I need to be honest about something.
Two years ago, if you hired us, here's what happened behind the scenes.
A developer — sometimes me — would sit down and hand-code your system from scratch. Line by line. We'd architect the database, wire up the backend, build the frontend, write the logic, test it, find bugs, fix bugs, find more bugs.
We charged you for all of it. Not because we were trying to cheat you. Because that's genuinely how long it took.
A job management system? Four months. An inventory module with supplier integration? Another two. Client portal? Add six more weeks.
And we were proud of it.
Handcrafted code. Artisan software. Like some kind of hawker uncle insisting on hand-pulling noodles when there's a perfectly good machine next to him.
Here's the part that's hard to admit: the results weren't always worth the wait.
We had a project — won't say who — where we spent three months building a quotation module. The client tested it and said, "This isn't how we do quotations." We'd misunderstood the flow. Not because we didn't ask — we did.
But somewhere between the meeting room and the code editor, things got lost in translation. Redoing it took another five weeks. Client frustrated. Team burned out. Margin gone.
That happened more than once.
The problem was never effort. My guys worked hard. Weekends, late nights, the whole thing. The problem was the gap between what the client sees in their head and what a developer interprets in code. That gap is where projects die.
So what changed?
I'll just say it plainly: today, 99% of our code is AI-generated.
I know how that sounds. Like we pressed a button and collected your money.
It's the opposite.
What AI did was eliminate the boring, mechanical part — the part where a developer spends three days wiring up a CRUD screen that works exactly the same as the last fifty CRUD screens he built. That work is gone. AI handles it in minutes, and honestly? It's more consistent than what we wrote by hand.
But here's what AI can't do:
Understand your business.
AI doesn't know that your warehouse guys scan barcodes with one hand because the other hand is holding a pallet. AI doesn't know that your boss only approves POs above $500 and everything below just needs to notify finance. AI doesn't know your client expects the quotation PDF to look a certain way because that's what their customer is used to receiving.
That's where we come in. And this is where the work actually got harder, not easier.
Now, before a single line of code is generated, we build the system on paper first. Figma screens — every button, every flow, every state. You see exactly what your team will use before we write anything. Flow charts that map out "if this happens, then what?" so there's no surprises. Assisted prompts that we've refined over hundreds of projects to tell the AI exactly how to build what you approved.
The client who used to see their system for the first time after two months? Now they see it in two weeks. Don't like something? We change it before it's built, not after.
That quotation module disaster? Today, the client would've caught the mistake on a Figma screen in week one. Five-minute conversation instead of a five-week rebuild.
Are we less "hardcore" now?
Maybe. I don't write code till 2am anymore. My developers don't either.
But our clients get better systems, faster, at lower cost. And the things that used to go wrong — the misunderstandings, the "that's not what I meant," the six-month projects that should've been three — they mostly don't happen anymore.
Some developers will read this and say we're cheating. That real engineers write their own code.
I used to think that too.
Then I realised my client doesn't care about my code. He cares about whether his operations manager can use the system on Monday without calling me. He cares about whether the thing works. He cares about going home on time.
So yeah. We let go of our ego. And everything got better.