How We Run Caffeine

We build AI operating systems for small businesses. We installed one here first, and this is what it looks like on an ordinary day.

I own a small software company. For most of thirteen years that meant everything ran through me: support tickets, DNS changes, proposals, the newsletter, the website, the hosting. The team builds the client work. Running the business was mine.

That stopped being true this summer. Not because I hired anyone. Because I gave an AI real access to our systems, wrote down how we do things, and set it up so it does the routine work and I approve it.

It is the same setup we install for clients.

What it is connected to

It talks to each of these through its API. It is not clicking around in a browser pretending to be me.

  • Our helpdesk
  • Our issue tracker and code hosting
  • DNS
  • Transactional email
  • The marketing contact database
  • The form pipeline on this website
  • Our servers
  • Our YouTube channel
  • My inbox
  • My calendar

What a support ticket looks like now

A ticket arrives. The system reads it, checks the site if it needs to, and drafts a reply in my voice from our help address. Then it waits. I read the draft, usually on my phone, and either say yes or change a line. It sends the reply and closes the ticket.

Early on it signed off wrong. I told it once. That correction is a rule it reads before every reply now, and it has not happened again.

That is the whole of what people mean by a system that learns. Something got written down, and something reads it every time.

What a site change looks like now

We moved this website off WordPress to a static build we host ourselves. The AI did most of the porting and most of the checking. It found videos sitting on the old server that we had forgotten about, put them on our YouTube channel, and updated the pages that referenced them. I did not open YouTube.

First commit to live site was under a week. Then it wrote down how it had done it, which is why the next one will be faster.

What content looks like now

Every morning I get a short list of post ideas, pulled from my inbox and from whatever we worked on the day before. I pick one. It drafts the post in my voice. Nothing publishes until I say so. The newsletter works the same way.

What it knows

About twenty documents describe how we work: our voice, our servers, how to reply to a client, how to migrate a site, how to qualify an RFP, what we have and have not done. The AI reads the ones it needs for the job in front of it. When something changes, or when I correct it, the document changes.

What it does not do

  • It does not send, publish, or change anything that matters without me.
  • It does not hold passwords for things that need a person to log in.
  • It runs on one small server, alongside our automation, and it depends on one AI vendor. We would rather say that than imply otherwise.
  • It gets things wrong. The setup is built so that wrong shows up as a draft I did not approve, rather than as an email a client received.

Why this is the product

We did not build this to sell it. We built it because I was the bottleneck. It turned out the parts are the same for any small business: connect the tools, write down how you work, let the AI do the routine part, and keep a person on the approvals.

That is what we install now.

Want to see it?

I am happy to walk through any of this in person, including the parts that have gone wrong. Or tell us about your business and we will point at where the bottleneck actually is.

Start With an Audit