LLMs have flipped the build vs buy debate on its head for me. I also have been re-evaluating existing tools and building my own custom, just-for-me versions and it's been liberating. Using off-the-shelf software increasingly feels stifling and limiting. I do wonder if the future for many SaaS companies is to provide a solid core with a nice API/MCP/Hooks/etc to build on top of so you can add features only your company cares about instead of every SaaS trying to be a one-size-fits-all.

The cool part is building smaller tools to solve your problems also allows you link those all together (MCP/CLI/API) in ways that weren't possible in the past using LLMs as a glue layer.

With regard to ‘provide a API/etc.”, companies have been trying hard to do that for a long time, even coming up with their own languages, like salesforce did.

It’s extremely hard to do, even on a basic level. And the worst part is actually the UI. You can go the Wordpress/shopify route where you allow client templates and it’s a huge cost for you to maintain. Or you can do some sort of automatic field generation and no-one’s happy.

Not only that, but your product ends up in a straight jacket, where you can’t fix any fundamental data structure mistakes because half your client integrations will break.