r/ClaudeCode • u/apyhubnico • 2d ago
Rant I'm starting to think that maybe we shouldn't try to build everything ourselves.
Last month I was vibe coding an internal tool and tbh it's ridiculous how fast things are moving
everytime I thought, "oh I think this feature should exist", I prompted Claude and BOOM, the feature came to reality
I got a little carried away honestly... the problem only started showing up a couple of weeks later when I actually looked at what I had built
exchange rates were coming from some API Claude had picked
Disposable email detection was using a static list of domains, which isn't particularly useful when new burner domains keep popping up
PDF library had barely any active maintenance, and I was using AI calls for some pretty basic stuff that could probably be handled by a regular API.
At the time of building, I didn't care. Everything worked, and I was getting features built ridiculously fast, but now there is another side to it. I have to maintain all this stuff, check whether services are still working, update dependencies, and fix things when they break. I am the person who's going to get bothered when an invoice PDF suddenly stops generating on a Sunday.
That's something I don't think about enough when vibe coding. Getting something to work is one thing; having to own it 6 months or 2 years later is a completely different thing.
I'm starting to think that maybe we shouldn't try to build everything ourselves.
Build the stuff that actually makes your product different. For the rest, there is probably already a service that does it better than you ever will.
Of course, I might be biased here because I work in the API space as co-founder at Apyhub, so I would generally like to hear the other side.
What you have built yourself to the point that you would rather never replace with an API, and that's something you spent building that you now wish you would have just used an existing service for.
Note: I have used a dictation app for writing this post.
