Buy vs Build

An agent asked to "add background jobs" will happily write a tasks table, a polling worker, a retry column, and a dead-letter flag. It works. It is also BullMQ, or Trigger.dev, or Cloud Tasks, or the queue library already sitting in package.json — rebuilt badly, and now owned forever.

Nobody makes the call deliberately. Repo-level review only ever asks "does this already exist in our code?", and model memory answers external questions with confident, stale, sometimes invented package names. The expensive, hard-to-reverse decision — own the implementation, or hand the capability to a third party — gets made by default instead of on evidence.

melech-buy-vs-build owns that decision. It looks outward — finding what the rest of the world already shipped for the capability, verified against live sources — and it runs one inward check first: adopt-vs-rebuild, is this already covered by a dependency or vendor you already have? Then it brings back a shortlist and a verdict: adopt, or keep building.