This has been a consulting-heavy year for me.
I go in and out of those, and I kept running into the same problem: nearly every invoicing system produces ugly, one-size-fits-all invoices that are embarrassing to hand to another human being.
I don’t understand why people don’t treat invoices like marketing material.
They really should.
An invoice should be beautiful, clean, and typographically correct.
It should make you look like a professional to the people who matter most in any consulting project:
The people who are kind enough to pay you for your expertise and good taste.
This was on my mind when I started testing the new GPT Sol model.
So I loaded up my trusty copy of Spec Kitty 3.2 and set it to work on the problem.
I’m happy to report that, after six days of solid, nonstop work, it has finished the foundational layer, worked out a CI/CD pipeline, and published the first substantial piece of the application to GitHub, in case anyone feels like reviewing it:
https://github.com/LynnColeArt/invoice-manager
The application and its storage
The app will be boring in useful ways.
When it’s finished, it’ll let you create invoices with LaTeX, support several domestic and international invoice formats, and generate real-time previews while you edit.
The backend is written in the latest stable version of Zig, with a Next.js frontend.
For persistent storage, it uses ShovelerDB. The easiest way to describe Shoveler is as something like an embedded MariaDB style Sql variant, on a system built from scratch and packaged more like SQLite, with native vector support and owner locking per application rather than per instance.
It also has a completely deranged memory-projection layer because, of course, it does.
The finished invoicing app will include useful reports, a couple of practical dashboards, and various quality-of-life features for individual consultants and small consulting outfits.
And it just started working on the UI, so... it should be finished sometime in early August?
I’ll let you know what it built the next time I look in on it.