Comment by tjr

Fair point! And I wasn't clear: my anecdote was me, personally, needing an instance of some software. Rather than me personally either write it by hand, or even write it using AI, and then host it, I just found an off-the-shelf solution that worked well enough for me. One less thing I have to think about.

I would agree that if the scenario is a business, to either buy an off-the-shelf software solution or pay a small team to develop it, and if the off-the-shelf solution was priced high enough, then having it custom built with AI (maybe still with a tiny number of developers involved) could end up being the better choice. Really all depends on the details.