Reinventing the Wheel Is Underrated

There’s a piece of advice you hear constantly in software engineering: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.”

The argument is simple — great libraries, tools, and frameworks already exist, so why build your own?

And in production, that’s often right. Mature implementations ship faster, are safer, and are easier to maintain.

But personally, I think the opposite is true. Reinventing the wheel is underrated right now.

Especially now that AI has slashed the cost of implementation, the gap between people who just use tools and people who’ve built one themselves is wider than it used to be.

1. Building it yourself transforms your understanding

For example, on this blog I write a lot about AI-related setup and development workflows.

But honestly, most of it has already been packaged as a plugin somewhere. Search GitHub, install, done.

So if you just need something to work, you don’t need to build it yourself.

The problem is, when you only use existing plugins, you end up not really understanding:

• what it’s actually doing
• why it works
• where the bottlenecks are
• what’s risky

And sometimes you install a “batteries-included” plugin because it looks convenient, only to find it makes performance worse or adds a pile of unnecessary processing.

When you build something once yourself, the internal structure and design philosophy become visible. Your view of every existing tool changes too.

That’s a big deal.

2. “Reinvention” sometimes becomes a real invention

Another important point: reinventing the wheel doesn’t always end in waste.

Take Nginx. In a sense, it was a reinvention of Apache HTTP Server.

Both are web servers, and “Apache already exists, why build another one?” would have been a fair question at the time.

But it mattered.

Nginx massively improved the concurrency problem that Apache struggled with.

In other words:

• the same “wheel”
• with a different purpose
• demands different performance characteristics

Off-road tires, F1 tires, and railway wheels are all different. Software has the same logic — purpose-built solutions have real value.

Forcing an existing tool to fit your problem is often slower and more complex than just building something simple yourself.

3. AI has collapsed the cost of reinvention

Personally, I think this is the biggest shift: AI has dramatically lowered the cost of reinventing things.

In the past:

• Building something from scratch took days or weeks
• Just choosing a library could eat half a day

Now:

• You can get a prototype running in hours
• You can try multiple design choices in parallel
• You can build while having AI explain the internals as you go

In other words, the cost of closing the gap between “I use this tool” and “I’ve built one of these” is much lower than it used to be.

Conversely, the gap between people who only call existing tools through AI and people who have actually built one and understand the internals is going to keep widening.

4. “Reinvention is evil” is not the message

Of course, building everything from scratch every time is inefficient.

In production, you have to consider:

• maintainability
• track record
• security
• team operations

But for:

• learning
• understanding internals
• optimizing for a specific use case
• finding the limits of existing tools

reinventing the wheel is genuinely valuable.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel” is advice from the pre-AI era.

Today, building something once at low cost is becoming one of the most efficient long-term ways to actually learn.