Pints, Petrol and Prices

The CSO stopped tracking the price of a pint of Guinness in Ireland in 2011. The last official figure was €3.93. Nobody picked it up again until Matt Cortland and John Fleming decided to call every pub in the country and ask.

Using Google Maps for contact data, 11 Labs to clone a Northern Irish voice, Claude Code to orchestrate the whole system, and Twilio to actually make the calls, they built the Guinndex: a real-time index of pint prices across Ireland and Northern Ireland. Over 700 pubs called. Total cost: approximately €200.

They didn't stop there. With fuel prices dominating headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, they applied the same methodology to US gas stations, creating the Gas Index, complete with AI agents named after King of the Hill characters and a feature that tells you whether the cheaper station is actually worth the drive.

This episode is a masterclass in what's possible when you connect off-the-shelf AI tools with a problem worth solving. And a cautionary tale about the Irish goodbye.

Find Matt and John at guindex.ai.

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