My WhatsApp Was My Open‑Mic Booking System, So I Gave It to Gemma

Description and use

Automating open‑mic lineup management via WhatsApp reduced weekly effort from 3 hours to 15 minutes, leveraging Gemma 3 for message classification and a React PWA for lineup control.

Problem

Managing open‑mic lineups via WhatsApp DMs was time‑consuming and error‑prone, with requests slipping out of view and manual triage taking ~3 hours weekly.

Outcome

Reduced weekly workload from ~3 hours to ~15 minutes, saving ~12 hours/month, with minimal cost and running on a repurposed laptop.

Workflow

• 1. Comics DM curator via WhatsApp. 2. Node worker with whatsapp-web.js captures chat bursts when quiet. 3. Gemma 3 model classifies messages into request, cancellation, etc., quoting the ask. 4. Evidence check ensures quoted text exists in chat. 5. Classified requests appear in Waiting board. 6. Curator drags comics into Monday/Tuesday columns. 7. Press Confirm & send to generate confirmations, regrets, and group updates. 8. Curator reviews changes before finalizing.

Evidence

WhatsApp is my daily driver. I use it to ask other rooms for spots, gossip about shows and audience with comics, reply to my family group, talk to my girlfriend and somewhere in all of that, comics message me asking for a spot on the lineups I curate.

Source

It takes me about 3 hours every week. I'd rather spend those 3 hours writing jokes. Or sleeping. Mostly sleeping.

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Spot Solutions takes off my plate every week: finding the actual requests in a weekend of DMs, checking who performed last week, messaging every comic, adding and removing people from each show’s group.

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Before: about 3 hours a week. Now: about 15 minutes

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The model must quote the ask. If its "evidence" isn't actually in the messages, it made it up.

Source