Building vs Buying AI Agents: A Developer's...

I have spent the better part of two years building AI agents. Custom ones, from scratch, with hand-tuned prompts and bespoke tool integrations. I have also deployed marketplace agents that someone else built. This is my honest take on when each approach makes sense, written for developers who care more about shipping than about purity. The Seductive Pull of Building Everything Every developer's first instinct is to build. We see an agent demo, think "I could build that in a weekend," and three m