Over drinks, a few colleagues and I kept circling a practical internal-tools problem: small workflow ideas often wait behind engineering capacity. We were interested in whether AI tools could let someone who understands the workflow make a rough prototype while the idea is still cheap to change or discard.
A dashboard mock, for example, could make a vague request concrete enough to argue about. People could point to what is missing and explain how they would use it. If that exposes a misunderstanding, revising the mock would be cheaper than carrying it into a finished tool. A lightweight intake form or a script for a recurring spreadsheet could serve the same purpose: make enough of the workflow tangible to find out whether the proposed tool is useful.
A useful prototype would still leave details (e.g., permissions, reliability, edge cases, and maintenance) to resolve before people could depend on it. The first pass could help decide whether that investment was warranted. Someone asking for engineering time could bring a version of the workflow they had tried, along with a clearer account of what it needed to do.
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