Your tools are not the problem.
You are. (In the best possible way.)
TL;DR: A 5-person team at Gusto shipped a full AI product in 10 weeks — no Figma, no Jira, no docs. The lesson isn’t about their tools. It’s about the question they asked before they opened a single one. That question is the one most of us never ask.
Grab your kava. This one’s going to sting a little. ☕
I want to tell you about a team that built a complete AI product in 10 weeks.
Five people. No Figma. No Jira. No documentation. No project manager.
Just Claude Code, a permanent Zoom call that ran for ten weeks straight, and a question they asked themselves before they started:
Which of our tools are actually serving the work — and which ones are just making the process feel legitimate?
That question changed everything.
Here’s the part that stopped me when I read this.
The CTO — Eddie Kim, who runs a company with $1 billion in revenue and 500,000 small business clients — went back to writing code himself. A designer with zero engineering background hit the 94th percentile for shipping code. They replaced planning documents with something they called the “trash-can method”: write it, review it together, throw it away. The writing and reviewing was the decision. The document was just the container.
The result: a new product, live, in 10 weeks.
Now here’s what I want you to sit with.
Most of the tools in your stack are not there because they make your work better. They’re there because they make your work look organised. Figma makes designs look professional. Jira makes planning look structured. Docs make decisions look documented.
None of that is the same as shipping something good.
And this isn’t just a tech company problem. I see the same thing in creator stacks all the time. The content calendar that takes longer to maintain than the content it plans. The project management tool nobody opens. The scheduling platform that adds three steps to a process that used to take one.
We accumulate tools the way we accumulate excuses. Slowly. Convincingly. Until we can’t see the work anymore for all the scaffolding around it.
The Balkanish AI Way doesn’t mean using every tool available.
It means knowing which tools are yours — and which ones you’re just performing.
In Croatia, we have a phrase: kako se to radi. “How it’s done.” The unspoken agreement that this is the way, because it’s always been the way. Warm, communal, completely useless when you’re trying to build something new.
Gusto’s team didn’t have a kako se to radi. They had a blank screen and a question. That’s the whole difference.
Three things worth doing with this:
Name your Figma.
Every creator has one — the tool they use because it feels professional, not because it actually moves the work. Write it down: “My Figma is ___.” That’s the first honest step.
Try the trash-can method once.
This week, instead of writing a strategy doc — write it, read it out loud, then ask: do I actually know what to do now? If yes, you don’t need the document. The thinking was the work.
Ask the 10-week question.
Not “what should I build?” What would you actually build if you stripped away the tools, the process, the planning cycles, and just started? That answer is usually more honest — and more interesting — than anything a roadmap has ever produced.
The full story of how Gusto did this — including the exact two-tool agent stack, how they shipped to production from day one, and what happened when a non-technical designer started writing code — is worth reading in full.
And if this made you think of the one process in your own work that costs you the most time — the one you keep meaning to fix — hit reply and tell me. I read every single one. And the most interesting answers might just become the next Drop.
Ajde. ✍️
Anita 🧡
P.S. — If you’re building your own AI stack and want it to actually work for you instead of the other way around — the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic is still free and still the right place to start. Because the tools only get as good as the context you give them.