Not just faster development: why AI is changing traditional application development

AI helps us develop traditional applications significantly faster. In our own product VVS, we are seeing development move at least five times faster in practice. But the most interesting change may not be how much faster we can build. It is what that speed makes possible.

Traditional application development gives you a lot of freedom.

You decide how an application is structured, which technology you use and how different parts work together. That makes traditional custom development interesting for questions where control, flexibility and integrations matter.

The other side of that freedom is that a lot has to be built.

Writing code. Creating tests. Keeping documentation up to date. Running migrations. Preparing releases.

It is all part of the work. And that is exactly where we are currently seeing a major shift at JAM-IT.

We are doing more traditional development with the support of AI-assisted development. Not because AI decides what kind of application an organisation needs, but because it can speed up much of the execution work.

During the development of our own product VVS, we are seeing how much difference that makes.

With VVS, we develop at least five times faster

For us, the biggest time saving is not in deciding what the application should become.

We still need to understand what an application has to do.

Which features are needed? How will people use the software? Which processes are we supporting? And which technical choices fit that situation?

The difference starts once we know what we want to build.

AI then supports our developers with writing code, tests, documentation and release notes, and with tasks such as creating migration scripts. Part of the testing work can be automated, alongside the manual checks we continue to carry out ourselves.

In VVS, one of our own software products, that gives us a development speed that is at least five times higher in our experience.

That is not a general promise that every application can be developed five times faster with AI. It is what we are experiencing within this project.

But the acceleration is significant enough to change the way we develop.

Not only moving forward faster, but stepping back more easily

We noticed this especially when we gained new insights during the development of VVS.

Software development rarely follows a straight line. While building, you see a feature actually working and sometimes discover that something can be done more intelligently. Or that a choice that seemed logical earlier would be better arranged differently.

Normally, the question is not only:

Will this improve the application?

But also:

How much extra development time will it take to do this again?

With VVS, we revised several parts because we came to new insights while building.

AI-assisted development makes that decision easier. Not because the thinking disappears, but because the execution work needed to implement a change can be done much faster.

To us, that may be even more interesting than the pure time saving.

Faster development creates more room to improve

We see the same effect in work such as refactoring, testing and migrations.

A developer may know that a certain part can be set up better technically. But if a change takes days of extra work, you always have to weigh whether that investment is justified at that moment.

When a large part of that execution work can be done faster, that trade-off changes.

There is more room to rebuild a component, add extra tests or improve an earlier choice.

AI helps us not only build more software in the same amount of time. It also gives us more room to stay critical of what we are building while we build it.

The developer remains the person who decides what good looks like. AI mainly helps with the execution.

The biggest gain of AI-assisted development is not only speed. It is also the room to keep making better choices while building.

What does this mean if you want to have an application developed?

For organisations considering new software, it becomes interesting to look at the possibilities of custom development again.

Having an application developed traditionally no longer automatically has to mean the same amount of manual development work as a few years ago.

AI-assisted development can speed up the process while preserving the freedom of custom software.

That opens up possibilities for applications where traditional development may previously have seemed too time-consuming or expensive.

But speed is never the only criterion for us. An application also has to fit the process, be maintainable and be able to grow with the organisation.

That is why JAM-IT does not start with the technology we want to use. We look at what needs to be built and then choose the approach that fits.

Time needs to stand in the way less often

VVS shows us in practice that AI-assisted development goes further than writing code faster.

We can build and test faster, but also experiment more easily, revisit earlier choices and process new insights.

And perhaps that is where the biggest gain lies.

AI does not only help us move from an idea to working software faster. It also means time less often has to be the reason not to carry out a good idea.

Want to know which development approach fits the application your organisation needs? See how JAM-IT develops applications or discuss your question with us.