“You can’t ignore or outrun a wave. You either ride it or it knocks you flat.”
-Nabeela Elsayed
Back when I worked at IKEA, the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, famously made a bold declaration:
“People are not going to buy furniture sitting on the toilet.”
He meant it. He didn’t believe people wanted to sit on the toilet and shop for a couch. And because of that belief, for years, he resisted IKEA’s evolution into an e-commerce retail giant. Despite his brilliance as a business leader, he genuinely believed there were limits to what people would do with technology.
Eventually, IKEA’s leadership team and board were able to convince him otherwise. However, by then, other global retailers had already been years into the e-commerce game, and IKEA was playing catch-up.
Not only did phones make it to the bathroom (unfortunately), they have made it everywhere. We shop, grieve, date, bank, and build almost everything through a screen.
Technology hasn’t stayed in its lane.
It’s taken the wheel.
And now, it feels like those were the easy days. The calm before the acceleration.
From Assistant to Builder
If you’re like most professionals, you’re already using AI to augment your work.
It’s helping you synthesize data. Transcribe your Zoom meetings. Summarize 300-page board decks. Provide you with templates for emails, job descriptions, and social media posts.
You're prompting your way into a pretty committed relationship.
But have you tried to actually build something from scratch with it yet? Like… an app?
Because that’s what I spent the first two days of this week doing.
I Just Wanted to See How Far I Could Go
Here’s a little backstory.
Most of my time is spent advising, coaching, and consulting high-achieving professionals. And I’m constantly shocked by how few of them have an actual life development plan. So I’ve created my own framework a Google Form, a set of assessments, and some structured reflection tools I walk clients through.
One of my ambitions has been to turn that process into a simple, accessible app.
Now, I have an amazing web team talented designers, developers, and copywriters. I could have just called them and kicked off a Statement of Work. But I was curious.
I wanted to see how far I could get with a natural language AI App development tool just me, my documents, and a bit of courage.
A few YouTube tutorials later, I landed on Bolt, a no-code AI app builder. I started feeding Bolt everything I had: assessments, Google Sheets, customer personas, a brand book, and real content, not just ideas. Then, almost instantly, it started creating.
The Honeymoon Phase
At first? It felt like magic. Bolt started building screens, mapping flows, and creating onboarding logic. I wrote in my own voice, with real user interfaces, everything being populated on my screen and on my phone simultaneously.
No developers. No meetings. No fighting over tech resources or tech budgets. I kept thinking about all those boardroom discussions about how to prioritize our tech roadmap, as well as arguments about tech resources and how to allocate scarce talent. This could eliminate all of that noise. So I kept typing as screen after screen got added to my app. Just me and AI… vibing. I thought I was falling in love.
I thought I was unstoppable. But a few hours in things got complicated. I couuld’t get my AI API to work no matter what I tried.
Then there were the endless terminal errors with their evil red exclamation mark and “x” teasing me:
Before I knew it, I had one screen open with Bolt, full of bugs, and another with ChatGPT, trying to troubleshoot what had gone wrong. I was copying code back and forth, asking ChatGPT to coach me through fixing it. When it told me to “open the developer console,” I knew I was in trouble.
I kept reminding ChatGPT that I was not a developer. That I had never done this before and that I needed it to explain things to me like I was a five year old.
The Breakup Came Early
Suddenly, my workflow stopped working. Logic was glitching. I couldn’t move past a white screen. I tried everything: ChatGPT, Claude, Google, YouTube tutorials, even whispering sweet nothings to my JSON like, “Come on, baby, don’t do this to me.”
Nothing worked.
So I did what any rational person would do in a moment of digital crisis. I gave up on Bold and tried a different tool. Bolt and I were on a temporary breakup as I moved over to Glide. Now, Glide promised to make things even easier - just upload a bunch of Google Docs, and it would do the rest.
Glide was a liar.
Glide catfished me with sweet videos and promised a bright future, but it was very obvious that Glide was not as good as Bolt, and I didn't even experience the initial euphoria that comes with a new relationship.
I quickly cancelled my Glide subscription and did the only thing left to do after 1.5 days and a lot of heartbreak. I called in my development team.
Full 911 mode. Phone-a-friend. Summon Batman.
The Developer Debrief
We jumped on Zoom, and I walked them through my rom-com-meets-horror-film relationship with Bolt: the infatuation, the crash, the ghosting.
And to my surprise, they were impressed.
“Honestly? You got pretty far,” one of them said.
They weren’t threatened. They weren’t skeptical.
They were curious. Open. Even excited.
“Yeah, we’re already using tools like this,” my DevOps guy said.
“It’s going to make development exponentially cheaper. Sure, it’ll replace parts of what we do, but we’ll just evolve and do other things. That’s how tech works.”
They weren’t scared; they were already evolving, already augmenting and then retooling and reskilling themselves. They were adaptive. These folks had a remarkable growth mindset because they know that the real game isn't resisting the wave it’s about learning how to surf it.
The Democratization of Creation
As someone who sits on the board of a tech incubator, I couldn’t help but think about what this means not just for seasoned engineers, but for early-stage founders, especially women and underrepresented groups.
There are so many people with brilliant ideas who can’t afford to bootstrap a $50K digital product.
But now? Natural language AI tools and others are collapsing that barrier.
They’re making it possible, not necessarily easy, but possible to get an MVP off the ground for a fraction of the cost. Just as the World Wide Web and the dot-com boom, these tools as flawed as they are still have the potential to be great equalizers.
But Let’s Be Clear: The Process Still Matters
Even if the tools get faster, the thinking behind them still matters.
One of the biggest risks associated with AI tools is the potential for a 'rabbit hole' effect. Because you can prompt your way into confusion if you’re not grounded.
That’s why product thinking is still critical:
Define the problem you’re solving.
Map the customer journey.
Clarify who it’s for and what matters most.
Decide what to leave out.
These are the muscles that keep you focused. Because honestly? It’s easy to get obsessed. On Day One, I found myself lying in bed, putting my kids to sleep, while trying to log into Bolt on my phone. (That didn’t work, by the way.)
Yes, I was that person. In the dark. Whispering to the universe, “Just one more try.”
The Real Shift Isn’t Technical. It’s Psychological.
I’ve been a Chief HR Officer. A Chief Operating Officer. I’ve hired entire product teams and led billion-dollar transformations. And yet, in a matter of mere hours, I watched AI do imperfectly, but impressively, what used to take weeks.
It wrote onboarding flows. Built screen logic. Corrected its own code.
Drafted a user journey. And gave me the beginning of a functioning prototype.
That’s not assistance. That’s co-creation. And it changes everything.
Thought Leadership Is Cute. Real Leadership Is Getting In the Arena.
In retail, one of the oldest principles is: Get on the shop floor. Run the registers. Stock the shelves. Talk to the customer. The same applies here. The biggest threat to leadership today is that it won't adapt quickly enough, and that is likely very true. However, you can help yourself by getting on the shop floor.
You don’t have to be an AI expert. But if you’re still only dabbling in ChatGPT and reading consultancy reports, you’re missing the point. Try building something. A basic agent. A rough app. A presentation powered by AI. Because there’s a massive difference between reading about change and experiencing it in your own hands.
Now what?
I’ve handed my work in Bolt to the experts. They now have everything they need:
A developer brief, a strategic identity, customer personas, AI system proposal, brand book, and core MVP features.
They’ll take it to the finish line. I didn’t set out to become an expert. But I’m walking away with something even better, a greater perspective. So here’s my advice:
If AI hasn’t yet made your brain hurt and humbled you in equal measure, you probably haven’t gone deep enough. Learn what is possible and challenge your assumptions. Because AI isn’t just disrupting how we work. It’s reshaping who gets to build. Who gets to lead. And who gets left behind
And that should light a fire under you if it hasn’t already.
Until next time, take care of yourself and those around you.
In Partnership,
Nabeela
If you made it to the end, you’ve got range.
For more content on redefining leadership and getting off the the burnout loop, you can:
👉 Follow me on LinkedIn, YouTube or Instagram
🎙️ Listen to the article on the Substack or wherever you get your podcast: Re-Imagine Success Podcast
📨 Or just forward this to a colleague who needs a little perspective (and maybe a little permission to let go of the balancing act).
Want to learn more?
If you would like to learn more about the world's unhealthy relationship with work, success, and achievement and discover ways to escape the burnout loop, check out some of my other posts below:
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