Just a month or two ago, the tech world boasted about how many tokens it burned (i.e. how large its operating expense was). That party didn't last long. The consensus now is that for many jobs, hiring a person is easier/cheaper than hiring an AI agent.
This has been my fear with agents all along: (1) what kind of agent truly needs to run automatically 24/7 and (2) how many tokens would this eat up needlessly. Side note: I got burned with cloud hosting on both Snowflake and Databricks for a personal project -- billed for cloud/GPU capacity that I wasn't using at all -- so I'm more sensitive than most to trusting tech companies with my credit card.
I've also consistently heard great things about Claude Co-Work. I've been tinkering with building my own tools for a while, and I had a moment of panic: is there any use in what I'm building, or am I reproducing things that Claude (and thousands of other smart developers) are already building?
ChatGPT helped drum up where the tradeoffs are. I put them below, as a reminder to myself that in-house tools -- ones that you know how they work, that link to the data you want, etc. -- have lasting value. Maybe not as a venture-backable company, but real time-saving workflow value.
Anyways, here are the top dimensions where building your own software really shine over what Claude (or similar) offers.
| Dimension | Claude / Chat UI | Custom Pipeline |
|---|---|---|
| Time-to-value | Extremely fast | Slower |
| Repeatability | Weak/moderate | Strong |
| Flexibility | Limited | Full control |
| Structured data extraction | Okay | Excellent |
| Audit trails | Weak | Strong |
| Multi-stage workflows | Awkward | Natural |
| Integration with database | Limited | Native |
| Cost at scale | Can become expensive | Often cheaper at volume |
| Vendor lock-in | High | Low |
| Human-in-loop review | Limited | Fully customizable |
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