The Wheels We Keep Reinventing

A critique of the software industry's persistent habit of rebuilding solved problems from scratch. Auth, background jobs, rate limiting, feature flags, caching, and deployment pipelines all have mature solutions, yet teams routinely ignore them and hand-roll their own versions — often shipping subtly broken implementations. The argument isn't against simplicity, but against foreclosing future options by building bespoke infrastructure instead of adopting standards-based tools like Keycloak, Redis, NATS, or Temporal. The key metric: if reinvented infrastructure is consuming more engineering effort than the core product, the team's own estimates are telling them something they're not reading.