On building your own tools

The argument against building your own tooling is always maintenance. It's a real cost and it never goes away.

But the argument for it is that a tool you wrote knows things a general one can't. It knows your schema, your conventions, the shape of the thing you actually make. Generic tools are configured; personal tools are just correct.

The trick, I think, is keeping the output boring. Plain files, plain formats. Then the tool is a convenience rather than a dependency, and walking away from it costs nothing.