The Mindset way / Build your difference, not your plumbing

Resist "not invented here"

Barrie Hadfield, CEO & Co-founder Last updated October 3, 2026

Software teams have a deep instinct to build everything themselves. It feels safer, it feels like control, and engineers enjoy it. The instinct has a name, "not invented here", and with agents it is expensive.

Every month spent building plumbing is a month not spent on what customers pay you for: the features, the data and the know-how that set your product apart. The plumbing is the same for everyone, so building it yourself does not make you different. It only makes you later.

The test is simple. Before your team builds any part of an agent, ask whether a customer would ever choose you because of it. If not, it is plumbing, and someone else should carry it.

There are other routes. Teams assemble components from the big cloud providers, hire a dedicated AI team or buy finished agents from specialists, and each has real strengths. But each either leaves someone in your company building the plumbing or puts your agents in a system you don't control.

If agents are your core product, rather than a feature of it, building it all yourself can be worth it. For everyone else, the way to stop paying for plumbing is to rent it from a platform built to carry it, while keeping the design of your agents in your own hands.