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Jachtoday at 12:06 AM3 repliesview on HN

Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)


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shimmantoday at 12:40 AM

It's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case.

edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.

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scottyahtoday at 1:00 AM

I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for teams to reset their service account password and manage permissions, as well as add, remove, switch which project is sponsoring which person, edit points of contact, verify project statuses, and a lot more. It even has some quick charts that pull from our Jira helpdesk queue- charts that people used to run once a week for a meeting are just live now in one place. It also has application statuses and links, and a lot more.

I'd been fighting to make this for two years and kept getting told no. I got claude to make a PoC in a day, then got management support to continue for a couple weeks. It's super beneficial, and targets so many of our pain points that really bog us down.

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qingcharlestoday at 1:17 AM

The ones I can mention.. one that watches a specific web site until an offer that is listed expires and then clicks renew (happens about once a day, but there is no automated way in the system to do it and having the app do it saves it being unlisted for hours and saves someone logging in to do it). Several that download specific combinations of documents from several different portals, where the user would just suck it up previously and right-click on each one to save it (this has a bunch of heuristics because it really required a human before to determine which links to click and in what order, but Claude was able to determine a solid algo for it). Another one that opens PDFs and pulls the titles and dates from the first page of the documents, which again was just done manually before, but now sends the docs via Gemma4 free API on Google to extract the data (the docs are a mess of thousands of different layouts).

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