GoKawiilKent Beck, the person who gave us Extreme Programming and popularised Test-Driven Development, tweeted something in April 2023 that should have been a wake-up call for every developer alive:
90% of my skills just went to zero dollars. 10% of my skills just went up 1000x.
Two years later, in a November 2025 podcast appearance, he expanded on what that 10% actually looks like: “Having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keeping track of a design to maintain or control the levels of complexity as you go forward. Those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to knowing where to put the ampersands and the stars and the brackets in Rust.”
If you’ve been paying attention, you already know what the 90% is. And if you haven’t, well, this post is for you.
The $350K Weekend Project
Paul Ford, former CEO of Postlight and one of the sharpest observers of the technology industry, described what happened when Anthropic gave Pro plan subscribers $1,000 in free Claude Code credits in November 2025. Ford, a self-described “reasonably effective coder and horrific dilettante”, set out to burn $100 a day on side projects that had been sitting in folders for a decade.
Ford can put real numbers on this because he spent years as a professional software cost estimator. He knows exactly what things cost to build. Claude Code itself would estimate project costs and those estimates were, in Ford’s words, “extremely on the nose — for 2022.” But in 2025, one can type “do all of that; sounds like a bargain” and it gets done in fifteen minutes for maybe 50 cents.
Over the weekend, he ported his old blog from a custom, “incredibly obscure, disturbing data format” he first created in 1999 to a tidy new CMS. He built a timeline visualisation project with a new TypeScript frontend and backend. He created a functional clone of OwnCast. Total spend: about $150.
Ford’s description of the experience is worth lingering on: “Programming in Claude Code is like playing with a Tamagotchi, if a Tamagotchi was a forty-person engineering and product team, and instead of producing little digital poops, it could instead deploy database-backed web applications with type-safe API interfaces and React frontends.”
At 2021 retail rates, the dataset conversion alone would have been $350,000: a product manager, a designer, two engineers including one senior, four to six months of design, coding, and testing, plus maintenance. Ford himself, on weekends and evenings, for the price of leftover promotional credits.
... continue reading