A few weeks ago I built and shipped a working app in under a week. No engineering team. No budget. No permission. Just me, at my kitchen table, with AI as my co-worker.

It's called JobTracker, and it's free. I built it for myself, honestly — I was applying for roles everywhere and drowning. Spreadsheets that fell out of date the moment I made them. A fog of "wait, did I follow up with that person?" Tasks slipping through the cracks at exactly the moment I couldn't afford to drop anything. Good tools existed, but they cost money, and I was trying to be careful financially. So I made the thing I wished existed and shared it out for free.

I've been genuinely moved by how many people have used it, and those who wrote to say it helped. A few asked how I built it. I'm happy to share — but the "how" turns out to be less interesting than what the "how" reveals.

The first version was a Claude Artifact. If you haven't built or used one before they are simple: you describe what you want, and in a few minutes you have a working app. It was fast and almost magical — perfect for one person. But it wasn't robust enough to hand to a friend who might rely on it during one of the most stressful seasons of their life. I wanted something real.

So I rebuilt it in Grok Build, which is made for deployable applications — the kind real people can depend on — at a fraction of what software like this used to cost. From there I kept going and built a second tool — AskHoot.ai, a decision-making app that's now live. (More on that one another day; the point here is the building itself.)

Here's the part I genuinely can't stop thinking about.

The barrier to creating a real digital tool is now roughly one $20-a-month subscription.

Just months ago this was a team of engineers, a budget, and half a year — I did on nights and weekends for the price of a couple of streaming services or the proverbial one cup of coffee a week. And I am not a professional developer. I'm someone who had problem and was willing to just try things.

That last part is the whole game. If the tools are nearly free and the capability is largely here, then the barrier that's left isn't technical. It's the quiet story we tell ourselves that building things is for other people — the engineers, the founders, the "technical" ones. It isn't anymore.

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Could it fail? Of course. But you cannot find out whether something would have worked without trying it, and the cost of trying has fallen through the floor. So you may as well start small, ship the rough version, and learn from the real thing instead of the imagined one. (This newsletter is called The Increment for a reason — I believe in getting a little better, a little at a time, far more than I believe in the grand overnight leap.) What a time to be alive!

Now let me put on my other hat, because I spend my days advising leaders on exactly this — and I want to be careful here, not breathless.

I am not telling you that every company should run off and build its own software. Often that's precisely the wrong move; build-versus-buy is a real question, and most organizations overestimate how much they should build themselves. The point isn't "build everything." The point is that the capability now sitting in front of every leader is staggering, and most haven't truly reckoned with what it changes.

Think about what's actually available right now. The ability to evaluate a genuinely hard decision with what feels like a room full of experts on call. The chance to finally dismantle the data silos that have quietly frustrated your people for a decade. The ability to put real, capable tools into the hands of every employee — not in some future roadmap, but this quarter.

That's not a tooling upgrade. It's a shift in what an individual, and therefore an organization, is capable of.

And here's the thread that connects my little kitchen-table app to your enterprise AI program: the technology was never the hard part. The hard part is believing it's possible and being willing to try — and then, inside a company, helping other people believe it and try too. That's adoption. That's the actual work. It's the same human gap I've watched my entire career, from a hospital to the Apple Genius Bar to seven years selling enterprise software — just with far higher stakes now, and far better tools.

The leaders who win this decade won’t be the ones who build the most apps or deploy the most new tools. They'll be the ones who realize a whole new landscape of value is there for the taking, but working backward from outcome to tooling its he only way to achieve it at scale and at speed.

So I'll leave you with the question I had to ask myself before I built anything:

What would you build, fix, or finally tackle — if you let yourself believe that you could?

— Isaac

P.S. — A small gift: build your own. If this got you itching to try, here's a starter prompt. Paste it into Claude (or your AI of choice) and answer its questions — it'll walk you through building a simple job tracker you can run in your own browser, no code required:

That's the whole point of this issue, made real: You can just build things!