1039: Should You Quit Your Job?

Wes Bos (0:00)

Welcome to Syntax, we got a potluck episode for you today. You bring the questions, we bring the answers. We got questions on, how does freelancing work in the age of AI? I used to bail based on time, and now I can do that so much faster.

So do I make less money? Should I move to value-based billing? Got lots of thoughts on that. The future of CMSs, right? We have all these websites that are block based, and now they're really complex. How do we tackle that? And how does AI and agents play into managing a CMS?

What do job interviews look like nowadays? Should I be sandboxing my agents or just YOLO running them on my computer, right? And a really interesting question about like, I can't find any blog posts that are good anymore. They're all slopped out, they're all clanked out, and I can't Google it anymore. We go into this little rant about like how trust and community is this huge new currency. So you got a question, Syntax.fm, click on the potluck button, submit your question, we will answer it on a future episode.

Scott Tolinski (1:09)

All right. First question for today is Sarah Chen Rodriguez asks, a long time listener, first time caller. Thank you, Sarah, for calling in. Web development has been paying the bills for about 15 years for me. I do some freelance client work on the side, and now that we have AI coding tools, some things just take less time.

I've leaned towards hourly rates. They have been working fine. I guess the core question or thought I have is, who should be benefiting from the increased speed, the dev or the client? I guess there are all sorts of ways to look at this. Devs have some additional costs and the client expects things to take less time. The budgets might stay the same overall, but you can expect more for the same money, etc. Thanks for creating such high quality dev content over all these years. Sarah, I'm going to say this in the complete, most unbiased way possible. This is me being unbiased. I think the developer should charge the same and get all of the rewards of the increase.

Wes Bos (2:07)

That's what I think.

Scott Tolinski (2:09)

Why do I think that? Because I'm the developer. I mean, I think if it's taking you less time and effort, the end of the day, though, I think value-based pricing has always been a good thing. If you make a website in a week, and that website manages to make your client a lot of money, or it serves as their business foundation, the value is in the creation of it, not the amount of time it took to get there. I do think that this is tough now, because the amount of things that we can do faster has increased.

I wonder about this. Because I haven't done any freelance client work since this AI boom happened, I don't know, Wes, what do you think?

Wes Bos (2:57)

Yeah.

I thought for the longest time, and when I did freelance, it's like hourly billing is usually not the way to go, because I invested a ton of time in my tooling and my process and all of that stuff so that I could be quick and I shouldn't be penalized for being quick, right? Shouldn't be what? You shouldn't be penalized for being quick, right? Scott, come on now, come on. That's awful. But now more than ever, as you can like rice out your entire set up and a lot of the stuff like maybe like you get an email from a client, they have feedback. You pipe that into your agent, it submits a pull request and then you're the human in the loop there. Like how do you how do you build based on that? Like, and if you're spending more tokens than somebody else, you know, like you're spending thousands of dollars on this type of stuff.

It gets really muddy. So I think now more than ever, it's very important to ideally move to value based billing.

Scott Tolinski (3:58)

Yeah. Do you put the token spend in the in the invoice?

Wes Bos (4:04)

I don't think so. I think that you should be charging much more than your actual token spend. Like it should it should be negligible compared to how much you're you're actually charging the client. Right. If you are simply just like, again, being a meat proxy and taking what they want and sticking into the machine, you're not going to have a job for much longer because the client come so much more easily. Just do that themselves. Right. They could just type into the box themselves rather than email you and have them copy paste it. I think the TLDR about this type of stuff is that you just need to get better. What you're able to deliver for the client, right? Like a 15 page website with a map integration and link off to a Shopify store used to be the bread and butter of a lot of these freelance devs where you could make 5, 10 grand, right? And then Squarespace came around and like Wix and whatever.