Automation 2.0 Product Reviewer

The Problem

Every Tag Was Designed by Hand, From a Stack of Paper

Before this system, the process started with a printer. Someone printed physical order forms, then highlighted and hand-sorted every product, 40 to 60 minutes before design work could even begin. Then a designer pulled each order up in Amazon Seller Central, copied and pasted every element into Illustrator one at a time, and made manual design edits to every single tag. On busy days that was up to 4 hours per designer of pure transcription and layout, repeated tomorrow, and the day after that.

The Solution

The Pipeline Transcribes. The Designer Designs.

Automation 2.0 killed the paper system outright. It parses each order with an LLM triage layer (Ollama and Claude, with a shadow-mode verifier that catches the AI when it is wrong), auto-sorts the day's run, does the copy-paste for you, and renders a print-ready tag from a versioned JSON document model. It also makes the design calls. AI layout matching reads the customer's request, then places the logo, sizes the name, and sets the colors on its own. The Product Reviewer is where the designers now spend their time, reviewing and art-directing instead of transcribing. Risky orders arrive pre-flagged, a guided mode walks the queue in print order, and a full layer-based canvas editor handles edits in the browser. Standard tags never touch Illustrator anymore, which is why the Adobe licensing bill is coming down.

Under the Hood

It runs on FastAPI and SQLAlchemy behind a session-authed web UI, with a pure-functional SVG rendering core covered by golden-snapshot tests, self-hosted behind Tailscale. The screenshots below show the app running on demo data.

Visual Walkthrough

Product Reviewer queue with live tag previews, logos, and automatic flags

Review queue: every order rendered as a live tag preview, logo placed, with automatic flags for long names, special requests, and risky layouts

Rendered name tags with customer logos, auto-laid-out

Auto-designed tags: logos placed left or right, names sized to fit, design special requests surfaced next to the preview they apply to

Canvas editor: text and logo layers, safe-area guides, and one-click AI Match that reads the customer's request and lays the tag out for you. Illustrator stays closed

Key Features

What It Does

LLM order parsing with a shadow-mode verifier that audits the AI's work
Auto-sorting of the day's run, replacing 40 to 60 minutes of paper sorting
Logos, names, and titles placed automatically, with AI layout matching that reads the customer's design request
Automatic flags for long names, special requests, punctuation, and risky layouts
Full layer-based canvas editor in the browser, so standard tags never open Illustrator
Guided one-at-a-time review, grouped by plate color in print order
A keyboard-driven flow that lets you approve, skip, and edit without touching the mouse
One-click production sheets and shipping pages, golden-snapshot tested rendering core

Impact

Results

4 hrs → 30 min Per Designer, Per Day

5,285+ Orders Processed

~200/day Running Volume

~240 hrs Saved Per Month

In Production

Running daily at Gem Awards. This system effectively offset a departing $32K a year role, turned up to 4 hours a day of per-designer transcription into a 20 to 30 minute review pass, and is cutting the Adobe bill because standard tags never need Illustrator. It now runs 24/7 on its own server, and the team I trained runs it day to day. I build systems the business owns.