What build-versus-buy actually looks like in agentic engineering

Agentic engineering requires ongoing build-versus-buy decisions across different layers of an AI stack rather than a single permanent choice. Upsun principal engineer Patrick Dawkins found that individually selected local agent tools created reliability, visibility, and governance problems because work stopped when laptops disconnected or closed, motivating a centralized platform approach. Although unconstrained tools can rapidly enable individual experimentation, organizations need harness engineering that gives agents useful capabilities within controlled, auditable, disposable sandboxes. When selecting a sandbox vendor for Upsun Dispatch, the team tested several options, found their capabilities similar, chose one while keeping its infrastructure replaceable, and treated the decision as reversible. Upsun similarly relies on commodity services such as frontier models and compute while focusing internal development on differentiated capabilities, including safety constraints and an evaluation framework that compares models by cost, quality, and reasoning performance.

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