People keep asking how I run three Riverwalk venues and still ship software full-time. The answer is - a very specific stack of tools that compounds. Here's the live inventory.
Compute
- Mac Mini M4 Pro at home - Claude Code, all dev work, primary brain.
- 2 × DigitalOcean droplets ($6/mo and $12/mo) - every project gets its own droplet so blast radius is contained.
- Cloudflare Tunnel - every internal service hits the internet through a named tunnel, zero open ports.
AI
- Claude (Sonnet + Opus + Haiku) - the actual moat. I write almost no code by hand anymore. Claude Code runs the dev loop, I run the product judgment.
- ElevenLabs - voice cloning for BarPhone (my AI phone receptionist).
- Deepgram - STT for any voice-input pipeline.
Hospitality ops
- Shift4 Lighthouse - wrapped with my own alerts (see previous post).
- Twilio + Pipecat - BarPhone takes our reservation calls.
- Custom Telegram bot fleet - TGTranscribeBot, BillBot, Shift4Bot, HireBot.
The unique part
I don't separate "running a bar" from "building software." Every bar problem becomes a build target. Wait staff missed a reservation? Telegram bot. Phone ringing during service? AI receptionist. Daily sales report? Bot in chat by 9 AM.
Most devs can't ship this stuff for bars because they don't run bars. Most operators can't ship this stuff because they don't code. I'm in the rare middle.
Want my stack pointed at your business?
Email audit@thirstyai.live. I do single-project builds ($500-3500) and small monthly maintenance retainers.