Build vs buy in the age of AI
It's the wrong question.
“We can build that ourselves.”
I keep hearing it. It’s hard to know how to take it if you’re building software for a living.
A salesperson can describe exactly what they need, hand it to Claude or Codex, and have something functional over a lunch break. The cost of building dropped so fast that the whole build vs. buy calculus feels like it’s been rewritten completely.
For companies buying software, it sounds like leverage and money saved (kaching!). For companies selling it, it can feel like a gut punch.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
Can you build it? Of course you can. But that’s not really the question anyone should ask.
The question was always, and still is: is this the right use of the people and resources we have?
A head of sales I spoke with recently wants his team prospecting, reaching out, picking up the phone. He doesn’t want them dabbling in engineering.
A RevOps lead at a $30M+ ARR company told me he doesn’t want his team thinking about data pipelines at all. He wants the insight delivered, so his people can do their success work, their expansion work, their onboarding work as well as they possibly can. They should be good at their job.
Both of them could technically build something, but neither of them should.
What’s actually changing is the job description for software companies, not the existence of them. Yes, the cost of building is cratering. Yes, that’s a genuine threat to businesses whose value was access to the capability, not to the expertise behind it.
If your value is domain expertise – deep knowledge of the problem, the data, the signal that matters – the bar got higher, not gone. It’s time to produce something better than a customer could build themselves in an afternoon — and yeah, I say that in just as breezy a way as LinkedIn influencers tell us all to “be authentic”.
Unlike being “authentic,” building opinionated, accurate, and integrated products can be done on purpose without feeling gross about it.
As much as “we can build that” comments keep me up at night, I’m starting to believe that deeper knowledge and stronger opinions delivered into the places people already work is how we’ll all build the next wave of software products.
To all y’all builders - keep going.
Peter