Building is 20% of the work. Running is 80%.

AI tools compress the build phase — sometimes dramatically. But the real cost of DIY was never writing the code. It's operating it: on-call rotations, scaling incidents, security patches, API migrations, debugging at 2am. AI tools don't page you less.

AI-generated infra is yours to debug.

When Copilot scaffolds your Kubernetes configs and monitoring pipeline, it creates code you didn't design from first principles. When it breaks — and production infra always breaks — you're debugging code you don't fully understand, with no support team to call.

Day 1 is fast. Day 100 is the problem.

AI helps you ship v1 in a weekend. But by month three you have a custom platform with no documentation, no dedicated maintainer, and every change requires another AI session. Meanwhile, a managed platform is being improved daily by a team that does nothing else.

AI makes platforms better too.

If AI tools make you 5x faster at building infra, they also make platform teams 5x faster at building platforms. The productivity gain doesn't close the build-vs-buy gap — it widens it. A team focused full-time on agent operations will always outpace a team doing it on the side.

Your agent is your moat. Your infra is not.

The competitive advantage is in your agent's logic, prompts, and domain knowledge — not in the deployment pipeline running it. Every hour spent on custom infra is an hour not spent making your agent smarter.