Build What Makes You Different. Buy Everything Else.

Everyone's been running the same AI loop over the past six months.

First, amazement:
"Wait, AI built that?"
Then ambition:
"Let's automate everything! Let's build our own tools!"

Then the hangover: the code works until it doesn't. The workflow breaks. The model updates. The thing you hacked together on Saturday is load-bearing infrastructure by Monday.

The lesson underneath all of it: AI scales your output way faster than it scales your certainty.

Accounting firms are next.

Call it “vibe accounting”

At first it really is magic. A partner prompts a tool and gets a client memo. A manager builds a workflow over a weekend. A staffer wires a few apps together and kills a repetitive task. A firm prototypes software without the six-month procurement saga. That's real, and it's exciting.

Then the questions start. Who owns this thing? Who tests it every month? Who keeps it current when the tax rules change, the client facts change, the API changes, the model changes? Who makes sure it doesn't blend two clients' data together? Who explains the output to the client, and who takes on the risk when it's wrong?

That's where build-vs-buy stops being a slide and becomes a real decision.

AI made building dramatically easier. It did not make maintaining easier. And in accounting, maintenance isn't a technical problem. It's a trust problem. A tool that nails the demo is not a system that survives hundreds of clients, close cycles, tax deadlines, audit trails, staff turnover, permissions, edge cases, and regulators. The demo is cheap. The operating burden is the whole bill.

This is exactly why experts matter more, not less. AI can generate work that looks right. Experts know whether it is right. They know where the judgment lives, where the controls belong, and when "close enough" is the dangerous answer.

So the best firms will build. They'll build the parts that are truly theirs: their operating model, their client experience, their judgment layer, their particular way of delivering advice. And they'll buy the things every firm needs and nobody escapes maintaining: ledgers, tax, practice management, payments, security, compliance. Then they'll build around those platforms instead of rebuilding them from scratch.

Which might be where the great SaaS-pocalypse quietly ends. Everyone's about to remember why we handed software to software companies in the first place. Not because firms can't build. Because software isn't finished when it works. It still has to be maintained, secured, governed, supported, upgraded, documented, integrated, monitored, and trusted.

AI doesn't change that. It just lets more people find out a lot faster.