The Mixing Bowl
Tips and strategies for running, growing, and surviving your dessert brand.
The Spend Report Was Right About One AI Cache and Wrong About the Other
Bakery Buddy's weekly AI spend report flagged two prompt caches as wasted money, using a break-even rule that had never actually been checked against the real prices. One flag was correct. Following the other one would have raised the bill, not lowered it.
The Cron Cleanup That Broke Sends Twice, in Opposite Directions
Bakery Buddy's automated emails only fire inside a 9am-7pm window in the bakery's own timezone. Two separate 'just tidy up the schedule' edits, nine days apart, broke that guarantee in opposite directions: one silenced every West Coast send for over a week, the next one woke real customers up at 3am.
The Order Status Nothing Could Tell Apart From an Inquiry
Bakery Buddy added a real status between Inquiry and Invoice Sent, with a real button, wired into every list that moves an order forward. Three days later it had zero rows and got deleted, for the same reason the status before it did.
The Notification Bell Got Blamed. It Wasn't the Bell.
A popup kept interrupting Lindsay on the Orders page and she assumed the old notifications bell was back. The bell was already gone. The real bug was a toast whose entire memory of 'you already saw this' was a single saved id, and working through a backlog of 23 requests is exactly what kept resetting it.
The Foreign Key That Made Buddy Say Nothing Needed Attention
One new column gave two tables a second way to relate to each other. Supabase's API layer couldn't pick one, so it refused about 33 queries across the app at once, and most of them just quietly turned into empty lists instead of errors.
Just Opening an Order Was Spending a Credit
A card on Bakery Buddy's order page called Claude twice the moment the page rendered, no button, no ask. Looking at an order was quietly billing for it. Here's why the fix stuck the second and third time it mattered, when the first documented rule usually wouldn't have.
What Happens When Three AI Coding Sessions Share One Git Repo
Git was built assuming one person types at a time. I run several AI coding sessions against Bakery Buddy's repo at once, and for a few days in August that assumption kept quietly breaking in ways no test could catch.
The Thank-You Email That Only Thanked Part of the Order
Bakery Buddy's review-request email describes what a customer ordered by reading one database column. On any order with more than one line item, that column was quietly describing a fraction of it, and every email built from it still read as a complete, well-written sentence.
The Last Screen Before a Customer Paid Was Showing the Wrong Day
A confirmation screen on the last page before a customer pays was asking them to confirm the wrong pickup day, two days off, from two separate bugs stacked on each other. Neither one showed up in a build, because the bug only exists in a customer's timezone, not the server's.
Four Screens Showed Four Different Numbers For the Same Thing
Bakery Buddy shows a small green number when something needs a baker's attention. Orders said 20. Automations said 21. Reports said 17. The toolbar said 14. Nobody could say which one was right, because none of them were reading the same list.
When "Skip" Quietly Means "Never Again"
A birthday email automation looked like it had nothing to send. It actually had eight real orders buried under four stacked bugs, the worst of which turned a normal "not now" into a permanent lockout.
The Nightly Sync That Kept Un-Paying My Customers
A nightly import from FreshBooks was quietly overwriting orders that customers had already paid through Bakery Buddy itself. Here's what happens when two systems both think they own the same truth.
Nobody at a Counter Talks Like a Database
I added voice ordering to Bakery Buddy this week. The speech recognition was the easy part. The hard part was that a customer says "six inch round" and the menu says Round 6", and those two strings share almost nothing.
Go Outside and Stop Playing Video Games
The advice I ignored as a kid finally makes sense. With AI agents doing the heavy lifting, I ship software from a mountain bike trail now.
How to Write a Blog Post with AI (Copy My Exact Steps)
The exact steps and copy-paste prompts I used to make a blog post with AI. No coding. If you can copy and paste, you can do this.
What Building a Bakery App with AI Taught Me About AI for Bakers
I built Bakery Buddy's platform with AI coding tools in about a week. Here's what I actually shipped — and what it means for AI in a small bakery.