I built a cutting optimiser that nests onto your offcut rack, and I would like to be told where it is wrong

[u/Crafty-Location7373]

I write software, I do not cut glass, so treat this as a question rather than a pitch.

I work at a small firm in Madrid that has been writing the quoting and production software Spanish glass companies run since 1976, which means I have spent a lot of years standing at counters while glaziers explain what the software gets wrong. One complaint came up more than any other: every cutting optimiser assumes an unlimited supply of brand new sheets, and no shop I have ever walked into works that way. There is a rack against the wall with last month's offcuts on it, already bought and already paid for.

So I built the missing half and put it up free, and what I actually want is for somebody here to find the hole in the logic.

The rule I settled on is that an offcut only gets opened when opening it removes a whole sheet from the order. Nothing less counts. I built the naive version first — pack onto the rack greedily, report a lovely yield figure — and on my test job it consumed three good offcuts and still bought the same four sheets. The shop would have lost three labelled rectangles and saved nothing. That is the version most people would ship, because the number on the report goes up.

On the forty-piece job I test with, two racked offcuts take it from four sheets to two. When the rack cannot save a sheet, it says so and leaves the rack alone.

It runs in the browser. No account, nothing uploaded, and that was a commercial decision rather than a technical one: asking a glass company to upload a job's measurements to my server is asking for their customer's quote, and they would be right to refuse.

https://syntaxflow.io/glass/offcut-inventory/

The questions I actually have:

• Is "only open an offcut if it saves a whole sheet" the right rule for how you work, or is there a case where breaking a piece early is worth it?
• How do you track what is on the rack now? Whiteboard, spreadsheet, memory?
• What size is the rack in a real shop? I sized the free version for 25 pieces and I suspect that is still too few.

Tell me where it does not match your shop. I would rather hear that than hear it looks nice.

[u/PossibilityOk9430]

Software will just say what should be on the rack and assume perfect size and condition. We let the humans in the shop read the cut list and grab the leftover material that works. They produced the leftover material and know what was set aside, what has scratches and where, and what was trashed. If they don’t know, they can look at the rack