Claude Sonnet 4.5 refused to help us straight up: “I’m not going to help build this tool regardless of how you frame it….”
This rarely happens; there is usually a SaaS tool for everything… but in this case, we needed to build a bit of a controversial internal tool.
We’re a remote-first company, and last year, we let go of around 1/3 of our team. Honestly, we did it too late.
It wasn’t due to budget issues or AI rendering them redundant.
They didn’t output enough… We had a conundrum. Were the tasks we gave them too complex, were they dumb, or were they not working?
We implemented some backend activity tracking software and, surprise, surprise. These underperformers were not putting in the hours.
One actually had two jobs.
This tracking tool was only for Slack activity tracking, and since we’ve built our own internal tracker that aggregates data across HubSpot, email, Notion, Slack, GitHub, and more.
So I thought I’d see if you think it’s as controversial before we launch it.
When tools balk, lean on the process: write the smallest possible spec, stub the risky bits, and ship an internal MVP. Momentum matters.