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AI IN MI I BY PETER DODS BUILD IT & THEY WON’T COME
A few articles back, I warned readers about the hidden cost of building your own apps. Who owns them? Who fixes them when they break? And I learned that lesson the hard way. Yesterday, I finally landed on an answer. THE APP THAT NO ONE USED I built an instrument intake app that runs as a kiosk on an iPad. When a customer brings in a repair, they enter their information, snap a few photos and hit “submit.” They can be automatically added to our Mailchimp list. On the back end, our technicians see a live queue of arrivals with a running stream of time-stamped notes. When a tech closes a job, the customer gets an automated email with the final cost. It moves the whole process off pa- per and puts the bulk of the work on the customer. I proudly showed it to my man- agers. Then it sat there, untouched, for months. THE REAL OBJECTION When I asked my general man- ager why nobody was using it, he gave me a familiar answer: “I like what you made, and we clearly need something like this, but who supports it when there’s a problem?” It was a fair question. He likes the tech, but he isn’t invested in AI the way I am. Six months
what my team needed.
90 MINUTES THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
My general manager was hooked, and with a twinkle in his eye, he went off on his own. HAND THEM THE MAP The next day, he showed me a redesigned intake app that was better than anything I could have produced alone. He admitted he never would have pushed through those first 90 minutes of setup by himself. He had quit in the past because he lacked the vocabulary. That’s the quiet wall most people hit. A year ago, I hit it too, but then I watched 20 hours of YouTube before build- ing my first automation workflow. It was frustrating, but it’s how I earned the words. What I handed my general manager wasn’t just code; it was a map proving there’s a way through to the fun part. By showing him the path in- stead of telling him to go watch YouTube, I finally unlocked what the project was missing: his natural eye for design and his deep knowl- edge of how the store actually runs. If you’re the person in your business leveraging AI at a high level, your job isn’t to be the sole expert. It’s to empower others with your resources and let them make the tools their own. Build it alone, and they won’t come. Build it to- gether, and you might be surprised who takes the wheel. MI
We started with Claude Code, a ver- sion of Claude that works directly with the files on your computer instead of in a browser tab. I figured the desktop app would ease him in, but it choked while installing software, so we switched to the ter- minal version. It looks intimidating, all command line and no buttons, but it downloaded everything it needed on its own and turned out to be the easier path. From there, we set up the plumbing. We signed him up for GitHub, the standard place to store and share code, so we could both work on the same project with- out overwriting each other. Then I invited him as a collaborator on Vercel, where I host a lot of my work. We also loaded a few token- saving Claude skills I’ve been lean- ing on lately. My favorite is called Caveman: it forces the AI to drop its polished paragraphs and grunt back at me. Instead of “Certainly! I would be happy to help you refac- tor that function,” I get “Function slow. Me fix.” Then, instead of starting from scratch, we pulled up the idle intake app. At first, I kept both hands on the wheel. Then my GM started making suggestions. As we debated edits, it finally clicked for me: he is the one who actually uses this tool. His instincts about how it should look and flow were simply better than mine. I realized how much time I had wasted trying to guess
“If you’re the person in your business
ago, I wouldn’t have had a good response. This time I did. I told him we have tools to build these projects together, so if either of us is out of the shop, the other can step in and fix it. He had tried developer tools before and found them intimidating, with too much noise and a payoff too far away to justify the time. So, we sat down with his laptop, one screen between us. leveraging AI at a high level, your job isn’t to be the sole expert. It’s to empower others.”
Peter Dods is the owner of Honolulu-based Easy Music Center.
OCTOBER 2026 I MUSIC INC. I 25
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