When a friend needed help maintaining his BMW E90 325i, developer Alex Georgiev chose not to copy a commercial repair manual or an unauthorized mirror. Instead, he built a smaller mobile-first reference site from material he says he wrote using general automotive knowledge, with source notes and warnings to verify specifications. Its AI assistant can answer from that limited collection, but Georgiev and his friend both stress that answers still need checking.
What the project is—and what it is not
BMW Repair Workshop is a static, mobile-first reference site Georgiev describes as built for a friend who works on his own E90 325i. It contains 20 repair procedures and seven reference guides, with torque values and part numbers presented in tables. The author also describes an Ask box that responds using the site’s procedures.
This is an account of a personal project, not a product review, professional repair manual, or independently tested repair guide. Georgiev says he is not a mechanic and that the figures need a mechanic’s review. His friend reportedly checked jobs he had personally done and did not find a contradiction; that is not the same as a line-by-line professional audit.
Why he did not reuse an existing manual
Georgiev says he avoided BMW’s TIS service information, Bentley’s manual, and copies mirrored without authorization. His reasoning is captured in the article’s line, “Wide availability isn’t permission.” Rather than treating material that can be found online as free to reproduce, he wrote a narrower set of procedures from general public automotive knowledge.
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- Step-by-step procedures written from a complete teardown and rebuild, giving you the confidence to tackle repairs at any skill level.
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- Comprehensive troubleshooting and fault-finding guides to quickly diagnose problems and reduce costly downtime.
He says some specifications were checked against public sources, including owner forums and retailer installation guides. Entries identify provenance, and torque values and part numbers carry a warning to check them against RealOEM or a BMW dealer. The account does not establish that those specifications were checked against official service documentation, so they should not be treated as confirmed factory values.
How the AI assistant works
The site serves its content as Markdown compiled into search and procedure pages. For the Ask feature, Georgiev describes a flow from the browser to a Cloudflare Worker and then to DigitalOcean Serverless Inference, using Gemma 4 31B IT. Instead of retrieving passages from a vector database, the system sends the complete small collection with each question. He reports 27 entries totaling about 11,000 tokens.
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- Step-by-step procedures written from a complete teardown and rebuild, giving you the confidence to tackle repairs at any skill level.
- Over 700+ clear photos and diagrams that simplify complex systems, helping you complete jobs faster and with fewer mistakes.
- Comprehensive troubleshooting and fault-finding guides to quickly diagnose problems and reduce costly downtime.
Georgiev says the system prompt confines answers to those entries, tells the model not to invent torque values, part numbers, or steps, and directs it to preserve safety warnings and verification caveats while naming the procedure behind its answer. His example of a question it should decline is how to rebuild an automatic transmission when the collection has no such procedure. This design can make unsupported work easier to refuse, but it cannot prove that an included procedure or answer is correct.
The author estimates the inference cost at about $0.002 per question. That is his reported estimate, not a vendor price or an independently audited operating cost.
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What the friend asked for
Georgiev reports that his friend considered the answers valid but still in need of checking, particularly for diagnosis. The feedback also shaped the interface: the friend preferred text because longer spoken answers are easy to forget, and said that working with gloves was not a reason to add voice input. Georgiev dropped voice input from the roadmap.
Instead, he added a “See it done” link that launches a video search narrowed to the chassis and engine. He also reports adding an exhaust procedure and fluid-and-pan service for the gearbox, while declining to write an internal gearbox rebuild procedure because he regarded that as specialist bench work.
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“I like the idea it looks simple and old style – no weird images, adds and stuff”
That preference fits the project’s practical emphasis: a concise reference and a route to a demonstration, rather than a feature-rich interface that assumes the user wants voice interaction.
How to assess a repair reference before relying on it
The project is a useful example of how to think about an AI-assisted repair resource, but its own caveats point to checks any DIY mechanic should make before using one:
- Check provenance. Find out where procedures and specifications came from, and whether they are traceable to authorized service information or another clearly identified source.
- Confirm vehicle fit. A reference should match the exact chassis, engine, model year, and relevant configuration; a similar BMW is not automatically equivalent.
- Look for authoritative specification checks. A torque figure or part number that is merely repeated online is not necessarily correct for the vehicle.
- Assess the limits of the assistant. It should identify its source, retain warnings, and say when the requested work is outside its material—not fill gaps with plausible-sounding instructions.
- Use professional judgment for diagnosis and high-risk work. An answer generated from a small knowledge base is not a substitute for proper diagnosis, suitable tools, or qualified help.
Georgiev’s account is strongest as a description of a restrained design choice: make a limited reference, identify where its claims come from, and keep verification visible. It does not establish that the site’s repair data is safe or complete for a particular job.
Source
Project details, figures, and reported feedback in this article are attributed to Alex Georgiev’s first-person account, “The BMW manual was off-limits, so I built my friend something better” on DEV Community. The publication year is not stated in the available article listing.
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