AI Broke the Triangle — And That Changes Everything for Small Business

There’s an old rule in project management that’s been drilled into every business owner’s head for decades. The project management triangle. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it good — but you only get to pick two.

Want it fast and good? It’s going to cost you. Want it cheap and good? You’ll be waiting months. Fast and cheap? Good luck with the quality.

I lived inside that triangle for twenty years. Building software, managing projects, explaining to clients why their perfectly reasonable request was going to take longer and cost more than they expected. It was just… how things worked.

Then AI changed the equation. And I mean fundamentally changed it.

The Old World Was Expensive

Let me paint you a picture. A small business owner — let’s say someone running a $500K revenue trades business — needs their website rebuilt. It’s been abandoned for years, running on outdated software, probably a security risk.

In the old world, here’s what that looks like:

A web agency quotes $15,000 to $30,000. Timeline: six to eight weeks. The project drags to twelve. There are scope meetings, revision rounds, and “change request” invoices that make your eyes water. By the time it launches, you’ve spent more than you budgeted and it took twice as long as promised.

That’s not because the agency is bad at their job. That’s the triangle doing what it does.

What Actually Changed

Here’s the thing most people miss about AI in development. It’s not just “faster typing.” It’s not autocomplete for programmers.

AI can look at a legacy codebase — the kind that makes experienced developers wince — and understand it completely. Every function, every dependency, every weird workaround someone put in at 2am five years ago. It sees the whole picture instantly.

That means the most expensive part of any rebuild project — understanding what exists and figuring out what to change — just went from weeks to hours.

I rebuilt a completely abandoned website in two days. Not a template slap. A full custom rebuild with A+ security ratings, modern SEO, and performance that would make the original developer’s jaw drop. Two days.

In the old world, that’s a six-week project minimum.

Why Small Business Wins the Most

Big companies were already solving the triangle by throwing money at it. Hire ten developers instead of two. Pay premium rates for the best talent. Throw bodies at the problem.

Small businesses never had that option. You were stuck choosing which two sides of the triangle you could afford.

Now? The playing field just got levelled in a way I’ve never seen in two decades of this work.

A small business can get the same quality output that used to require a team of five, delivered in days instead of months, at a fraction of the cost. That’s not marketing talk — I’m delivering exactly that, right now, for real clients.

The Hidden Advantage Nobody Talks About

There’s something else AI brings to the table that gets overlooked entirely: consistency.

A human developer has good days and bad days. They get tired, they get distracted, they miss things. A codebase rebuilt by AI at 4pm on a Friday is the same quality as one built at 9am on a Monday.

And it remembers everything. Every best practice, every security standard, every performance optimisation. Not because it’s trying to be thorough — because it literally cannot forget.

Combine that with twenty years of human experience knowing what actually matters for a business, what corners absolutely cannot be cut, and which ones never needed to exist in the first place — and you’ve got something genuinely new.

So What Does This Mean for You?

If you’re a business owner sitting on an abandoned website, a broken internal tool, or a manual process that’s eating hours every week — the calculus has changed.

The project you were quoted $20K and two months for? That might be a few thousand dollars and a few days now.

I’m not saying AI replaces human judgment. It doesn’t. I’m saying it removes the bottleneck that made everything slow and expensive. The thinking, the strategy, the “should we even build this” conversation — that still needs a human with real experience.

But the building part? The triangle is broken. And that’s genuinely good news for small business.

If you’ve got something that needs rebuilding, I’d rather have a straight conversation about what’s possible than let you keep assuming the old rules still apply. They don’t.