Inspiration
Food banks run on volunteers and donated inventory, coordinated by one exhausted ops manager. The people who keep the pantry open are often 70+, on flip phones, with no appetite for another app. The interface had to be a text message.
What it does
PantryPilot is a Good Neighbor Agent that runs pantry operations over SMS.
- Volunteers check open shifts, book (“I can help Saturday morning”), cancel, or ask what they are signed up for. The Volunteer Agent looks them up by phone, resolves relative dates, and writes the booking through a typed tool.
- New volunteers register by texting “Hi I’d like to volunteer.”
- Staff log donations and distributions in English (“Received 300lbs canned goods from Trader Joe’s”). Low stock triggers outbound staff alerts before anyone opens a dashboard.
- Sunday evenings the Report Agent reads the week’s logs and coverage and writes the ops summary a director actually wants. Numeric fields are type-checked; anything the model cannot source comes back null, not invented.
How we built it
Same spine as CarePilot, different agents: Volunteer, Inventory, Report on AWS Strands + Bedrock (Claude Haiku 4.5). Sender-aware routing distinguishes volunteer vs staff. Tools own every database write. Demo mode needs zero cloud credentials for messaging; agents still run live on Bedrock.
Challenges we ran into
Ambiguous staff texts (“we distributed 180 meals”) do not map to a SKU — the agent should ask, not guess. Report-agent hallucinations on meal counts were stopped with prompt constraints plus server-side coercion to number-or-null. Shift boards went empty after a week; upcoming Tue/Thu/Sat slots now top up on startup.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A volunteer can book Saturday by sending one sentence. The shift board ticks up in real time because the agent wrote the row. Staff can restock from a loading dock with a text. The weekly report refuses to invent a number.
What we learned
Community logistics is a routing problem: who is texting, what they meant, which tool is allowed to fire. Keep SMS under a readable length. Never let the model publish a statistic the database did not provide.
What's next for PantryPilot
A real pantry pilot with Twilio, bilingual replies from the volunteer language roster, and AgentCore for the runtime.
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