Why I stopped billing by the hour

Imagine you’re working on an hourly basis. How would you answer these questions?An idea popped into your head that could improve the company’s financial situation. It came out of nowhere — you weren’t even thinking about it; you were just going about your daily routine. The company doesn’t buy individual ideas; it only pays by the hour. How many hours should the company pay you if you spent 0 hours on this idea?You’ve been assigned the task of implementing a certain feature. You remember that you’ve already built this feature before and spent 50 hours on it. You reuse that solution in the current project in 10 minutes. Everything works. The task is complete. Should the company pay for 50 hours or for 10 minutes?With the advent of AI agents, things have gotten even more interesting. You know how to use them effectively and delegate a task to them that would have taken you 10 hours to complete yourself. The agent draws up a plan, you review it, the agent carries it out, and you review…