A Gruntless Success

One of the first users of Gruntless was a guy I found on reddit who had a particularly tear-the-hair-off-my-head-level-of frustrating task. Three-four times a month, this guy would get a zip file with 50-300 images, representing a catalog of items for a digital store.

As well as the zip, he received a "starter ID", and a mapping of items to size distributions.

So for example he would get "1302" and:

The file name of each image included data like the brand, type and color. Something like NIKE-TSHIRT-RED.jpg.

Ultimately, this user had to manually build an excel file where each row represented all the item-size combinations for a given image. So for the example above, he would have 4 rows for the NIKE-TSHIRT-RED.jpg image:

And that was just one column. He also had to track the running ID, but if it was the same item then it became a sub ID. For example, 1302-1, 1302-2, etc. That's if an item had sizes, not all items did.

There were other columns too, in fact the resulting excel was nearly 60 columns wide, and this task would take him anywhere between 3-8 hours to complete.

Terrible, menial, and highly error prone work.

Enter Gruntless

Needless to say, this is prime Gruntless territory. The zip file was too big for any LLM to handle (not to mention all the places it could hallucinate the wrong data), this user had no intentions of installing Java for OpenRefine, and you'd have to be a proper PowerQuery/Excel wizard to get those to do what he needed.

With Gruntless, the guy just laid out in natural language what the task was, and bim-bam-boom, Gruntless created the app for him. Now all he has to do is drag and drop the zip file and press a button to run the app, which performs all those annoying steps automatically.

The End of Digital Gruntwork

This was one of the best emails to receive: Screenshot of the email

I mean really. We are humans, we are not meant to be doing busywork. It's little moments like these that motivate me to keep going with Gruntless.

If you've got a task that's eating up your time, and you're tired of doing it over and over again, then maybe it's time to give Gruntless a try