[jimvdv]

You are right most developers are not very good at that. I think it’s important to stress that this goes both ways. You should not cut your margins if you take longer, but I also think it is a little unethical to bill more hours than one spends no? At least if you have a clear agreement to bill by the hour.

[awkward]

The way to ethically handle this is to have a clear and contractual minimum number of billed hours in a day. That will get you paid well for built in efficiencies like OP mentioned, and keep you paid fairly on more substantial change requests.

[thfuran]

It's outright fraud. It's clearly unethical. But your billing shouldn't be strictly hourly if you're building tooling to speed up your work.

[derefr]

What you’re saying is that it’s inherently unethical (to yourself!) to accept hourly billing for work the whole point of which is exponential automation.