Nobody on the team had written a line of code. A day and a half later, leadership wasn't asking whether to keep what they'd built — they were asking how fast we could get it into production.
A UK enterprise Ops and Sales function ran a hackathon using Genie Code. People who'd never coded described what they wanted in plain English — "let each person see their own contracts", "let each manager see their own span of control/potential contracts", "keep a record of every change" — one team turned spreadsheets into a real app, another team pile of raw exports, excel and emails into a dashboard, in a day and a half.
The part that stuck with me: that when the team presented the results to the leadership, they didn't send it back to the sandbox. They put it into the funnel — PoC, architecture review, MVP, UAT, production. Lowering the barrier to starting didn't bypass the delivery lifecycle. It fed it.
When a first working version costs a day and a half, the bottleneck stops being who's allowed to build and becomes how fast you can review and promote what gets built.
More on how they actually did it soon. 