From the factory floor to AI developer: tools that run in my own plant

For 13 years I have worked in production at a steel-tube manufacturer. Not in an office — on the floor, with the machines, the night shifts, the handovers at 6 a.m. A few years ago I started building software in my free time. Not tutorials for their own sake — tools that solve problems I actually see every day. Why a factory worker writes code In production you learn one thing fast: it does not matter what looks good on a slide. It matters what works at shift handover. That perspective turned out to be my biggest advantage as a self-taught developer — I know the problem before I write the first line. What I have built PIPEZ — a shift & part-count PWA. Offline-capable, running on Cloudflare Workers + D1, live in production to capture shift and piece-count data that used to live on paper. A tool-management app. A multi-user client-server app with optimistic concurrency and a local AI assistant, used daily in the office to manage the lifecycle of dies in tube production. DeepCode — an agentic AI coding client. Electron + React + TypeScript, with its own tool loop, a swarm mode, and CI/tests. The project I am proudest of. Plus multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, and n8n automations that run every day. The stack Python/FastAPI, TypeScript/React, Node, Docker, PostgreSQL + pgvector, Cloudflare Workers, MCP, computer vision. Writing in public I will be writing here about the bridge I keep coming back to: real production experience plus building with AI. If you are automating something messy and real, I would love to compare notes.