Thursday, June 18, 2026

Build the tool to look like the thing the user already draws by hand.

A long, fast day on the gasket field app. The big one: techs can now sketch a real walk-in cooler on the canvas the way a fab shop draws it, and the app prices it correctly.

Shipped

• Sketch-a-unit, shipped to production — replaced the old fixed-shape picker with a drawing canvas. A tech draws each door and drawer of a cooler line, sizes them, groups the ones that are really one appliance, and the layout matches the actual stainless line in front of them. Built it live on a real phone, iterating on Neil's feedback dozens of times through the day
• Pricing fix for 3-sided units — walk-in coolers whose gasket only runs three sides were being quoted as if they had four. Fixed the math so the price follows the real edges, behind a test that failed before the fix and passed after
• Offline-first field work — the canvas now saves to the device on every change, so a tech closing the app or losing signal mid-inspection no longer loses the work. It uploads when they're back online
• QuickBooks data viewer, live — admins can now browse the synced customers, invoices, and estimates right in the app, and the first real sync landed clean
• Voice inspection, specced — wrote and locked the design for letting a tech talk through a unit while a local AI fills the form (heard-it, check-me), with no paid model and a transcript kept for later review. Spec only — build comes next
• New concept: kitchen inventory — a restaurant chef flagged taking stock as a real pain, so I researched the space and stood up a private research site for a voice-and-photo stock-take tool that writes counts back to the restaurant's point-of-sale. Early-stage, just exploring

Notes

The pattern that made the canvas click: stop inventing a UI and copy the artifact the user already trusts. A gasket pro sketches these jobs on paper with the dimensions outside the box and written as fractions, never decimals. Every time I drifted toward something "cleaner," it read wrong; every time I matched that sketchbook style, it read right. The interface should disappear into a tool they already know how to hold.