Building Account Wizard: How Unreasonable Prompts Helped Me Ship a CRM in Two Weeks
When I arrived at Highway Ventures in mid-June, one of my assignments was to build an account-strategy tool—essentially a lightweight CRM we called Account Wizard—by the end of summer. It ended up only taking 2 weeks. The twist: I’d never written production code or worked with a CRM before. My only real advantage was months spent experimenting with large-language-model prompts after graduating high school this past May. I’d learned that if you can describe a feature precisely in plain English, today’s models will do much of the heavy lifting.
Midway through week one, I was listening to an a16z conversation with legendary producer Rick Rubin. He said models are built to be reasonable, yet true breakthroughs are born from the unreasonable. That line reset my entire approach. I stopped micromanaging every prompt and tried the most direct instruction I could imagine: “Design a CRM that helps founders track every customer with a huge focus on strategy.” No tables, no schemas—just intent. The model’s answer wasn’t perfect, but it came back with a working skeleton: database structure, drag-and-drop pipeline, and even a basic dashboard. The less I constrained it, the faster it delivered useful code.
Unreasonable prompting turned out to be more than a tactic; it’s a mindset. It means outlining a request that might be impossible, pressing Enter, and seeing what happens. You lead with ambition, not certainty, treating the model as a collaborator whose limits you discover only by testing them. Asking a question you’re not sure the model can answer forces clarity in your own thinking and often reveals unexpected capabilities in the tool.
Of course vision still needed reality checks. I spoke with local sales reps, studied how their tools handled pipelines, and asked ChatGPT for a complete list of B2B CRM requirements. That single conversation produced a forty-item checklist that became my blueprint. I fed the list into Lovable—my preferred build-with-prompts workspace—layered in a color palette and branding, and watched it compile an MVP in minutes. From there I iterated by conversation: “Give me five deal stages, draggable cards, totals at the bottom, and an average probability score.” One reply later, the Opportunity bar looked ready for customers. Prompt by prompt I refined styling, copy, and logic until Account Wizard felt cohesive and usable.
Finishing a ten-thousand-line project in two weeks taught me three things. First, clear imagination now can outrun deep expertise; describe a solution vividly enough and the model meets you halfway. Second, broad direction can beat brittle detail; over-specifying a prompt can strangulate creativity, while a bold ask invites it. Third, the surest way to unlock a reasonable model is to ask an unreasonable question. The boundary of what’s possible has shifted outward; all it needs is a confident, colorful prompt. If Rick Rubin can shape platinum albums with vibe alone, we can shape software the same way—one daring request at a time.
