Comparison
Build versus buyvsFrameworks: build vs buy
Build versus buy
you costed six weeks to build it and nobody costed the years of owning it afterwards.
The decision to write something yourself or to adopt something existing. The comparison is almost always done wrong, because building is costed as the initial implementation while buying is costed as its whole lifetime; the honest version compares total ownership on both sides, including operations, upgrades and the people who will leave. The usual tiebreaker is whether the thing is core to what your business is actually good at.
Full entry →Frameworks: build vs buy
you are five abstraction layers deep trying to see the prompt that was actually sent, and start wondering what the framework is buying you.
LangChain, LlamaIndex and kin bundle orchestration, retrieval and integrations. They speed demos and obscure fundamentals; teams routinely outgrow them once debugging through five abstraction layers costs more than writing the loop themselves. Learn raw first (your two-week plan), adopt a framework later only with a named reason.
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