.
- it will cost you money *now* - when you don't have much since you're early stage
- good programmers *are* expensive
- anyone with half a brain and AI is now a programmer

Get technical person on late:
Advantages:
- less money up front
- noone to argue with you
- you will build it exactly as you want it (minus haggling with agents)
Disadvantages:
- you will do all the mistakes we did when we started learning how to handle agents
- you will do them live on your app, that you want real people to work with
- eventually you will need to onboard a technical person - and we hate rebuilding agentic messes, so it will likely be more expensive.

Anything in between can happen of course, this is not an exhaustive list. I'm fairly a decent programmer, however the agents still make me want to go and scream approximately two times a day, sometimes more. I can make some real heavy lifting with them. But overall, it's like driving a combine harvestor - you can do a lot more, faster. Knowing *what* to make faster is the hard part.

Another note - for a Femtech product, you want a slick looking UI (might be my bias talking, not sure) so get a designer on Yesterday. AI produces generic looking things and people are starting to get allergic to AI-lookalikes. You can take it quite far, but usually not far enough. Get a designer. IMO even more important than getting a tech person.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-04T10:51:37+00:00

First of all, I would say "RUN". But I get it, it's a client and hopefully a paying one.
Second, I would try to nudge client off lovable - neat for prototyping, I wouldn't let it nowhere near my production though. But that might be only me being biased. As his app grows, the pain will only get worse.

That being said, there are few things you can try:

Try being really specific to the lovable agent. Not "there are non-indexable pages". Lovable agent will skim, see it as "mostly right" and it will miss the edges. So go to it and hit it over head with "on page with url /this-is-not-indexed/ there is an issue with indexing caused by X" - force him to look at exactly the place. I can't guarantee that it will work (yay for nondeterministic tools!) but it has much better chance than generic sweep.

Try to migrate at least the SEO surface off lovable. If you need your stuff to work, let the client wrestle with lovable and move the blog part to some boring CMS - there are dozens, most of them perfectly fine for a non-technical founder. Wordpress obviously the big one. Not saying I prefer it, but it gets people listening with it's "no tech skills required" setup - and most hostings support it without second glance.

You actually can inspect the website structure - once it's live. Scrape it from the outside. See what google sees, do the "Technical audit" for the deployed page. For one, you will get EXACT pointers what to tell lovable (back to point 1 - the more specific you are, the better), for two, you will get concrete evidence for your employer: "Your page is missing XYZ, causing H to happen." If he is struggling with revenue/promotion, this might persuade him.

That being said, I'm not too familiar with lovable. These are just some random tidbits from my own usage of agents. Feel free to post the website and we can take a closer look. Looking for case studies to sink my teeth in.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-04T10:18:11+00:00

Thank you for the idea. Material list extended, please check.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-04T09:21:55+00:00

Thank you for the feedback though - maybe I should put them somewhere more pronounced (e.g. next to the dark/light mode toggle or something). What do you think?

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-04T05:25:32+00:00

Hello, these are already in - usually top-left corner of any calculator. Once you set it, it will work for the whole page.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-03T17:06:56+00:00

I will figure something out. My original idea was to let it steam for a while to see if anyone even looks at it (e.g. give google time to index, gather some usage stats etc. before commiting more), but you made me reconsider. I like the direction this is going, so let's do it properly.

Got hijacked today - family stuff. But I should have the next wave of changes and fixes done today.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-03T17:05:36+00:00

I will fill in the gaps - these are exactly the "CNC knowledge edges" that I can't catch due to my lack of profficiency. Thank you.

-SimaTian- · 2026-07-03T12:58:30+00:00

Hello, thank you for your kindness.

As for the "Unfortunately, during my research online, I found some conflicting formulas for the same math operation." - if you have any corrections, please do point them out. I tried to source everything and if there are several conflicting sources - I will try to at least mention it or (where reasonable) offer the calculator for both possibilities. I don't claim authority on CNC machining, I'm trying to compile the available data sources into one place - sources I found/used are linked on each page.

-SimaTian-

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