The Opportunity
A business owner had an existing invoicing system which had been built over a decade ago, was complicated to use and needed some upgrades. On top of that, the version of PHP was no longer supported by most hosts. Due to its large size, updating the code to the latest version of PHP was not an option.
The Ask
The goal of this project became rather quickly to re-create the invoicing system with a few enhancements before the next billing cycle.
The Challenge
The project's central challenge was recreating the invoicing within a very short time-frame. On top of that, we had to recreate the very same functionality and get the system to look as close to the previous solution to avoid confusion among customers.
The Solution
To meet this deadline, we counted on help from ChatGPT and Claude 3. We chose to use WordPress as our foundation and just need to recreate the invoicing system using a custom-built set of plugins for WordPress. Using our experience with WordPress and AI, we were able to rebuild the invoicing system within 1 and 1/2 weeks to easily meet our deadline. The new system was easy to use for both customers and our client. The website was now up-to-date and will last for many years to come.
Overcoming Challenges
One of the challenges of building custom solutions is often figuring out what exactly needs to be built. In this case we had a great starting point and the client was not looking to greatly expand his website.
Valuable Lessons
This project allowed us to train ChatGPT and Claude 3 to write code the way we needed. For complex solutions, neither is able to write code with a lot of hand-holding so we had to guide them through the development process.