Preserves No. 4 Tools my teammates use
A system of record you can ask in plain English
- Ingredients
- four days, about 45 tools, one link per person, zero write access
- Packed
- Summer 2026
- Best before
- the next time someone closes the billing account
Our property management system knew everything about the business and would tell it only to someone who could click through its screens or write a query. For most of my first year that someone was me, on my laptop, one question at a time.
In June 2026 I built a hosted, read-only connector to it over MCP, the protocol AI assistants use to reach outside tools: a personal link per teammate, every question logged, nothing writable. It took four days. Five teammates use it, founders included, and asked it about 2,000 questions in the first three months; two hires who joined over the summer were on it within seven weeks. What changed is that people answer their own questions now, and the log tells me what they looked for and couldn’t find.
The mess
Everything about the business lived in the property management system: every tenant, unit, lease, invoice and payment across every site. It would tell you anything, if you could click through its screens or write a query against it. For most of my first year that meant questions came to me. Six weeks into the job I had left myself a note, “explore creating a custom connector to our database”, and then spent ten months too busy to build it. By May 2026 I had a connector on my own laptop and was answering questions one at a time; my note that month was to turn it into something a teammate could use without me.
What I built
Over four days in June 2026 I built and deployed a hosted, read-only connector to the property system over MCP, the protocol AI assistants use to reach outside tools: about 45 tools across tenants, units, leases, invoices and payments; a personal secret link per teammate; a log of every query; no write access anywhere, by design. I gave the laptop version to one teammate first, then sent the first two people their links with “if it works on your end, it goes to everyone who would use it”, and retired the laptop tool three weeks later.
Around it, the same move with everything else I had built: a kit of fourteen tools handed to our platform lead with runbooks; the inspection-form tooling handed to two teammates “so you can run the whole flow yourself”; and seventeen merged contributions into the team’s shared control platform, so my tools live where the team’s tools live. The connector is one piece of a wider access layer across all our systems that I co-built with the platform lead. The connector is mine; the layer is ours.
The result
Five teammates, founders included, asked it about 2,000 questions between mid-June and late September 2026, plus 87 of mine. Monthly users went from two in July to four in September; two hires who joined over the summer were on it within five to seven weeks of starting. There is no switch on this jar: nobody counted the questions that didn’t get asked before, and I’m not going to invent a baseline.
The call
What people ask doesn’t matter. The point is that someone who can’t write a query can now answer their own question, which they couldn’t before; the content of the questions is theirs. Read-only, per person, logged: those three guardrails are what made it fine to hand a system of record to everyone, and the log does a second job, recording what people looked for and couldn’t find. And the test I put every tool through before I build it: is this tool going to be worth how long it takes me to make it? This was the first thing I built that other people chose to use every day.
Seconds from this batch
It went down for two days in September when the cloud billing account it ran on was closed, and nobody could ask it anything. A tool people rely on needs an owner and a health check, not just a builder. The next release, agents that maintain it and cut new versions on their own, is not shipped, so it is not on the label.
Still mine
Keeping it alive. It is one hosted service with a health check and a query log, and the person who watches both is me.
What transfers
Read-only first: most of the value is in reading, and it removes most of the risk. One link per person, so you can see who uses it and revoke one without revoking all. Log every question, then read the log for what people could not find; that is the roadmap. Give it to one person for a week before you give it to everyone. And retire the old way on a date, or two ways will run forever.
Bring me one like this
Have a system of record your team can only reach through you?
pullover@peachyadventure.com