The Mindset way / Build your difference, not your plumbing

Rent the plumbing, build the difference

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

My argument does not rest on any new technology. How agents should be built is already well understood, so there is little invention left in the plumbing, only best practice.

The plumbing has to exist either way. You can build it or rent it, and in both cases your real invention is what you do with it: the business problem you solve, your data and your logic.

Everyone is now discovering that this is the hard part, and it is where your team's time should go. Agents are only as useful as the things they can do for users. Their ability to do things rests on your team exposing APIs, which is where your real IP lies; your unique data and logic. This alone can take teams months to get right.

However, renting is a dependency, and you should weigh it as one. That is why I believe the design of every agent should stay with you, where your team can read it, track every change and take it elsewhere if it ever needs to.