One post tagged with "build-vs-buy"

There's a moment every engineering team hits when building AI agents from scratch. It's usually around week six. The demo still works. The prototype is technically impressive. But now you're staring at a list of things you still need to build before any real user can safely use it:

• The approval workflow before the agent sends anything externally
• The credential management layer for integrations
• The multi-tenant data isolation
• The retry logic for when the LLM fails or the API rate-limits
• The observability stack
• The notification system so humans know when they need to review something

And you realize: none of this is the agent. All of this is the platform the agent needs to run on.

This is the trap of building your own AI agent stack. You set out to solve a business problem. You end up building infrastructure.