it is ok to reinvent the wheel now

one of the first things every entrepreneur hears is: don’t reinvent the wheel. if you're building a video game, for instance, why spend time developing your own chat system? just use one off the shelf and focus on what makes your product unique.

(okay, maybe that wasn't the best example—but you get the idea.)

for years—millennia, even—that advice has held up. but maybe that’s about to change.

a problem, a paywall, and a personal shortcut

a couple of weeks ago, i needed to share a few links with someone—nothing fancy, just a quick way to password-protect a few urls. so i looked at existing url shorteners.

most didn’t offer the feature. the few that did had it hidden behind a paywall.

i could’ve just paid and moved on. but instead, i saw the opportunity to finally build something i’d been strangely fascinated by for a while: my own personal url shortener. i already owned a few ultra-short domains, and this felt like the perfect use case. also, for some reason, using my own shortener felt very elite in a nerdy way (even if it really isn’t).

i decided to go all-in on the experiment: build the whole thing using ai. to be honest, i was very skeptical and reluctant at first. i imagined my endless frustration while trying to explain the app and its features to chatgpt, only to end up with clunky code that barely worked—if at all.

but that’s not what happened.

in 30 minutes—including time spent setting up cloudflare workers and kv storage—i had a fully working app. it took a few tries, but it was running and totally tailored to my needs. no feature bloat. no tracking. no paywalls. just my own fast, free, and bespoke solution.

later on, i wanted to have links that only started redirecting users after a set date—something no other app offered. it was built in 10 minutes or less.

the real shift: cost of custom is plummeting

encouraged by the success of my first experiment, i’ve started working on a tool i’ve badly needed for a long time: a reliable webpage monitor. as someone who works in media, i constantly need to keep an eye on a large number of websites—dozens of them, mostly government portals. using any of the decent commercial services would’ve cost me a small fortune, so i’ve been stuck with free tools and all their limitations.

for years, i considered forking one of the open-source options and adapting it to my needs. but honestly, it always felt like too much work for a problem i wasn’t passionate about—even though i urgently needed a solution.

but ai makes that barrier disappear.

now, thanks to ai, i can finally break out of that status quo. it’s letting me build exactly what i need, from scratch, without sacrificing the time and energy i want to spend on things i actually care about.

why this matters: the return of indie engineering

the old wisdom about “not reinventing the wheel” came from a time when building things from scratch was risky and expensive. that’s not true anymore. we’re entering a phase where custom software might actually be the cheaper, faster, and better path—especially for individuals and small teams.

in this new world:

• you don’t (necessarily) need a saas subscription or spend precious free time to solve a personal problem.
• you don’t need to compromise on features just because your use case is rare.
• you can build exactly what you need, exactly how you want it—and iterate instantly.

reinventing the wheel isn’t wasteful anymore. it’s efficient.

and if more people start doing it, we might see the rise of a new kind of software movement: not big, bloated platforms, but small, handcrafted tools solving real, personal problems.

a personal list

here are a few tools i’ve wanted for a long time—but never had the time or energy to build. now, i do:

• a chrome extension that converts imperial units to metric—even inside youtube videos. (and no, it won’t do the reverse.)
• a timestamp-mark: sometimes i just want to mark the moment something happened, so i can refer back to it later.
• a purpose-driven reminder: if i want to buy milk on the way home, it should ping me when i pass by any place that sells it—without me having to pick a specific store.

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