To make this more interesting, read in the voice of Morgan Freeman.
I've been in the
sign industry for 20 years. For most of those years, I've watched us all complain about our software. Everybody knows the workflow can really SUCK! Everybody does it anyway because there's nothing better. Or they're using software that costs too much and still doesn't do half of what you need.
Screw... that.
I didn't want to waste my life on that kind of work. Why should I? I'm too pretty. I needed a better solution!
So I built one.
Actually, I built several. And they work on real world projects at 4x speed. That's not boasting. That's numbers.
Now here's the part that's going to make some of you skeptical. I built these with AI.
Before you close this thread...
I know. The AI conversation in this industry has been almost entirely about clients showing up with terrible ChatGPT logos and expecting us to print them on a monument
sign. I get the frustration. But that's one tiny, annoying corner of what AI actually does.
Here's what nobody in the
sign industry is talking about yet. AI can help you BUILD your solutions, custom fit. Not clip art. Not logos. Actual working software that solves actual problems in your shop.
I don't have a programming degree. I'm a
sign industry professional. I could not have built these applications on my own. What I do have is domain expertise from years of soul-crushing, monotonous work. I know exactly what I want and exactly where the existing tools fall short. That knowledge is the hard part. That's the part AI can't do right now.
What AI can do is write code. And it's gotten scary good at it.
What it actually looks like
There's a lot of hype. Building software with AI is not "hey ChatGPT, make me an ADA app." That gets you nothing useful.
What it actually looks like is more like this. You sit down and you think hard about the problem. What does the workflow need to be? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? What are the edge cases? You sketch it out. You make decisions about how things should work based on your years of experience doing the actual work.
Then you describe what you need to AI, piece by piece. You test what it gives you. I make web apps so it gives me a webpage to review. It's wrong sometimes. It's wrong a lot, actually. But you catch the mistakes because you know the domain. You know that Braille translation has rules that most programmers have never heard of. You know that
sign maps need to reference room numbers a certain way. You know what the production floor needs to see on a shop drawing. You know your problems.
The AI handles the code. You handle everything else. The design, the decisions, the testing, the iteration. It's a tool in your hands, not a magic button.
It takes patience and it takes critical thinking. You have to be willing to look at what AI gives you and say "no, that's wrong, here's why" and push it in the right direction. There are features I rebuilt over and over before they worked right. And there are still some bugs.
But the fact that someone from the
sign industry can build production-grade tools like this at all? That's the point.
Five years ago, if I wanted to build a custom application that solves my custom problem, I would have needed to hire a development team (tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars). Developers who don't know the
sign industry. I'd spend half the project just explaining what a message schedule is. That barrier is basically gone now. All that cost drops to the price of your AI subscription and your extra time. This is real right now. $100,000 to a $1000? Incredible.
The software industry is collapsing... right... into... your lap.
Why this matters for you
Think about that for a second. Every one of you has deep knowledge about some part of this business. Maybe you've been doing vehicle wraps for 30 years and you know exactly how the estimating process should work but no software does it right. Maybe you run a shop and your job tracking workflow is held together with sticky notes and prayers. Maybe you've got an install crew and there's no good way to track field progress.
You know the problem better than any software company ever will. And now you have access to tools that can help you build the solution. Your solution. You don't need a
computer science degree. You need to be good at thinking through problems, which... you already are. That's literally the job.
The real AI conversation
Most of the AI conversation has been noise. Bad logos, overpromising, hype. But there's a quieter thing happening underneath all that noise. Regular people in specialized industries are using AI to build tools that solve their own problems. Not billion dollar companies. People like me, building exactly what they need because they finally can.
That's the AI story worth paying attention to. Not the logos.
DO NOT SLEEP ON THIS.
Let me know if you want a tutorial. I'll write a post here to show you how to make something really simple to get your feet wet.
- i am 3toed, struck by lightning, bit by a cobra
