December 22, 2025
created with NotebookLM ^ another pretty exciting and new AI tool
In many businesses, there's at least one critical workflow that's still "stuck in paper mode." For our veterinary clinic, it was the patient check-in system. The front desk would print a sheet, which was then physically walked to the back and placed in a wall-mounted holder. This created a clunky, chronological stack where the paper on top was the next patient to be seen. It worked, but it was messy. Paper got lost, staff wasted steps, and there was no at-a-glance clarity for the team. We couldn’t filter or prioritize cases, let alone see operational trends like busy hours or bottlenecks. One minute you're dealing with a "PROLAPSED COW BDL," the next it's a "BLOCKED CAT??"—all trapped on a disorganized pile of paper.
The default solution is to buy software. There are countless prebuilt digital queue boards available, but they often come with expensive subscription fees, training overhead, and a host of features you pay for but never use. We didn’t need a giant system; we needed a clean, color-coded visual queue with clear columns for STATUS, CLIENT, SPECIES, and DVM that could bring order to the chaos.
This led me down a different path: building a simple, custom solution. With the help of AI as a partner, I was able to create a practical, low-cost internal tool that upgraded our daily workflow in just a few hours. Here are the five key lessons I learned on that journey.
1. The "Obvious" Solution is Often a Trap
My first decision was to actively avoid purchasing a prebuilt queue board. While many of these products are excellent, they are designed to solve everyone's problem, which means they often come with a "catch" for businesses with simple needs. This includes recurring subscription fees, the overhead of onboarding staff, and the technical challenges of integration. And the truth is: we didn’t need a giant system. We would have been paying for a suite of features just to get the one thing we did: a reliable way to see the patient queue in near real time.
To be fair: it wasn’t "free." I pay for an AI plan, and I invested time. But compared to recurring monthly software costs, this was a ridiculously good trade. This reflects a common business trap of "overbuying" complex systems when a much simpler solution would suffice. By correctly identifying our core need, we avoided committing to a costly platform that would have been overkill.
2. The Real Power of AI Isn't Magic; It's Partnership
The secret weapon in this project wasn't that AI magically "built the whole thing." The real value came from using AI as a development partner. It didn't write the final program on its own, but it accelerated every step of the process by filling several crucial roles. AI acted as a: