TL;DR: Premium Cabinets founder Randy Lorensen says he can't code, and that four Ai tools told him building his own kitchen design software was basically impossible. He used Anthropic's Claude Code anyway. He now has his beta version that he calls TurnKey Cabinet Design.
At about 10:30 on a Sunday night, Randy Lorensen spent 5 minutes typing out what he wanted. Then, by his own account, he told the computer to begin.
Days earlier, he says, he'd asked four different Ai tools whether his idea could work.
"all four AIs said, 'Don't waste your time. That's basically impossible.'"
He went back and asked for odds. The best any of them gave him was 10%, he says, and most came in under 5%.
The idea was to build his own kitchen design software.
Lorensen is the founder and CEO of Premium Cabinets, a cabinet brand sold through independently owned dealer locations from Arizona to New Hampshire.
He's also a former professional poker player. And he says he can't get a program to say hello world on his own.
The busywork
Plenty of the jobs he gives Ai are the dull kind every service business knows.
His team sends an order to a manufacturer, where a person retypes it. Sometimes, he says, they type two of something when the order called for three.
He says an Ai checker now compares those orders, plus the pallet and shipping fees, so a person doesn't have to do the monotonous rechecking.
A Monday newsletter to the field used to be one person's job.
Now, he says, an open-source Ai model pulls data from the company's CRM and emails it out at 7:00 AM. By his description, it carries twice the information.
There was also a DBA filing on a Texas state website he says looks like a second grader built it 25 years ago. He asked one of his agents to fill it out.
It asked him for the details. About 10 or 15 minutes later, it asked for a credit card number for the $25 fee. He says he spent maybe 30 seconds.
The weak spot
The job he admits to doing worst is managing people.
"I am terrible at managing people."
So one evening during a football game, he says, he built a bot to read the Ai meeting notes piling up unread in his inbox. It pulls out his to-dos and checks what each person was assigned.
It also grades his own assignments, checking things like whether he gave a clear outcome and a deadline. The next morning, he says, it handed him a follow-up list, and he followed up.
"it's kind of managing me managing them."
The strange land
The design software was a bigger leap. He says the program his company uses costs $6,600 up front and $1,850 a year per seat, and the price keeps climbing.
He says it needs a machine beyond a gaming computer, and people fly to other cities for three-day classes to learn it.
So he opened a terminal, a program he says he'd never used in his life, and started working with Anthropic's Claude Code.
After that Sunday night prompt, he says, it ran for three days straight and came back with a working version.
"while I realized it was 98% right, all the edge cases have been 99% of the work."
By the October interview, he said multiple Claude agents had been coding around the clock for 4 and a half months. He says he built it alone, with other people helping find bugs.
The night before, he said, one of his plans ran out of tokens and shut down overnight.
Coming back with a working tool
The result is TurnKey Cabinet Design, which he called a beta. He said it was mostly used in-house so far, with some of his dealers using it too.
The day of the interview, he said, his team started marketing it to retail customers in a couple of markets with no dealer.
From watching people test it, he says a first-timer can design a kitchen in 15 to 30 minutes, faster than a professional in the incumbent software.
What he brought home
Lorensen frames the payoff as time. He told the show the big thing so far has been time saving.
The surprise came after that.
"Now, I'm also working more by the way, which this is I did not see this one coming. I started using it so I could work less and have more freedom."
He says each new thing he figures out leads to the next project.
His working rule for the agents fits on a sticky note.
"Just say here's the outcome. And then yeah, check it."
He adds that the checking shrinks as you go.
The idea for your shop
The jobs Lorensen hands to Ai are the ones he calls monotonous or admits he's bad at, from rechecking orders to following up with his team.
The useful question for your own business is which recurring job you'd describe the same way.
A note on guardrails. Several of these jobs touch customer orders and CRM records. Keep customer data out of any Ai tool unless its business terms cover that use.
Ai drafts, and you review it before anything goes out or gets filed. Keep payment in your own hands, and check filings like a DBA with your attorney or accountant.
If a bot tracks what each person on your team was assigned, tell them up front what it reads and why.
Nate
Hire an Ai Certified Operator (Full-Time or Part Time)
Every AiOS Certified Operator goes through a multi-week filtration, 40+ hours of hands-on training and continuous education, with peer support before they ever touch your business. These aren't generalists who stumbled into AI.