Why AI-assisted development is structurally cheaper than traditional agency work
Traditional agency website work is priced based on developer hours. A senior developer at $150/hour times 80 hours for a 10-page SMB site is $12,000 before any margin or project management overhead. The actual work being paid for is roughly: 10 hours of strategic architecture, 20 hours of custom design, and 50 hours of code-writing that is, frankly, repetitive across projects. AI-assisted engineering compresses that 50 hours of repetitive work to something like 15 hours of generation + human review. That is not "AI replaces developers" — it is "AI replaces the repetitive portion of what developers used to do, so the developer fee covers fewer hours." The savings get passed to you rather than to another layer of agency margin.