Throughout my career I have regularly encountered one of the more elusive elements of software development: estimating how long it takes to build a given piece of functionality. It is a kind of dark art in which intuition, experience and unfounded optimism combine to produce a wild guess at “how long this will take to build.” Among programmers it is a rich source of humour, usually with a kernel of truth. There is, for instance, the “pi rule”: take your estimate and multiply it by pi (roughly 3).
Why do I bring this up? Last week I had an experience that showed just how dramatically the craft of software development is changing. I wanted to build a demo application for an Agent Constitution Framework I am developing at NHL Stenden. Think: HTML/CSS/JS frontend with 10 tabs, Python backend, Ollama language model, SQLite database. Had I been asked to estimate this work in my previous life as a developer, I would have said two to three weeks.
On Monday at 8:00 I started writing the specification. By 8:20 it was done. I then asked Claude Opus 4.5 to write the code. By 8:30 the code was ready. And it worked first time. Clean user interface, well-structured code, genuinely nothing to criticise. That is roughly 200 times faster than I would have estimated a few years ago. I stared at my screen with considerable astonishment.
Of course, programming is not only about writing code. Reaching consensus on what needs to be built is at least as important. And naturally this was a small, greenfield application that only needed to run locally on my laptop — all the complexity of DevOps, hosting and security was absent. Even so. The craft is changing at breakneck speed.