AI Purchasing Assistant

01The Problem

Members of the cooperative buy equipment online all the time. Every purchase has to be charged to a specific funded project, and that project needs enough budget left. Someone has to check the balance, find the items, fill the cart, place the order and record it. It is small work, but it never stops.

Most online shops, even big ones like Amazon, give a small team no simple way to automate this. Most automation tools stop there. This assistant works on the real websites, in a real browser, the same way a person would.

02How a Request Flows

1. A member asks. They open a post in a dedicated Discord channel: one post per purchase, one shop per post. The post names the items and the fund to charge.
2. The assistant checks the budget. It looks up the fund's remaining balance in the cooperative's project system. It can only read there, never write.
3. It fills the cart. On an office PC, in a Chrome window already logged into the shop accounts, it adds the items to the cart. If the cart is busy with another request, the new one waits in a queue.
4. A person places the order. Someone at that PC reviews the cart and presses buy. The assistant posts a short status in the request's thread.
5. It records the purchase. When the items leave the cart and an order appears, the assistant adds the purchase to the purchases ledger, a Google Sheet.

If the cooperative has no account at a shop yet, the assistant does not create one on its own. It waits for an admin to say yes, then registers with the cooperative's details.

03Watch It Run

This is a replay of a typical morning. Press play. The items, funds and people are made up, but the behaviour matches the real assistant. Its status messages are short and in Portuguese, like a silent clerk.

04The Human Always Presses Buy

• It never confirms, pays or places an order. Those buttons are off limits. A person at the office PC reviews the cart and clicks buy.
• It only reads the budget. It never writes to the cooperative's project system.
• It never shows passwords in chat. The browser is already logged in. Credentials stay on the office PC.
• It asks before opening new accounts. No new shop account without an admin's go-ahead.
• Every purchase is on record. Each order ends up as a row in the purchases ledger.

05Under the Hood

• Real browser, no API: the assistant drives a normal Chrome window, so it works with any shop the team already uses.
• Cost-aware design: cheap checks run every few minutes with no AI involved. The model (Claude Sonnet) is only woken when something actually changed, like a new request or an emptied cart.
• One queue per shop: requests for a busy cart wait their turn and are picked up in order.
• Says the minimum: a fixed set of short status messages, so threads stay easy to read.

06What Came Out of It

• Members ask for a purchase in one place and see its status in the same thread.
• Budget checks happen on every request, before anything goes in the cart.
• The purchases ledger stays up to date without anyone typing it in.
• The person who places orders only reviews and clicks buy. The prep work is already done.