I run a fully custom AI setup. Here is one small example of why, out of probably hundreds in the last month.
I was reading back through a long chat with one of my AI agents. I knew there was a link I needed, somewhere way up the conversation, and I could not remember where the agent had put it. So I thought: wouldn’t it be nice to have a button that shows every link produced in this conversation?
What I actually did
I went to my coding agent, showed it the chat window, and said: add a button with a little link icon, and when I click it, drop down a list of every link referenced in this conversation.
About five minutes later it was done. The build cost ten cents.
The list does more than I asked for. The links to my own documents open them directly in Nexus Core. A link to a task pulls up the task so I can see where I am with it. External links get their own icons. I did not ask for the icons. They are exactly the kind of thing that makes the list faster to scan.
The other side of it
I used to use ClickUp, and I am near the end of moving off it. In the sidebar I wanted folders with subfolders. I looked it up and found hundreds of people had already asked for it, some of them six months earlier, so I assumed it would ship soon. It took them two and a half years to release it, by which point thousands of people had requested it.
That is the downside of the professional, off-the-shelf option. A small, obvious feature request can sit for years, because your request is one of many on someone else’s roadmap.
Meanwhile I wanted a speed reader, so I built one. I use it every day to get through content faster. I did not wait for anyone.
What it costs
Anything I can think of has cost me about ten cents so far. A more complex feature might run twenty or thirty dollars. Either way, whatever helps me move faster, I can usually have within minutes.
That is the whole argument. When the tools are yours, the gap between “I wish it did this” and “it does this” shrinks to almost nothing.
Where I land, and where I’d like your view
I think bringing it in-house, under your control, with any feature you want within minutes, beats waiting on a big vendor to get to your request at their leisure. I would like to hear where you land, though. If you have a feature you have been waiting on, I would like to hear what it is.
If you want to talk through where AI would actually fit in how your company runs, book a free one-on-one operations session and we will work it out together.
Benjamin