melech-buy-vs-buildlisted
Install: claude install-skill AdirD/agent-shell-hamelech
# Buy vs Build
An agent asked to "add background jobs" will happily write a `tasks` table, a
polling worker, a retry column, and a dead-letter flag. It works. It is also
BullMQ, or Trigger.dev, or Cloud Tasks, or the queue library already sitting in
`package.json` — rebuilt badly, and now owned forever.
Nobody makes the call deliberately. Repo-level review only ever asks *"does
this already exist in our code?"*, and model memory answers external questions
with confident, stale, sometimes invented package names. The expensive,
hard-to-reverse decision — own the implementation, or hand the capability to a
third party — gets made by default instead of on evidence.
`melech-buy-vs-build` owns that decision. It looks **outward** — finding what the
rest of the world already shipped for the capability, verified against live
sources — and it runs one **inward** check first: *adopt-vs-rebuild*, is this
already covered by a dependency or vendor you already have? Then it brings back
a shortlist and a verdict: adopt, or keep building.
Think *"is there an AI for that?"* — but for the build-vs-buy call, and
grounded in evidence instead of vibes.
---
## Two Intents
Both intents are **outward** research feeding one build-vs-buy verdict. Whichever
fires, run the inward **adopt-vs-rebuild** check first (step 2) — a capability you
already own beats anything you would go find or build.
| Intent | Trigger | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| **Intercept** | Code, a plan, or a diff exists and may be re