We delivered an AI Tide Desk Manager for a Folly Beach kayak outfitter who spent every evening reworking tomorrow's tours against the wind and the tide -- one that runs every booking against her go rules each time the marine forecast changes, moves failing tours to the nearest good water before guests wake, and pays her guides for the hours that move, while the call on a close morning stays with her head guide.

The water in the Folly River rises and falls about five and a half feet twice a day, and every tour she sells has to fit inside that. She has run kayak and paddleboard eco-tours off a floating dock on the river since 2016, after six years sampling marsh and counting shrimp on research boats out of Fort Johnson. Now there are thirty-eight kayaks, two trailers, four guides year-round and three more from May to September, and last year 5,800 people paddled with her: dolphin tours on the morning tide, sunset trips toward Lighthouse Inlet, birthday groups, bachelorette parties, families from the rentals on East Ashley.

Reading the tide was never the problem. The trouble was that guests book weeks ahead at fixed times, and the water does not care. A low tide strands a group on the mud short of the creeks. A southwest wind over fifteen knots turns the river crossing into a fight that tired paddlers lose.

A lightning chance ends a sunset trip. Every evening from eight to ten she reworked the next day against the marine forecast, texted guests, called guides and refunded whoever she could not reach, and on summer weekends she was up at five reading the wind. Last year sixty-one tours moved or were canceled. About one guest in eleven never got the message and stood on the dock at seven in the morning anyway.

There were seventeen chargebacks, $9,400 refunded on trips that could have moved to better water the same weekend, and two mornings when a guide drove out for a tour that no longer existed. She already used Claude for her website and her newsletter. In late July she brought her laptop to the lab on Jessen Lane and handed it over for an afternoon. We connected Claude to her booking system, her payment processor, the guides' shared schedule, the shop's text line, the National Weather Service coastal waters forecast and the tide predictions for the station nearest her dock, and wrote one skill with her: the go rules she had carried in her head for ten years.

Enough water over the creek mouth from launch to two hours after. Sustained wind under fifteen knots, gusts under twenty-two. No thunder in the window. No tour at all under a small craft advisory.

Two things wake it: a new forecast and a new booking. Each time, it runs every tour on the books for the next ten days against the rules. When one fails, it finds the nearest slot that passes, the same day or the next, checks which guides are free, holds the seats and texts every guest one choice: the new time, or a full refund. It collects the answers, rebuilds the manifest, pays the two-hour minimum she promised any guide whose trip moved, and posts the morning manifest to the guides' thread at six.

The night before each tour it texts guests where to park, how cold the water is -- sixty-five degrees this week, so bring a splash layer -- and how long the bridge traffic will take. It never calls a trip safe. The rules can only move a tour or flag it. Any morning that passes by too little -- wind within three knots of the limit, a lightning chance over twenty percent -- goes to her head guide, and the call is his.

It never refunds more than $300 without her, never puts more than twelve people on a tour, and never promises dolphins. On Saturday, October 17, at 3:52 in the morning, the Weather Service posted a small craft advisory for the coastal waters starting at ten. Three morning tours were booked, thirty-one guests, eleven of them a bachelorette party from Charlotte. By 4:40 it had moved the 9:30 tour to Sunday morning, when the wind was forecast to lie down and the tide was right, moved the bachelorette party to Sunday at sunset because their brunch was at eleven, refunded the four guests driving home Saturday and shifted two guides' hours.

The 7:30 dolphin tour still passed, but by two knots, so it went to the head guide in one line. He read it at 5:10 and said go. She woke at 6:45 to a three-line report and a phone with no missed calls. Since August it has moved twenty-six tours, and eighty-four percent of those guests kept their trip instead of taking the refund.

There has not been a chargeback, and no guide has driven out for a tour that was gone. Her evenings end at dinner. "For ten years I read the marine forecast before I read anything from my own kids," she said. "Now I read it in the morning, with coffee, because I like it."