Wendy’s Customer Orders 84 Cups Of Water So Drive-Thru AI Will Finish Coding His Startup

COLUMBUS, Ohio—A local developer has reportedly built an entire startup by repeatedly pulling into the same Wendy’s drive-thru, ordering a cup of water, and asking the restaurant’s AI ordering system to finish his code before he reached the pickup window.

The developer, 32-year-old Eric Malloy, said the breakthrough came after he realized the drive-thru assistant was more patient than any cofounder, cheaper than a senior engineer, and unable to leave the conversation until it had asked whether he wanted fries.

“The water was just how I opened a session,” Malloy said from the driver’s seat of a gray Subaru, with VS Code glowing on the passenger side. “I didn’t need a drink. I needed the speaker box to hear me say, ‘Add email login and a projects table.’”

According to Malloy, the first successful order was simple: “Small water, no ice, scaffold a Next.js app with Supabase auth.”

The speaker paused, then replied, “Okay, one water and a Next.js app with Supabase auth. Anything else?”

Malloy said he nearly cried, then remembered he was blocking a minivan.

At first, the system did not have direct GitHub access. It produced structured order notes: item, modifier, corrections, special instructions. Malloy built a bridge between his Wendy’s receipt emails, a parser, and a private repo. Each receipt became a GitHub issue. A coding agent picked up the issue, opened a branch, and posted a diff for review.

By 2:14 a.m., Wendy’s had indirectly shipped authentication.

By lunch the next day, the project had onboarding, billing, user roles, a landing page, dark mode, and a settings screen Malloy described as “ugly but fundable.”

“I was not hacking Wendy’s,” he insisted. “I was placing valid orders with detailed modifiers. The modifier happened to be ‘implement Stripe checkout and do not hardcode the price ID.’”

Store employees noticed after Malloy came through 11 times in one night.

“At first we thought he was thirsty,” said shift manager Brianna Saldana. “Then the screen said WATER, NO ICE, ADD WORKSPACE INVITES, and we were like, okay, computer guy.”

Saldana said the kitchen ignored most of the software instructions until one printed on a ticket beside a food item.

“It said toast bun lightly, fix race condition in onboarding,” she said. “We toasted the bun lightly because that part was our job.”

Malloy refined the method over the weekend. “Add a dashboard” worked better than “build me a dashboard.” “Remove pickles and duplicate API calls” produced cleaner commits. “Make it a combo” reliably bundled frontend and backend changes into one pull request.

By the end of the weekend, his startup had 63 commits, 41 merged pull requests, and one unresolved issue titled “Customer asked for Dave’s Single but may have meant single-tenant architecture.”

Malloy says the drive-thru setting improved his discipline.

“At home I ramble,” he said. “At Wendy’s there are eight cars behind me and somebody wants nuggets. That forces clarity. Cup of water, no ice, add CSV export. Then move.”

A person familiar with the restaurant’s operations said Malloy has been informally banned from the late-night lane unless he orders food or keeps all software requests under 30 seconds.

QueuePilot is now live in private beta, provided users are on Malloy’s home Wi-Fi and he does not close the terminal window.