Re:Bad ideas that aren't bad anymore
by rbehrends on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:09AM
(#50465224)
Yeah, that resonates with me. Like a lot of people, I started building several small tools earlier this year that I didn't have time for before, both for convenience and to alleviate pain points that I had. Turns out that this also means that I now have additional maintenance tasks that crop up at unexpected moments and I'm not sure if I'm getting a net benefit from it aside from the few that I use regularly.
There are maintenance risks for bought software too. A saas can change the interface in an undesirable way or the way a feature works or even introduce a new feature you don't want. Custom software can be more stable in that way.
I fully agree that there are maintenance risks when you buy software, but imho, those risks are much much more easier to mitigate: buy only "mature" software, make sure that maintenance is governed by contract, know your path to reversibility, etc.
Ultimately, in my opinion, this “make or buy” issue goes back to the age-old debate about how companies choose to adapt to the processes already built into the software they purchase. The companies that will “make” are probably the ones that would have developed custom solutions at some point anyway.
The cost of writing the tool is mostly gone, on that I agree. The cost of owning it hasn’t moved that much I think. If I look after the software stack of a couple of small companies I know, the custom tools are those that end up hurting the most. Nobody remembers it was custom made, until the API call breaks, or the person who built it leaves. I think the cost of maintenance is particularly high.
An afternoon build doesn’t fix long terme maintenance, nor does it provide functional knowledge. I think generalists stand to gain a lot from AI, but there will still be a huge role for experts to guide and maintain software in the future.