Putting up a shop in CA - fire department being a pain

Around here, anything 120 sq ft or smaller requires no city notification. A neighbor might call on a structure and code enforcement might come out with a tape measure, but that's where it ends.

Same here. And around here even if a neighbor did call they'd need to have a pretty good story for code enforcement to even bother with something like that, unless maybe you were already "on the radar" for other stuff