For my whole career, "don't reinvent the wheel" has been one of software's few unquestioned rules. Pulling in a library was free, and writing it yourself cost days you didn't have. So we imported everything, and we accepted what came bundled with that choice: APIs to learn, breaking changes, maintainers who walk away, and a tree of transitive dependencies you never asked for.

In 2016, an 11-line package called left-pad got yanked from npm and broke builds across the internet. We laughed nervously and kept right on installing, because what else were we going to do? Write it ourselves?

Well, now we can. A tested, purpose-built version of that 11-line utility takes minutes to generate and review, so "free" is no longer the library's best feature. Today you're weighing code you own and understand against a permanent relationship with someone else's roadmap.

That still probably doesn't mean writing your own cryptography library (please don't), but the small and medium dependencies on your list deserve a decision now instead of a reflexive install.

In this talk we'll work out which dependencies still earn their place, which ones you should generate and own instead, and how to keep an AI-built utility from becoming its own maintenance problem.