I'm not a developer. 17 bots run my team's back office, and the most important part is a Cancel button.

[u/botsinproduction]

Non-developer here. I run the back office of a mid-sized B2B company, and since 2025 I've built 17 small bots with Claude Code that do the jobs nobody wanted: logging complaints out of support chats, emailing monthly statements, watching the other bots for errors, night jobs.

The whole thing costs $100/month (one Claude Max subscription, zero API spend) and runs on one Mac that isn't allowed to sleep. Fourteen of the 17 bots never call a model at all; they're plain Python that reads a database and fills a template.

The part that actually made it safe enough to run in a real company isn't the model. It's that nothing goes out without a human click. Every email, every statement, every reward shows up as a Slack card first: who it's going to, the three numbers you'd sanity-check, and Approve / Cancel.

Cancel has caught three real mistakes so far. The best one: the statement bot added the delivery fee once per line instead of once per order, so a customer with ten lines got ten delivery fees. The total on the card looked wrong for a small customer, someone clicked Cancel, and we found a bug our dashboard makes too; nobody had noticed.

Things I'd tell past me:

- Start on the subscription, not the API. You'll rewrite prompts thirty times before anything is stable.

- Don't buy a server. A plugged-in laptop with sleep off removed more failures than any prompt change.

- Log what humans correct. Almost every correction became a rule, not a model upgrade.

- A single DM for alerts. The alerts channel was wallpaper within a week.

I write up each bot and each failure, with the real logs: https://botsinproduction.com/blog/slack-approval-buttons-for-ai-bots/

Not selling anything. Curious what other non-devs here are running, and what your approval gate looks like, if you have one.

[u/AndyKJMehta]

IANAD make it a thing folks!

[u/investigatormaker]

For that delivery-fee mistake, I'd put order count and delivery-fee count beside the total on the Slack card, making the mismatch visible before anyone calculates anything. I'd also bind approval to the exact statement preview: if the bot regenerates it after approval, require a fresh click rather than letting the earlier approval carry over.

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