The old reality
I've been building software for over 11 years.
For most of that time, the process looked the same everywhere: hire developers, write code manually, line by line, file by file. A project with 50 screens meant 4-5 months. A SaaS platform with payments and dashboards meant 6 months minimum. A custom Chromium browser meant a year or more — not because developers were slow, but because every component had to be hand-coded from scratch.
I built hundreds of projects this way — web apps, mobile apps, desktop applications, SaaS platforms, custom browsers. The process worked. It just hadn't fundamentally changed in over a decade.

