"Why are you spending your evenings building your own thing when there is already a tool that does it?"

I get a version of that question almost every week.

I get it about my AI agent. I got it about my store. I got it years ago about my podcasts, my side apps, my marketing experiments.

The honest answer has been the same for a while. I build my own things because I learn through process, not by reading. I genuinely envy people who can read a book on something complicated and walk away with a working mental model. That is not how my brain works.

When you build the thing yourself, you know every variable between the start and the end. That is the part that lets you change one small thing and get a meaningfully different outcome later. Without it, you can configure what you bought. With it, you can compose.

I am not religious about it. When I had spent two months building custom kanban software for the agent and realized I could do the same job in 94 lines on an existing tool, I switched. The rule I use now is simple. Build the parts you need to understand. Use the parts you do not. The trick is being honest about which parts those actually are.

One thing I should add. Everything I write about on the blog is something I am actually running, not a thought experiment. The agent, the store, Project Money, the experiments behind them. There is always more in motion than I get to write up. The writing trails the doing, on purpose.