Yes, of course, with time, attention, higher maintenance costs, and slower time to respond to requirements changes you can build a specialized system that performs better than an off the shelf general purpose solution. But you cost money. And you can quit and go work somewhere else, stranding the project. And the data might be garbage you can’t train on without substantial effort. And training takes time, which has opportunity costs that are often substantial. And the requirements may change tomorrow with no notice, invalidating all of your work.

I don’t want to pay someone to maintain a first rate classifier when I can buy a pretty good classifier as a service. I don’t want to pay someone to maintain and build server infrastructure when I can buy that as a service.

I feel like I’m being gaslit on HN when a solution seems obviously valuable to me because it eliminates or modifies constraints, and people dismiss that as if managing constraints wasn’t most of high level engineering work.

I tuned out of HN for a few years, came back in the middle of the AI renaissance, and I am constantly raising my eyebrows and hearing this Upton Sinclair quote in my head:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”