2026: The year of NIH syndrome

It was the year 2014; hadoop is on the rise, containers were new, and mesosphere and kubernetes were just around the corner. Everyone was exploring their cloud strategies.

Every growing internet company believed their technical challenges were unique but common. You would hear about some framework by netflix, or data pipeline by linkedin or spotify, or some microservice architecture by uber. Everyone was building their own internal tools to solve problems, were reinventing the the wheel every time.

This not-invented-here syndrome was rampant in the industry. Cloud caught on, and companies started adopting AWS, GCP, Azure. The culture of building these tools disappeared slowly as managed services took over. As a system engineer, there was joy in building these systems, but organizations always made an argument to buy rather than build, as ToC was lower, and was faster.

But here's my hot take - NIH syndrome is going to be back, and it's on steroids in the year 2026.

Let me start with the fact that I was not an AI believer.

In early 2023, I was skeptical about the AI hype. I believed that AI was overhyped and that it would not have a significant impact on the industry.

As the model improves, agents get better, and the ecosystem matures. I think the debate of build vs buy, ToC starts to shift.

You now have the ability to build internal tools for every specific problem of the organization in a verticalized manner. With opus, sonnet, gpt 5.2, gemini 3, you can do it to a point that you don't even need a developer to build these internal solution, a product manager or an analyst might suffice.

The cost of building these tools will be lower than buying a SaaS solutions, and the time to market will be faster.

The control, customization, and integration with existing systems is going to be better.

So, in 2026, I believe NIH syndrome is going to be on steroids.