I have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained.

It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.

It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.

I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.

For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.

My experience is it's short to get a working tool and long to finish. Many 3D modulers (blender for example) have literally 1000s of features. Yes, you might not need all of them but you probably need 100s, each with quirks and UI/UX decisions. Just iterating on camera controls can take days. You get an orbit camera working via a prompt. But then find it only zooms in/out so far because the LLM decided that was ideal. So you prompt to fix that. Then you find moving the camera is not zoom aware so it moves in meters per frame and when you're zoomed in things move too faster. So you prompt to fix that. Repeat 10000x. Every feature, extrude, bevel, chamfer, subdivide, select vertices, select faces, select edges, etc etc all require this handholding and finese.

At least that's my experience.

Small tools with few features is great. a 3D modeler is not that.

> I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools

Not necessarily. But only if what you need is not available in open source or not achievable by forking open source. Otherwise it’s a waste of money (token) and attention. This is a significantly smaller pool that “build [all] your own tools”.

Although, AI mega corpos would love if we do constantly re-build everything. You can tell by the tendency of the agents to write everything from scratch instead of importing the code that does the same thing or better.

I really appreciate this sentiment, and at the same time there are real opportunity costs to building and maintaining your own tools. Even in the era of tokens.

I think it comes down to where you want to spend your time and attention.

https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

I have always been skeptical of the reality of this, especially for businesses. But then one person on our CSM team spent a week building an alternative to Gainsight, saving the company like $90k a year. Granted, it required a technical person to do it even with vibe coding, but it doesn’t take much of his time to maintain it.

> At the same time I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools

I wonder if Claude Code and other similar tools start to maintain their own base apps that everyone keeps asking for? This would be like a "cache" that makes the requests cheaper/easier to deliver?

Then everyone's "own" apps is really just a customization layer on top of a solid base that already does all the heavy lifting.

So many people are building their own versions of:

- PDF editors

- Word processors

- 3D editors

- Video editors

- Pixel-based image editors

- Vector-based image editors

- CAD editors

etc.

In some of these there are a few flavors as well that are major architectural choices. But most of what people are doing is just playing around with UI and file formats. Much of the functionality is generally the same.

I think that could be true once you're experienced enough to know what you want.

Before that, though, I think you have to learn what the experts do and what can be done and what you should want. And then you can start to make your own opinions.

By then, unless the major players have done it really wrong, you're not going to make something better than what already exists.

Right now, it's different, because we have that experience prior to the ability to just wish up an app and have it happen.

I literally just had Claude build a 3D modeler slice of Blender that I wanted but that also works in VR [video: (https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/s/q5Y6cskYb9)]

I think the value of adapting full tools to your own workflow far outweighs the maintenance costs nowadays. The tool above for instance took my agent a couple hours and it was good to go. It wasn’t a small slice by any means either: it supports edit/obj mode, extrude, loop cuts, modifiers like subdiv, save/load, undo/redo, bones, auto rig, posing, and more.

Mind you, this is a slice of an open source tool which was still outside of what I wanted from it. Cost wasn’t even part of the equation here.

Looking at CRM tools these days and they are so complicated that I’m thinking of just using my tool and add features as I need them.

Would love to hear advice from people who use CRM tools on the job.

Skip the 3D modeler and have the agent do the operations directly instead.

A good visualizer might be useful thought! If that part of the work needs to be validated.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, people gained skills by learning about things instead of outsourcing all the hard parts.

By outsourcing the modeling to Claude or whatever, you don't learn how to build 3d models on your own. You've become dependent on the LLMs, and you're trivially replaceable by someone who can build 3d models on their own...because they can also learn to tell Claude to do all the work.