The Framework for Software Decisions
in an AI-First World
Ben Roberts
The book · out 2026
Build or Buy
The framework for software decisions in an AI-first world.
For decades there were five good reasons to buy software instead of building it: expertise, cost, speed, maintenance, and risk. AI is dissolving all five at once. This book shows you how to decide what that means for every tool in your stack.
Build. Buy. Bridge. Beware. A scoring methodology you can apply to any software tool in your stack.
Subscribers get the manuscript first
What’s inside
Part one
The Software Trap
How enterprises end up with hundreds of paid applications, why SaaS won, and the five reasons to buy software.
Part two
The Shift
What changed: the capability curve, the era of personal software, and the democratization of building.
Part three
Building in the Real World
Infrastructure decisions, agentic engineering, and the builder's playbook for operators.
Part four
The Framework
The B4 Decision Matrix, the Beware quadrant, and how to run a quarterly stack audit.
The engine at the heart of the book
The framework isn’t theory. It’s running, in public, on 1,609 categories.
Every method in the book is applied weekly by the B4 Index — and every score is browsable, audited, and dated.