EU just made time tracking legally mandatory for every employer in Europe. Nobody loves it, and most small businesses are stuck choosing between enterprise HR software they can't afford and free tools that fall apart the moment compliance is on the line. This talk is about building Pistacio, a full operations platform for companies under 200 people, as a solo engineer. I'll walk through the architecture decisions that let one person ship six production modules, how a shared foundation makes compliance structural rather than bolted on, and what it actually looks like to use AI as a force multiplier without letting the codebase turn into a mess.