Real-World AI Usage Part 1: Vibe Coding a Script to Help my Accounting Department
The reason why there is huge skepticism in AI (especially from programmers) is because hardly anyone shares real-world examples in how they use AI to accomplish certain outcomes, and because of bug-ridden prototypes. Part of the reason why there is a lack of articles and content surrounding this is because companies want to keep their usage a secret, because of both optics and competitive advantage. I’m not here to convince you that AI is worth trillions in stock investment, or that you should smile and eat shit while it replaces you. My aim for this series is to help you as the pleb understand that AI can have an absolutely gargantuan impact on businesses if used properly. While I will not reveal all of the projects I’ve done due to competitive advantage, I’ll share implementations that are obvious to deploy.
First, why should you give a shit about what I say about the topic of AI? Well, I am a business analyst focusing on AI implementation within a billion dollar company, but I combine my experience as an esports writer from 2017-2024, mostly writing about League of Legends, interviewing professional players, writing and producing YouTube videos discussing game strategy, and producing investigative pieces surrounding the esports industry. I have produced almost 300 videos, hundreds of interviews, multiple documentaries, and several investigative pieces. I’m also an amateur car mechanic and former street racer, valet and bellman. I know, the progression of this story makes no sense (even to me), but I’ll be grabbing from that bag of tricks, along with the various jobs I’ve had throughout all of my writings. I’ve witnessed things from the bottom, from non-technical aspects to replaceable individuals, so I’m just letting you know that I’m speaking from experience.
With all of that said, I’m going to show you how I created a python script that has saved my company hundreds of hours a month by automating invoice generation and therefore saving my company in excess of $100K, all by vibe coding.
My accounting department was having a problem collecting invoice documentation for issuing credits to vendors. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but they were manually printing documents and then scanning them all together to create a PDF to then submit as documentation to our payment database in Oracle.
So I decided to develop a python script to merge these documents, while also taking their notes about the invoice and placing it in the PDF files.
The first piece of software I used was Airtable. I actually don’t recommend Airtable because they’re money-grabbing pieces of shit, but my company is kind of obsessed with them. Regardless, I put all requested credits from vendors that fill out an online form into our Airtable database. From there, my accounting department can fill out extra information about the requested invoice. They then click the “create PDF” checkbox and my python script runs through Render.com.
From there it creates the new stitched PDF, combining all supporting documents with the information from the Airtable cells and consolidating everything into a final PDF.
All of this was vibe coded. All of it. It runs almost every day as a webhook for the script to activate through the “Create PDF” checkbox, and I’m saving my company thousands of dollars. All of my code is also documented via readme and documentation.
You may also be wondering, have I replaced jobs with this implementation? No, I just prevented the accounting team from growing due to useless work (which tbf prevents juniors from being hired, but that is another conversation). I could not have accomplished this without the usage of AI. The point of this is not to say AI has handled the end result product, but that it helped create a programmatic script that is more reliable than AI. I have leveraged AI past its weakness of hallucinations to provide me with a product that is programmatic and will produce a far more reliable result.
Notes about the author: Traditionally an esports writer, having written over 100 articles, produced over 300 YouTube videos, multiple documentaries and several investigative pieces.
** AI Generated thumbnail, but not AI generated written words; we’re too proud for that.
*** Contact me for work if you feel you could benefit from my expertise.