Reinventing The Wheel, Now At A Bargain Price!

This article argues that the long-held software engineering principle 'don't reinvent the wheel' is being reconsidered due to two major shifts: the rise of AI and increased supply-chain governance. The author reflects on the history of software libraries, from manual code inspection to today's massive dependency trees (e.g., npm, Go modules). The traditional trade-off of outsourcing code to third-party libraries for cost and speed is now fraught with security risks, compliance burdens, and vulnerability management. With AI making custom code generation cheaper and safer, and with the high cost of auditing dependencies, the article suggests that reinventing the wheel may sometimes be the more prudent choice for modern IT projects.