Build, Buy, or Wait: What's Still Worth Building in the Age of AI

Every couple of weeks, a big AI company ships the exact thing I was about to build.

I run a dev team of twenty, and I'm building a software product right now, so this isn't abstract for me. I'll scope a project, get the team lined up, and then Anthropic or OpenAI releases a feature that does eighty or ninety per cent of it. There it is. The thing we were about to spend months on, done, sitting inside someone else's product.

There's a word for it now: getting sherlocked. It's when a platform builds your product straight into theirs, and overnight you're finished. It wiped out a whole wave of startups last year, all those little apps that let you chat with your PDFs and documents. Real businesses, real customers. Then the big models added file upload for free, built right in, and most of those apps were gone almost overnight.

For a while, honestly, it started to put me off building at all. What's the point, if they're just going to do it for you?

And then there's the opposite fear, pulling the other way. Call it FOMO. The nagging thought that I'm being left behind, that there are tools out there right now that would save me hours and I just don't know they exist. I felt it directly not long ago. I used Aura.build heavily when I built The Scheduler. Then Claude Design showed up, far better at the same job, and it hadn't even existed when I needed it. So I'd done the work the hard way, and the better tool landed the week after.

Two contradicting feelings at once. Don't build, it'll be obsolete by next month. And hurry up, you're falling behind, get more AI-enabled. I think a lot of people building right now feel both, and nobody says it out loud because the whole AI conversation is built on pretending the speed is pure upside.

This is the honest version of how I climbed out from under both feelings. It comes down to one decision I now make before I build anything: should I build this, buy it, or just wait?

Why everyone is suddenly building

To understand why this decision has got so much harder, you have to see how tempting building has become.

For years, off-the-shelf software worked on one quiet assumption: your business adapts to the software, not the other way round. You buy a generic CRM built for a generic company, and then you spend your days bending your actual sales process to fit its fields. It's a suit off the rack. It technically covers you, but it bunches up in all the wrong places, and it never quite moves the way you do.

That gap between how the tool works and how your business actually runs has a cost, and it's bigger than the subscription. When a bought tool doesn't fit, you pay again in integration work to make it talk to your other systems, in training, in the consultants you bring in to paper over the cracks. Analysts reckon that hidden work can add 150 to 200 per cent on top of the licence fee over five years. There's a stat I keep coming back to: more than a third of CRM users say they lose revenue to poor data quality in the system they already pay for. That's the fit gap made real.

Now put AI on top of that frustration. What used to need a funded engineering team and months of work can be prototyped in an afternoon by someone who can't code. In the US, well over half of small businesses now use generative AI, more than double the share of two years ago. The forecasts say most new business software will soon be built with low-code or no-code tools rather than bought. The barrier to building has genuinely collapsed.

The tools sort roughly into three tiers. At one end you've got the fully managed ones like Lovable and Bolt, where you describe what you want in plain English and it hands you a running app, hosting and all. In the middle sit tools like Replit, where you can actually see the code the AI is writing. At the professional end are Claude Code and Cursor, which work inside your own codebase and let you host wherever you like. That's the tier I live in.

So building looks more rational than it ever has. The suit finally fits. That's exactly why the decision is so easy to get wrong.

The one question that changed how I decide

Here's the question that sorted it out for me. Is it unique to me?

That's the whole thing. If I can build something in a way nobody else can, because of my data, my experience, the exact spot I sit in, then it's worth building. It's mine, and nobody can take it from me. But if anyone could build it, if it's a thing a hundred other people could knock out, then it's a commodity, or it's about to be, and building it myself is just burning time I won't get back.

The second I started asking that question, a whole pile of things I'd have built without thinking, I now just buy.

Buy: the stuff that was never mine

Take my CRM. I use Zoho, I pay for it, and I'd never dream of building my own. I've got no business building a CRM, and no interest in it either. We've asked ourselves at circle.cloud whether we should build one, and the answer has always been no. Same with our customer support system, Freshdesk. Same with Linear, where my dev team plans its work. All bought. None of it is unique to me.

And here's the part people forget about building. When you build something, you don't just build it. You own it, forever. You maintain it, you host it, you're the one fixing it at eleven at night when it breaks. When you buy it, you pay your money and you forget all of that. So if it isn't unique to me, and I don't even enjoy it, I buy it every time, and I keep the energy for the things that are actually mine.

The bigger surprise was a buy I never saw coming. For a long time we wanted our own AI coding agent, something the dev team could just hand work to. We had it scoped, the research done, the PRD written. We were weeks from building it.

Then Anthropic shipped Claude Tag, where Claude basically lives in your Slack, like a coworker you tag and hand jobs to. So I tested it. I gave it access to our code and a real job: moving one of our apps, Evalua, off its old transcription provider and over to ElevenLabs. Normally that's a developer ticket. I set the new key as an environment variable, told Claude where it was, and said go and work out how it all fits together and switch it over. A few minutes later it had read the whole codebase, made the change, and opened a merge request for us to check. It was fine. We shipped it.

That was the entire project we were about to build, done in a Slack message. And it isn't laziness. Anthropic have said their own AI now writes well over eighty per cent of their code. The people who make this stuff barely hand-write it anymore. So is building that agent unique to me? No. Anthropic did it, and did it better. We buy it.

The tax on both sides of the decision

Here's what neither the "just build it" crowd nor the "just buy it" crowd tells you: both choices come with a bill you don't see up front.

Buying has the fit gap and the duct-tape tax I already mentioned. Building has a different bill, and it's the one almost nobody talks about, because it only lands after the exciting part is over.

When anyone can vibe-code an app in an afternoon, the easy bit is building it. The hard bit is deploying and owning it safely, and that's exactly as hard as it always was. Something like nine in ten breaches at smaller companies come from simple misconfiguration, a database left open to the internet, not some genius attack. Turning on multi-factor authentication alone blocks the vast majority of automated attacks, and it's still the step people skip. And the worst part is you don't hear an alarm when you leave the door open. You find out when someone's already inside.

Then there's what happens later, because software rots. The systems it connects to change, the dependencies go stale, and if the person who prompted the thing into existence leaves, you're holding a black box that runs part of your business and nobody left can read or fix. You finally got software that fits your company perfectly, and you handed the only set of keys to a machine.

Put those two bills side by side and the point sharpens. The barrier to building has dropped through the floor. The barrier to living with what you built hasn't moved an inch. Which is precisely why "is it unique to me?" matters more now, not less. If you're going to take on the forever-cost of owning something, it had better be for the one thing only you can build.

Wait: the hardest of the three

Waiting is the option nobody talks about, because it feels like doing nothing. It isn't.

Start with the catch in buying the coding agent. When you lean everything on one company, you inherit its bad days. Claude went down one afternoon, right in the middle of the working day, gone for a couple of hours. We weren't stuck. My team are proper developers, they wrote code without AI for years, so the ones running work through Claude just switched to another model for a bit. We were slower, that's all. But I don't even want that. I don't want a single company able to slow my team down at all.

So the thing genuinely worth building here isn't the agent. Anthropic have that covered. It's the layer underneath, something that can run any model and, the second one goes down or gets too expensive, switches to another on its own. That layer keeps me independent, and independence is one of the few things nobody can hand me.

The purest example of waiting on purpose is a product I've wanted to build for years. It's called Ringup, a voice AI agent that can actually pick up and handle phone calls for a business. I still haven't built it, and it's not that I've been short of time. If I really wanted it, I'd have found the time. It's that every time I go to build it, all I'd really be doing is taking an off-the-shelf voice tool and putting a voice on top of it. Anyone can do that. It isn't unique to me.

So I wait. Maybe one day I find the angle that makes it properly mine. Maybe I never do, and that's fine. The discipline isn't building everything you want to build. It's only building what's actually yours, and waiting on the rest. That one habit has saved me more wasted time than anything else.

Build, buy and wait, all in one project

The example that taught me the whole thing was a single feature: the analytics inside Olatti. Quick note, because I keep saying it, Olatti is the new name for the product we used to call We UC. Same software, new name.

We had a big analytics upgrade planned, and when I first sat down to think it through, I was ready to kill the lot. Part of the plan was letting customers build their own dashboards inside Olatti, and I thought, they're never going to use this, they'll just ask Claude to build them a dashboard in thirty seconds. On that bit, I was right. It isn't unique to us. So we dropped it.

But then I realised I'd jammed two different things together and called them one. Because there's something our analytics does that Claude simply can't. It puts a dashboard live on a screen. Picture a sales team with a screen up on the wall, the numbers changing the second a call comes in. Claude can answer you when you ask it a question. A screen that's always on, updating by itself, needs the data to live inside our own phone system. That's ours. Nobody can hand us that. So that half, we build. And the really fiddly part, wiring it up to every other system out there, we wait on, and we'll see if customers even use the live screen first.

One feature. Build, buy and wait, all in the same project. That was the moment it clicked. This isn't three separate decisions. It's one question, asked again and again.

The commodity line keeps climbing

Step back from the individual projects and you can see the shape of it. These aren't five flukes. It's one thing, moving in one direction: the commodity line keeps climbing up the stack, faster than anyone can build.

It used to swallow templates. Then it swallowed components. Then whole websites. Now it's swallowing internal tools, data pipelines and entire product features. My own websites are the clearest map of it. Years ago I built on WordPress with a template off ThemeForest. Then Claude Code built the site and I used it as the CMS, with a component library for the parts it couldn't design. Then I used v0 for the design, then Aura.build. Now Claude Design generates the logo, the design system and the landing page, and Claude Code assembles the whole thing. Each of those was "the modern way" to do it. Each was gone within a couple of years. The separate design step, which had always needed its own tool, just disappeared.

That's the real cost nobody admits. It isn't that AI replaces you. It's that it can make the thing you were about to build pointless before you've finished it, and that uncertainty is what freezes people. The commodity line has never climbed this fast, and you can't see exactly where it'll be by the time your project ships.

What actually passes all three

So after all the buying and the waiting and the letting go, what survives? For me, one thing, and it's the project I'm most excited about in years.

Let me be honest about scale first. My dev team's focus is Olatti. That's the priority. This one I'm building mostly on my own, on the side, a proof of concept for now. But it's the one that's truly mine. It's called Coet, which means rocket in Catalan.

For ages I wanted to build what I called a company brain: take everything a business knows and put it behind an AI. When Claude Tag came out, I assumed that was dead too. But what they built is the plain, one-size-fits-all version, and what I want is bigger. Not just a brain you talk to. A brain with a workforce. Imagine your business knows everything about itself, and on top of that you build AI agents that work like employees and actually do the jobs. So instead of a company with ten people, you've got ten people and a hundred AI workers alongside them. And that model-agnostic switching layer from earlier is built into this too, so you're never stuck with one company.

Run it through the test. Is it unique to me? More than anything I've built. I've got circle.cloud, a real business of over a hundred people, as the first place to build it, run it and prove it. And I've got Olatti, our phone system, which already handles every call and message a business makes, a goldmine of context that an off-the-shelf tool plugged into your apps simply doesn't have. Can I build it? The open-source pieces exist now and the models are finally good enough. Will I love owning it? Genuinely, yes, for years.

I know what you might be thinking, because I just spent half this piece telling you to buy the tools. And I am. I'm building Coet out of bought parts and open-source bits I didn't make. But buying the parts isn't the same as buying the result. The way it all fits my business, that's the thing nobody can hand me. It's early, more of a tease than a product, but it's the reason I came out of all this feeling excited instead of stuck.

The test, in three questions

So here it is, the test I now run before I build anything.

One. Is it unique to me? Could only I build it this way, because of my data, my experience, where I sit? Or could anyone do it?

Two. Can I actually build it? Are the pieces there, the models, the tools, for me to put it together?

Three. Will I love owning it? Not just building it, looking after it for years. Because build is forever, and buy, you can forget.

And the answers sort themselves out. Not unique to you? Buy it, and save your energy. Not yours yet, or the pieces aren't there? Wait, and watch. Unique, buildable, and you'd genuinely love to own it? That's the one. Build that.

I'm not going to pretend I've got this perfectly figured out. Things move so fast that any plan I make more than a month out is basically a guess. The thing that's mine to build today might not be in six months. Coet itself might change completely. So I keep asking the three questions, and I change my mind when I need to.

But that one decision, build, buy or wait, is what took me from feeling there was no point building anything to being more excited about what I'm building than I've been in years.

That sinking feeling, when an AI company ships the thing you were about to build, comes from building without asking the question first. So ask it. The paralysis lifts the moment you stop trying to own the stuff that's turning into a commodity. You build less. But you build the right things.

Because in the Age of AI, the hard part isn't building things anymore. It's knowing which things are still worth building.

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If this is the kind of thing you turn over in your head, building and running a business in the Age of AI, it's most of what I write about. I share what I'm actually learning as I build all of it, receipts and all, in my newsletter. You can join it at axelmolist.com, and I'll send you the CEO Operating System, the free system I use to run myself as a founder.