The traditional software consulting model is broken.
You hire an agency. They assign a team of 5-8 people to your project. There's a project manager, a designer, a frontend dev, a backend dev, a QA engineer, and maybe a DevOps person. Half the team is in meetings. A third of the code written gets thrown away. The project takes 6 months and costs six figures.
There's a better way.
The AI Multiplier Effect
AI development tools — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and others — have fundamentally changed what a single experienced developer can accomplish. Not by replacing the hard parts of software engineering, but by eliminating the tedious ones.
Think about what actually takes time in a project:
- Scaffolding and boilerplate: Setting up project structures, writing repetitive CRUD operations, creating component templates. AI handles this in seconds.
- Research and context-switching: Looking up API docs, remembering framework syntax, figuring out library quirks. AI has instant recall.
- Testing and validation: Writing test cases, generating edge cases, catching obvious bugs. AI does this systematically.
What's left is the work that actually matters: architecture decisions, business logic, user experience design, and strategic thinking. That's where experienced developers add value — and AI frees us to spend nearly all our time there.
What This Means in Practice
At TwoFour Digital, we've rebuilt our entire development workflow around AI tools. Here's what that looks like:
Discovery stays human. Understanding your business problem, asking the right questions, and designing the right solution — that's a conversation, not a prompt. AI can't replace the strategic thinking that happens before a single line of code is written.
Development is AI-augmented. Once we know what to build, AI accelerates every step. Component scaffolding, API route creation, database schema design, utility functions — we guide the AI, review the output, and focus our energy on the complex logic that requires genuine engineering judgment.
Quality is non-negotiable. AI-generated code isn't automatically good code. Every line gets reviewed. Every component gets tested. The speed advantage comes from generating a strong first draft fast, not from skipping quality checks.
The Result
What used to take a team of 5 people three months, we can now deliver as a focused solo engagement in 4-6 weeks. Not because we're cutting corners — because AI eliminates the busywork and lets us focus on what actually moves the project forward.
This isn't a theoretical future. We've shipped full-stack SaaS platforms, HubSpot integrations, and AI-powered applications using this approach. The projects are in production. The clients are happy. The code is clean.
The Takeaway
If you're still hiring traditional agencies that charge for seats and hours, you're paying for a model built for the pre-AI era. The consultants who embrace AI tooling aren't just faster — they're more focused, more consistent, and more cost-effective.
The future of consulting isn't bigger teams. It's better tools in the hands of experienced people.
Want to see what AI-augmented development looks like in practice? Check out our work or book a discovery call.