We delivered an AI Studio Manager for an Awendaw potter who works alone with one kiln and sells at Marion Square, online and to four restaurants -- one that counts every piece from wet clay to shipped box and promises only what a firing can cover, files her sales tax and reorders her clay without being told, and runs the school, the groceries and her mother's appointments in the same calendar as the kiln.

She threw her first bowl in 2014, in a night class, and kept it because it was too lopsided to give away. Five years later she left a job as a dental hygienist and put a seven-cubic-foot electric kiln in a shed behind her house off Doar Road in Awendaw. She is forty-three. Last year she fired that kiln 112 times and sold about 6,100 pieces: mugs, bowls and plates, in four glazes.

They go out three ways. Thirty-three Saturdays a year she sells under a tent at the farmers market in Marion Square. Her own online shop took 1,140 orders. And four restaurants downtown and on Sullivan's Island eat off her plates and reorder when a dishwasher has a bad night.

Around that sit an eight-year-old, an eleven-year-old, a husband who is a firefighter on twenty-four hours and off forty-eight, and a mother in Mount Pleasant who no longer drives after dark. There is no software for that. The shop knew what was listed, not what was on the shelf. The whiteboard in the shed knew what the restaurants had asked for.

The kiln knew nothing. She was the only place where all of it met, and last November it stopped meeting: a restaurant on upper King ordered ninety dinner plates for a December opening, the holiday shop orders sold through the same glaze run, and she delivered the plates nine days late and refunded thirty-one strangers. She also paid a late penalty on her sales tax twice, both times because the twentieth fell in a firing week. We built her a studio manager on her own laptop, under her own Claude Cowork account.

Nobody opens it. It wakes when an order posts to the shop, when a restaurant's email arrives, when the kiln controller writes its log at the end of a firing, and once more every evening at eight. It keeps one count. Every piece is thrown, bisqued, glazed or promised, and each morning she photographs the shelves and it reads the count from the photographs.

When an order posts, it assigns real pieces to it, from the shelf or from a firing already on the calendar, buys the shipping label and writes to the customer. When neither covers the order, it changes the listing to say three weeks, on its own, before the next buyer sees it. When clay falls under two hundred pounds it places the order with her supplier in North Charleston. On the fifteenth it totals the market card reader and the shop, files the state sales tax return and pays it.

The same calendar holds the rest of her life, because it is the same life. It reads the fire department shift schedule, knows which days she is the only driver, and will not put a restaurant delivery across the 2:45 school pickup. It booked both children's dental cleanings into one afternoon. It puts the grocery order in on Thursday night and plans slow-cooker dinners for glaze days, when she cannot leave the shed.

It moved her mother's eye appointment to a morning and blocked the drive. The line is narrow and it holds. Anything on her price list, in a glaze she already makes, it accepts, schedules and confirms. Supplies under $350 it buys.

It does not take a custom commission, quote a price that is not on the list, or give anyone a date for a piece she has never made. Those wait for her. On a Saturday in September she was at Marion Square from eight until two with her phone in her apron. At 9:40 a chef wrote that a rack had gone over and he needed thirty-six salad plates by Friday.

The manager found twenty-two on the shelf in his glaze and forty bisqued blanks waiting, added fourteen plates and four spares to Tuesday's glaze load, confirmed the order at her $19 wholesale price, and pulled that plate from the shop so nobody else could buy his. Friday was a shift day for her husband, so it set the delivery for ten in the morning and told the chef. She read all of it at 2:20, folding the tent. That night's note was five lines.

Four were things already done. The fifth was a bride asking for 120 cups with initials by the eighteenth of October, which it had not answered. "I used to throw with half my head on the whiteboard," she said. "Now the only part of me working in that shed is my hands, and that is how you are supposed to make a bowl."