Anastasiia Shumilo.

Anastasiia Shumilo's entry into software wasn't through a computer science degree or a coding bootcamp — it was through a question. She had been using ChatGPT for everyday tasks: writing, researching, generating ideas. Then, almost without warning, the question shifted from what can AI do to what can I build? That single pivot changed the trajectory of her career. With no formal technical education, she started from scratch. She picked up Flutter to build mobile applications. She learned Xcode for iOS, VS Code for everything else. When she hit errors she didn't understand, she asked AI to explain them — not just to fix them, but to teach her what was actually going wrong. It was slow at first. Hours on a single bug. But each debugging session was also a lesson, and the lessons accumulated into a working mental model of how software is built.

The hardest part of building as a self-taught founder isn't the code. It's the confidence gap — the hours spent wondering whether the approach is fundamentally wrong, whether a trained engineer would have solved this in five minutes, whether the whole thing is worth continuing. Anastasiia navigated that gap by treating every blocked afternoon as a study session rather than a failure. She learned something she now considers essential: AI can accelerate your output dramatically, but it cannot replace your understanding. If you don't know what you're building, you cannot steer it. That insight — earned through friction, not theory — is what separates builders who last from those who ship once and stop.

Shumi Technologies is now a live company building software products at the intersection of AI, SaaS, and automation. Its flagship is Draw Flow, a construction technology platform that addresses a real and costly problem in the industry: construction professionals spend enormous amounts of time manually analysing drawings and producing estimates. Draw Flow automates the takeoff process — reading construction drawings, extracting relevant data, and generating estimates faster and more consistently than manual methods allow. Alongside Draw Flow, Anastasiia is developing a portfolio of smaller, focused products built to solve practical problems for businesses and construction professionals.

The line Anastasiia returns to most often is deceptively simple: 'AI doesn't remove the need to learn. It changes what you need to learn.' In an era when AI can generate code, debug errors, and explain architectural patterns on demand, the question of what a founder needs to know has genuinely shifted. You no longer need to memorise syntax. You do need to understand systems, ask the right questions, and know when an AI-generated answer is leading you in the wrong direction. Becoming a founder, in her view, was never contingent on having everything figured out first. It required starting with an idea, sustaining the willingness to learn, and building through the uncertainty — not around it.