Michael Brown is not a developer. He's a California lawyer who has spent years watching the housing-permit backlog slow projects to a crawl and squeeze his clients out of the market. When Anthropic ran the Built with Opus 4.6 hackathon, he didn't enter to learn to code. He entered to fix the part of his industry he understands best.
In one week — across nights and weekends — he built CrossBeam, a tool that streamlines the permit process. It beat 13,000 applicants. He took first place.
The lesson is not that the hackathon was easy. The lesson is that Michael did not need permission, capital, or a team to turn his expertise into something that worked. He understood the problem better than any engineer who hadn't spent fourteen years inside it. The AI handled the things he didn't know. He handled the things only he knew.
This is the pattern MinuteWork is built around: domain experts who decide they'd rather build the tool than wait for a startup to do it badly.