Engineer rebuilds existing network tools from scratch, blames AI's bias toward building over searching

A developer at Pulsed Media spent a full work session building a custom tmux-based tool to drive network-switch CLIs, only to discover that mature open-source tools — Netmiko, Ansible's network_cli plugin, and Oxidized — already handled the same task at scale. The redundant build went through design review, architecture documentation, adversarial testing, and bug fixes before anyone asked whether the tool needed to exist at all. The author argues that AI coding agents amplify this problem by producing clean, well-structured implementations that make unnecessary work appear legitimate. As a fix, they propose a 30-second 'reuse gate' — a quick local code search and a web search — to be run before writing any new code. The key lesson is that rigorous code review focused on how something is built cannot substitute for the earlier question of whether it should be built at all.