Coding Agents Made Building Easy. Platform Teams That Build From Scratch Are 3.5x More Likely to Lack a Strategy
The New Stack, Monday, October 12th, 2026
Survey of 379 platform professionals finds teams that build platform features from scratch meet fewer goals and lack strategy.
Drawing on the 2026 Future of Platform Engineering report from Octopus Deploy, the authors examine how platform teams source each feature they own: built from scratch, built on open source, or bought.
Teams that predominantly build from scratch were less likely to have a clear platform strategy and met fewer of their platform goals.
The piece argues that AI agents make building internal tools fast, but they remove the effort of writing code, not the work of owning it.
Maintenance, upgrades and governance remain, which makes build-versus-buy a sharper strategic decision than before.