Ask HN: How does your organization make build vs. buy decisions now?

8 points by bigblind 1 day ago | 2 comments

With AI, a lot of things are way easier to build than they once were. So I wonder how big organisations now decide whether to build vs. buy. Building is easy, but you still need to maintain and support everything you build in-house. I'm especially curious how this varies by organisation size.

thorin 22 hours ago |

Agree with the other reply. Working for enterprises the actual initial writing the code part is probably 10% of the cost or less. Several times larger is the working out what the business requirements might be, which is mainly talking to people and writing stuff down. The support and maintenance part is also massive and if you assume a 5-10 year lifespan costs much more than the initial build.

I think what probably has improved is the ability of the business to prototype ideas for new systems and products quickly and throw them away if they don't work as expected.

prasadvara 1 day ago |

If I am not wrong, orgs build vs buy for the most part is NOT impacted by AI cycle.

For the most part business care about, is this our core capability OR not?? If core, yes build is what preferred. If not, buy is preferred. Where few occasions they deviate from this due to, to be frank non-technical reasons.

In Software world, building is not the costly, maintaining it is - and this cycle of AI developed software is NOT proven yet. So, so far my understanding is nothing changed in that area.