How forty years of ERP experience and four months of AI-assisted coding finally brought a twenty-year-old architectural dream to life.
For most of my professional life, I have been a builder of software. I don't mean websites or mobile apps; I mean the heavy-lifting machinery of enterprise business. Over a career spanning forty years, I’ve navigated the complexities of ERP systems as a developer, a founder, and a consultant—including the privilege of serving as Australia's first Odoo partner.
Looking back on that journey, I’ve realised something powerful: the banded report writer I’ve just launched didn’t actually take four months to build. It took nearly twenty years of industry observation, architectural sketching, and a deep desire to streamline how businesses access their data.
The Missing Piece
Long before Odoo became the centre of my professional world, I relied on enterprise reporting tools like Crystal Reports and FastReports. Anyone who used them seriously understood why they became industry standards. They weren't just generators; they were bridge-builders. They gave ordinary users and consultants the ability to design professional, complex reports—complete with headers, footers, nested groupings, and running totals—without ever needing to touch raw code. Once you understood the "banded" layout model, designing a report became an intuitive, visual process.
When I began working with Odoo back in 2009, the contrast was immediate. Odoo was, and remains, an excellent ERP framework, but its reporting story was built primarily with the core developer in mind.
Because Odoo reports are generated through QWeb templates combined with HTML, CSS, and XML, they are complex and lean heavily on developer skill sets. Over the decades, I watched highly capable functional consultants completely avoid report writing because they weren't comfortable with that specific technology stack. Something that could have been a standard business task had become a time-consuming development project.
My goal was to bring that design power back to the implementer. I knew exactly what a tool built for that purpose should look like.
From Mental Blueprint to Execution
Identifying a solution is one thing; finding the uninterrupted time to bring it to life is another. For years, I was fully occupied with the daily realities of running businesses: implementing systems, solution consulting, and supporting customers.
But the core architecture never left my head. Every few years, I would refine the blueprint in my mind. The vision was uncompromised: a report writer shouldn't depend on HTML or web-rendering dependencies. It needed to be a pure-Python engine driven by a highly stable, structured document. Eventually, this evolved into the heart of my current application: a JSON-first report definition where every report is a validated, structured description of the data’s layout and logic.
Directing the AI Development Team
The landscape shifted dramatically four months ago. While I had been watching AI coding tools mature, I hadn't yet found a workflow that felt like a true partnership—until I started using Codebuff and OpenCode.
For the first time, I was able to assemble and direct a high-level development team at an unprecedented pace. Let's be clear: I wasn't asking AI to invent the product. I was acting as the chief architect, directing it to implement a highly specific blueprint I had spent years developing.
The process was rigorous and entirely under my control:
Architectural Direction: I described each subsystem and defined the guardrails.
Code Review & Refactoring: I challenged the AI's design suggestions, demanded alternatives, and optimised the structure.
Quality Assurance: Wrote over 1,100 automated tests to ensure absolute enterprise-grade reliability.
Four months of this intense, collaborative rhythm resulted in a pure-Python rendering engine that is deterministic, testable, and entirely independent of Odoo’s UI layer. It is a working application I hold up with immense pride.
Redefining Authorship in the AI Era
As the project neared completion, I reflected on the changing nature of software development. Some developers experience a form of "imposter syndrome" when using these tools, wondering if they've bypassed the traditional grind. I see it differently.
If I had hired a team of human programmers to write this code to my exact specifications, no one would question my authorship. My role on this project was to provide the vision, the architecture, and the uncompromising quality control. AI simply became a faster, remarkably efficient version of that development team.
This experience reinforced a vital truth: AI is exceptionally good at writing code, but it is incapable of deciding what should exist. AI didn't invent the banded model. It didn't understand the forty years of ERP implementation experience that informed this tool's design, nor did it know why a JSON schema is fundamentally better for future-proofing than an XML template. Those decisions came from decades of watching businesses struggle. AI accelerated the implementation, but it could never replace the seasoned judgment of a craftsman.
A Foundation for the Future
In launching the Banded Report Writer, I made a conscious choice to ensure the Free Edition is genuinely useful and robust right out of the box. It contains the complete engine and an Automated Report Builder to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible.
For those who need enterprise-grade capabilities, the Pro Edition adds the "professional" features I once found indispensable in tools like Crystal Reports, such as watermarks, SQL data sources, and advanced image handling.
As friends and colleagues have seen me transition away from daily corporate life, they often ask if I’m finally slowing down. The truth is, I’m simply refocusing. I am no longer interested in building a career or a legacy—I’ve already done that. Today, I am interested in building elite tools that distill a lifetime of learning.
This project is the product of an idea that sat in my head for twenty years, finally brought to life through a new generation of capabilities. If it saves an Odoo consultant even a fraction of the time and complexity traditionally required to deliver beautiful reports, then it has done exactly what it was built to do.
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