I'll build it myself!
As you can see from my blog posts, I’ve always made and done a lot of things myself. But I’m finding myself saying “I’ll build it myself!” way more often these days. It used to be a fun way to spend a weekend or scratch a creative itch, but now it feels like a necessity. From the physical furniture in my house, to the food on my plate, to the tools I use for work, building it myself has become the only way to guarantee a baseline level of quality.
Furniture
The mass produced stuff ranges from garbage to being acceptable. By the time you get to nicer pieces of furniture, you’re paying enormous amounts of money. Like with a lot of things I do myself, I don’t build furniture with the sole purpose to save money, I build my furniture because I can get a lot nicer furniture for the money. For instance I could’ve bought a dining room table cheaper than the one I built, but it wouldn’t be real walnut with a 1.25” thick top and custom sized.
Additionally, when you make this stuff yourself you also know how to fix it and it’s probably easier. After all, blemishes are easier to sand down in real hard wood than veneered mdf/ply. A quick sanding, cleaning, finishing can turn into removing and replacing veneer if you sand a little too much on that mass produced piece. If you made it yourself, you probably have some finish and scraps leftover if you ever do need to fix anything. And there’s no better way to come up with an excuse for new tools, I’ll just build it myself.
Food
With food, unlike furniture, it’s almost always cheaper to make it myself. But again, outside of a few places or maybe a few dishes at specific places, the quality is even better at home. I’m very picky about my ingredients and freshness. I don’t mind food waste that would cut into the margins at a restaurant. Not that I’m throwing away food, but I’m not trying to get every penny out of my ingredients.
On top of that, some of my recipes are just better. I take the time and effort to make things just the way I like them. And then when you really consider the time and effort it takes to go get food (because there’s no way I’m using uber/door dash unless I’m ridiculously sick) it’s often quicker and easier to make the food at home too!
Sure, there are exceptions (like NYC), but when you factor in the travel and the wait time, cooking is often faster anyway. Don’t even get me started on the dive in quality since COVID. There haven’t been many impressive meals since then and almost all the memorable ones were NOT cheap. Instead of taking a gamble going out, spending a lot of money for possibly mediocre food, I’ll just build it myself.
Software
I’ve always made bespoke software for myself. But now it’s getting out of hand. It’s even starting to bleed into my professional life. Where I would’ve used COTS before I’m finding that I’m more “build it myself” than I ever used to be. Thanks to LLMs there’s a lot less overhead, not just in getting software off the ground, but it’s also less effort to maintain. Even more so when you run everything in the cloud in a serverless architecture.
Ironically, the LLMs are a bit of a double edged sword for SaaS/Software. They’re all trying to integrate “AI” into their products, they’re not even stopping to ask if any of their users want it. I’m a huge proponent for using LLMs. Hell, I haven’t written code since Sept 2025 at this point. I start the LLM in my terminal, I tell it to review the codebase, then I tell it what I want to do and ask it to have a discussion to plan it out, and once we align I cut it loose and it writes all the code.
But trying to wedge LLMs into everything shows a bigger problem in software. We used to buy or use simple tools that did one thing well. But now everything wants to be a platform. Prices slowly increase year over year because the tool you have now does something another tool you have does better. So I’m just gonna build it myself.
WTF it’s everything
I started jotting this idea down with no real point, just meandering with my words trying to describe this feeling I’ve been having. But once I got most of these words down, it dawned on me. I think I’m writing this because of the disappearing middle ground. Maybe I’m imagining it and my tastes have gotten more refined, but it feels like there’s no longer a decent middle option.
The cheap option, it’s not cheap any more, it’s now priced around the bottom of where you’d expect that middle tier to start. The middle option, it’s just gone. And the top tier option, it’s astronomical. Now, I’m coming up with more and more things this applies to, not just the couple of bullet points I listed; housing, cars, flights (probably really coming now that Spirit has taken the ghost), etc.
I can’t do anything about the cost of a flight, or my house, and my wife would say I can’t do anything about the cost of a car (I do think about “building” a car). I’m stuck with the price of those things like everybody else. But for the things that I have some agency on, and there’s a lot of those things; the furniture in my home, the tools I use for work, the food I eat. I can choose to do those things myself. I just have to put in some time and effort.
Maybe the market will eventually correct itself. Maybe we’ll eventually see the real middle again. But in the meantime, I’m not going to leave it to fate, I’m just going to build it myself.