AI, Over Confidence, or Am I Crazy?
We are four years into the "AI revolution," and it brought along a lot of possibilities, misinformation, fear mongering, and plain old bad intentions.
In the midst of all the nonsense and absurd claims, one always makes me scratch my head: "Oh, now with AI, SaaS is dead! You can do it all yourself."
It left me questioning myself for quite a while: is my sarcasm meter broken?
Might Not Be That Easy
This sounds strange to me because any reasonably seasoned software developer or manager has faced the same question for decades: should we buy or build?
When we calculate the cost of building, we have to weigh so many things: maintenance, domain know-how, infrastructure, support, scalability, security. And those are just the known requirements. We also need to consider the cost when things fail, and they always fail. What is the impact then?
Big Opportunities... for Problems
The "just write your own" logic is perfectly fine for low-risk, low-complexity applications that you already know how to operate and maintain. Which raises the question: why would you be paying for it in the first place?
In any other scenario, an alarm starts ringing right behind my ear.
"Hey, we pay so much for Stripe. For what? Just let Claude run free!" said the overly confident CTO of a somewhat successful e-commerce company with three developers.
How many of those developers have experience with payment systems, fraud detection, legislation, refund workflows, and the rest? Zero.
So they let Claude run free. Three months later, a silent rounding bug in their refund flow had quietly overcharged a chunk of customers. No fraud detection meant chargebacks piled up, and the payment processor flagged the account. The "savings" evaporated, plus the cost of the engineering scramble, the lost trust, and the legal review. The realization that they were out of their depth came expensive and late.
This might be an extreme example, but, scaled to their respective proportions, the same dynamic applies to almost everything.
It's not about AI itself
To be clear, this is not an argument against AI. AI is excellent at accelerating the parts you do understand: scaffolding the integrations, writing tests, generating boilerplate, documenting workflows. The distinction is between using AI to move faster on a problem you can reason about, versus using it to replace expertise you simply do not have. The former is leverage. The latter is a liability waiting to blow up.
Conclusion
AI is an immense help for so many professions, including development, but it's not a silver bullet. Buy versus build never went away; AI just made it easier to pick the wrong answer with more confidence.