Better to have a friend with a boat

Someone asked a genuinely good question this week: why depend on someone else's AI agent when you could just build your own tool and own it? My answer is a Southern one. It is better to have a friend with a boat than to have a boat. Owning it means maintaining it. Every hour you spend keeping your own thing alive is an hour you are not spending on the customer it was built to serve. Keep the use case narrow and the maintenance low, or be honest with yourself that you have just taken a second job.