One day crystallized the entire thesis about build-over-buy.
I walked into the office with zero knowledge of Umbraco — a content management system I'd never worked with — and walked out with a working AI assistant plugin for it.
Together with Andreas and Rune, we spent the day hacking. I brought AI coding expertise. They brought deep Umbraco knowledge. We installed Claude Code on a few laptops and started prompting.
By end of day, we had:
- A React/Vue component integrated with Umbraco's backoffice
- An AI assistant that could help users with their Umbraco setup
- A foundation that could become a real product
Was it polished? No. Production-ready? Not even close. But we'd gone from zero to functional prototype in a single day, in a technology stack I didn't know that morning.
We couldn't decide on a name. "Umbraco Copilot?" "ContentHelper?" I joked about "Context& AiVen" and expected to get told off for it. The naming debate was more fun than the coding.
That's the build-over-buy argument in action. When you can go from zero to prototype in a day, the economics of custom development change. The risk drops. The speed increases. The flexibility becomes a superpower.
Part of the #100DaysToOffload documenting agentic development in 2026