Look, I love my brother. But the man is relentless.

He’s been pouring his heart and soul into Izzi’s Gym—our Pokemon card shop—and it’s growing so fast I’m pretty sure it’s breaking several laws of physics. The problem? There are still only 24 hours in a day, and I’m starting to suspect he’s secretly cloned himself because I don’t know how else he’s keeping up.

Me? I’m just trying to survive. And by survive, I mean finding ways to work smarter instead of dying under a mountain of inventory management.

The Lego Problem

We recently decided to start selling Legos because apparently we hate free time. And immediately I knew: this is going to eat us alive. Do you know how time-consuming it is to price individual Lego sets? You’ve got to look them up on Bricklink, figure out the market value, calculate what we’ll pay, and then—actually, I’m boring myself just describing it.

But here’s where it gets fun: I had Claude build me a custom block in literally a few hours that does all of this automatically.

You drop in a Lego set number, and boom—it hits the Bricklink API, pulls all the data, applies our buying percentage, and spits out exactly what we’ll pay for it. Customers can check prices before they even leave their house. We can use it on the fly when someone walks in with a bin of Legos. It’s elegant. It’s efficient. It cost me exactly zero dollars.

The Part Where My Mind Explodes

I keep coming back to this: a few years ago, this would have required hiring a developer, spending thousands of dollars, and waiting weeks for something that might not even work right. Now? An afternoon with Claude, and I’ve got a custom tool that’s saving us hours every week.

This is the kind of thing that makes me giddy about AI. Not because it’s flashy or impressive (though it kind of is), but because it’s practical. It’s solving a real problem that was actively making our lives harder.

And honestly? If AI can help me keep up with my brother’s maniacal work ethic without me actually having to become maniacal myself, I’ll take it. The man needs to be stopped, and apparently custom Lego pricing blocks are how I’m going to do it.

Stay tuned for more tales of survival from the trenches of small business chaos.