LLMs flipped the build-vs-adopt equation. When Opus 4.5 writes production code in minutes, why adopt a 50,000-line dependency for features you'll never use?

Consider Hugo. Hugo is an amazing project don't get me wrong, but I just needed a static site generator. Hugo offers multilingual support, image processing, taxonomy systems, and dozens of templating functions. I wanted markdown-to-HTML with a navbar.

So I built my own generator. In practically one day. 5300 lines of Go (approx. at the time of writing). It does exactly what I need: parse markdown, wrap it in a template, output HTML.

This project still uses external dependencies. This was an explicit consideration, and the same pattern and considerations apply. Do I need the full github.com/spf13/cobra module? Nope, perhaps I'll make a bespoke version in the future using plain flag. For now, having my own site generator as a product was more important.

This pattern repeats everywhere. Developers adopt React for a landing page, Kubernetes for a weekend project, Postgres for data that fits in SQLite. We reach for industrial tools because they are the standard? The features sit unused. The complexity remains. We pay the tax without collecting the benefit.

The economics have shifted. Before LLMs, understanding someone else's code cost less than writing your own. A learning curve beat starting from scratch. Now the equation inverts. An LLM generates your exact requirements faster than you can read a dependency's getting-started guide. The barrier to bespoke software collapsed overnight. To be more excise on November 24, 2025. The day that Opus 4.5 was released to the public.

Dependencies carry hidden costs. Every update risks breaking changes. Every abstraction obscures what actually happens. Every layer between you and your data creates another failure mode. You trade one problem for another. Writing code becomes understanding someone else's decisions.

Build what you need. Ship it. When requirements change, change your code, not your dependency tree.

Code creation has become a commodity.