I spent years doing WordPress agency work. Good clients, meaningful projects — and the same mind-numbing ritual every single time we landed one.
Eight to ten hours. Billable, technically. But brutal.
Every new project meant manually creating a custom theme from scratch. Wiring in custom post types and query backends, setting up internationalization text domains, orchestrating test harnesses and CI pipelines. The same work, in the same order, again and again. We were billing it to clients who didn’t care about any of it — they just wanted a site that worked.
I got sick of it.
So I took a day off and built an automation framework using Grunt — a popular task runner at the time. One config file. One command. What used to take eight to ten hours of focused effort became a thirty-second automated task. Same output. Same quality. A fraction of the time.
I presented the whole thing at WordCamp San Francisco in 2013.1Another colleague and I later collaborated on rebuilding the whole thing atop Yeoman. I’m sure today it would take yet another form.
One of my colleagues had a good laugh about it. I’d “just cost the company $1,200–$1,500 of billable work per client in perpetuity.” His math wasn’t wrong — we stopped charging for bootstrap time because it no longer took any.2Relatedly this why I so frequently bemoan time and materials based billing. While our improved performance and time to delivery was a huge advantage over other agencies, there was no direct way to convert this investment into return. A fixed setup fee would have fixed that. But at strict “hours-based billing” it really did seem — on paper — as if my improvements had legitimately cost us more than it was worth.
What he missed was everything that happened next.
Compounded Returns
Our engineers stopped spending days per project on boilerplate. They instead focused on the things clients actually hired us to do. Features. Performance. Strategy. The stuff that moved the needle.
Some of those clients — companies near the top of the Fortune 500 — are still running sites built on that framework today. More than a decade later. I’ve seen evidence of dozens of other organizations picking up the tool after I open-sourced it.
One day of grinding to build something no one would ever see — a quiet, unglamorous automation layer — saved an estimated 10,000+ hours of work across my team and the wider community.
My colleague’s concern about lost billing was real but short-sighted. The return wasn’t just “not negative.” It was enormous.
How Does this Apply in 2026
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The Hacker News crowd has been picking apart this piece from Claude Code Camp about building AI agents that run autonomously. The critique that stuck with me:
“You’re spending weeks of effort babysitting harnesses and evaluating models while shipping nothing at all.”
I get the frustration. The setup cost of any new automation pattern looks wasteful from the outside. Before the Grunt framework existed, someone watching me build it would have said the same thing: “You’re spending a whole day writing code that doesn’t serve any client directly.”
They’d have been right about the observation. Wrong about the conclusion.
Every automation has a non-zero upfront cost. That’s not a bug — it’s the nature of building something reusable. You’re not just solving the problem in front of you. You’re building the infrastructure to solve it ten, a hundred, a thousand times more. The first few runs feel expensive. Then the curve inverts.
The weeks someone spends building and evaluating AI agent harnesses today aren’t wasted. They’re the 2026 equivalent of me spending a Saturday iterating on a Gruntfile. The people willing to pay that cost now are the ones who’ll ship in thirty seconds rather than weeks in the future.
Will every AI harness investment pay off at the same scale as that WordPress automation? I can’t promise that. Some won’t. That’s true of every infrastructure bet.
From where I sit — having made exactly that kind of investment and watched it compound for over a decade — it’s a good bet. The critics are confusing “I don’t see output yet” with “there’s no value being created.”
Those are very different things.
What foundational work have you done that seemed wasteful at first, and paid off more than you expected?