Most “AI-powered” shops mean one thing: every product description is an API call to somebody else’s meter. Get Punny Shirts is the other kind. It’s a t-shirt store where the product line — puns, matched to artwork, ready to print — is generated by an AI the shop owner also hosts. The punchline writes itself; the infrastructure is the interesting part.
The shop that drafts its own products
The premise is simple: give it a theme, and the model proposes puns. Behind that simplicity sits a deliberately flexible inference layer. The pun engine speaks to any OpenAI-compatible server — Ollama, llama.cpp, or whatever you point it at — so the shop isn’t married to a model vendor or even a model size. Want fast mistral-class generation for volume? Set the environment variable. Want a reasoning model like DeepSeek-R1 to chew on wordplay a little longer? That works too, with the model’s internal thinking tags stripped before the result hits the catalogue. The product pipeline treats the model as a swappable component, which is exactly how it should be treated.
Why host the brain yourself
Self-hosting inference in an e-commerce path sounds like extra work, and it is — but it buys three things a per-call API never will. Cost behaves: generating five hundred puns to find fifty good ones costs electricity, not a line item. Rate limits stop existing. And the content floor is yours: the catalogue is generated by a model you chose, against a prompt you control, with no surprise policy change in the middle of a product run. For a niche store where margin is everything, that’s not a hobbyist flourish, it’s the business model working.
Curation where it counts
The images are not generated. Pun text comes from the model; artwork comes from a curated library the engine matches to each pun. That split is the quiet design decision that keeps the output sellable — AI is genuinely good at wordplay and genuinely unreliable at print-ready art, so the pipeline uses it for the former and trusts humans for the latter. Every shirt that ships is a joke the model wrote on art somebody chose.
The boring parts are what make it a shop
None of the cleverness would matter if the money and the parcels didn’t move. Checkout runs through Stripe. Fulfilment runs through Printful, so production and shipping are automated the moment an order lands — nobody screens shirts in a garage. The whole platform is a Go service: one binary, one small machine, no framework zoo. It’s the same architecture instinct as the rest of the Hansen IT Solutions stack — few moving parts, self-hosted where control matters, boring where boring is a feature.
The result is a store that can spin up a product line in an afternoon and pays nobody rent on the imagination. Go get punny — the AI already did the writing.