Why We Stopped Writing Code for Internal HR Tools

As developers, our knee-jerk reaction to a broken internal process is usually: I can whip up a custom portal for that in a weekend. But we all know how that story ends. The weekend project becomes a legacy nightmare of unmaintained repos, broken authentication, and HR asking for just one more feature every Tuesday. The Developer's Tax Every hour spent building a custom leave-management form or an onboarding checklist is an hour taken away from your core product's roadmap. In 2026, the goal isn't