--- title: The Wheels We Keep Reinventing | daily.dev description: A critique of the software industry's persistent habit of rebuilding solved problems from scratch. Auth, background jobs, rate limiting, feature flags,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-wheels-we-keep-reinventing-1fagpnhlr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Wheels We Keep Reinventing | daily.dev og:description: A critique of the software industry's persistent habit of rebuilding solved problems from scratch. Auth, background jobs, rate limiting, feature flags,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-wheels-we-keep-reinventing-1fagpnhlr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/1FAGpNhlR.png og:image:alt: The Wheels We Keep Reinventing og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Wheels We Keep Reinventing **[Blain Smith](https://daily.dev/sources/blainsmith)** · 8 min read · 1 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@agustinbarrientos** · 0 upvotes > Exponential backoff gets implemented first. Somehow jitter and idempotency become incident-review requirements later ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Are We Overengineering Modern Infrastructure?](https://daily.dev/posts/are-we-overengineering-modern-infrastructure--tzvs357re) · Nordic APIs · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Have less stuff](https://daily.dev/posts/have-less-stuff-llfkpnl7e) · RUBYLAND · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#infrastructure](https://daily.dev/tags/infrastructure), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#technical-debt](https://daily.dev/tags/technical-debt) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-wheels-we-keep-reinventing-1fagpnhlr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Wheels We Keep Reinventing","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-wheels-we-keep-reinventing-1fagpnhlr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-wheels-we-keep-reinventing-1fagpnhlr"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T16:24:19.357Z","dateModified":"2026-07-31T16:44:01.670Z","description":"A critique of the software industry's persistent habit of rebuilding solved problems from scratch. 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Somehow jitter and idempotency become incident-review requirements later","datePublished":"2026-08-04T18:59:21.265Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/1FAGpNhlR#c-Nc0whgo9u","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Agustin Barrientos","url":"https://daily.dev/agustinbarrientos","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--5ayxQnqn--/f_auto/v1788281802/avatars/avatar_wQYYVe5Tbj0NJ7C7qPoa8?_a=BAMAMicg0"}}]} ```