Now more than ever, top companies need to ship quickly to stay competitive. As AI accelerates the “inner loop” of writing code, the “outer loop” of testing, reviewing, and merging those code changes is quickly becoming a bottleneck in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Slow builds, long review wait times, and merge conflicts can block even the most productive developers. As engineering orgs scale, there comes a point at which it makes sense to consider either building or buying outer loop devtools to help them ship faster.

For many, this has looked like spinning up an internal developer infrastructure team to fork, maintain, and string together a series of open source tools. More recently, many large, fast-growing companies are adopting Graphite’s AI-powered code review platform to accelerate their engineering organizations. Our goal with this guide is to outline the pros and cons of both approaches so you can decide what’s best for your team. 

What to ask before making a decision

As a strong technical team with increasingly powerful AI tools at your disposal, it’s tempting to build tooling in-house to fit your specific needs. Graphite was directly inspired by this exact pattern at Meta and Google: Phabricator and Critique, both their prime examples of homegrown code review tools. However, it’s worth noting that these companies devoted vast amounts of time, resources, and engineering talent towards building and maintaining these tools, which many companies don’t have the luxury of doing. 

The maintenance costs in particular are easy to underestimate and burden eng teams indefinitely as they need to keep aging in-house codebases or forks of OSS tools working with the rest of the developer toolchain. Even as AI reduces the startup costs of building in-house, much of the maintenance and compatibility work still falls on developer infra engineers. Given the potential costs of homegrown tooling, it’s important to ask a few key questions to help weigh the costs and benefits before committing to building or maintaining your own code review tools:

• Customization vs. standardization: Do you need a highly-tailored tool that fits specific internal code review processes, or can an off‑the‑shelf product meet your needs?

• Resource commitment: What are the costs, in terms of both development time and ongoing maintenance, of building internally or forking & maintaining an OSS project versus adopting a commercially available product?

• Scalability and future-proofing: How will the tool grow with your team and adapt to changing needs, whether you build it or choose a commercial product?

• Time to market: How will developing an in‑house solution delay improvements in productivity compared to adopting a commercially available platform?

• Integrations and workflow: What tools does your code review platform need to integrate with (e.g. GitHub, CI providers)? Do you expect to add more integrations in the future?

The pros and cons of building in-house

Once you’ve answered these questions with your team, you can build an informed list of the pros and cons of building your own code review tooling. Here are a few examples we've collected that you’ll likely want to consider: 

Pros

• Full customization: You can tweak and tailor every aspect to your specific internal development needs.

• Complete control: You’ll have full ownership over features, updates, and integrations.

• Internal alignment: Your tool can be designed to match internal processes perfectly, which could potentially offer a unique competitive edge.

Cons

• Hidden costs: The cumulative costs of development, maintenance, training, and potential downtime often exceed the predictable subscription price of a commercial product.

• Scalability and future development challenges: In-house tools are difficult to scale effectively as your team grows or as your development processes become more complex, and aren’t regularly updated without additional internal resources. Commercial tools are designed with scalability in mind, and are backed by dedicated teams constantly shipping new features and improvements.

• Resource diversion: Building your own solution means dedicating engineering resources that could otherwise be focused on your core product. Internal dev infra teams are often comprised of the strongest engineers at the company, who would otherwise be focused on building the core product/business.

• Security concerns: Building your own solution requires dedicated security expertise and resources, which can be limited. Without the rigorous vulnerability management, compliance frameworks, and rapid incident response offered by commercial products, a custom solution might expose your organization to evolving threats.

Why choose Graphite?

At Graphite, our entire company is focused on helping engineering teams ship faster. We succeed or fail based on our ability to deliver on that value, and we’ve built a team of engineers and designers obsessed with crafting the best outer loop workflows and tooling ever created. Here’s what we’ve built so far to achieve that vision:

Smarter code reviews with Graphite Agent

Graphite Agent (formerly known as Diamond) uses AI to offer immediate, codebase-aware feedback on every pull request in seconds. It’s like having a second pair of expert eyes scanning for bugs and inconsistencies before your human reviewers even take a look. This not only catches issues early on but also keeps your teams unblocked so they can keep contributing high-quality code and shipping better features, faster. 

Stay unblocked with stacked PRs

Graphite makes stacking PRs seamless, which means your developers can build upon open PRs without waiting for each pull request to merge sequentially. Stacking reduces idle time, minimizes merge conflicts, and provides clearer context for reviewers, which not only simplifies dependency management across branches but also accelerates the overall development cycle.

Effortless merging with the Graphite Merge Queue

The Graphite Merge Queue automatically organizes and processes pull requests, ensuring that your trunk branch remains stable and “green.” With features like parallel processing for stacked PRs, your team can merge faster and without fear of merge conflicts or manual rebasing.

Data-driven decision making with Graphite Insights

Understanding your team’s performance shouldn’t feel like guesswork. Graphite Insights provides customizable, transparent metrics, from the average review response time to the number of PRs merged per person. With this data, you can better pinpoint bottlenecks and drive continuous improvement across your engineering processes.

Get organized with the PR Inbox

The PR Inbox in Graphite organizes your work into sections like “Needs your review” or “Approved,” ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. This simple, yet effective, organization tool can transform the way you manage code changes, so you never lose track of a pull request again. 

Simplify Git operations with Graphite’s CLI

Built on top of Git, Graphite’s CLI simplifies many of Git's complex operations, making them more intuitive and efficient for your workflow. For example, the Graphite CLI lets you manage and stack pull requests, as well as execute advanced commands, all from your terminal.

Next steps

Building your own developer tools is always an option. But by choosing Graphite, you’re gaining instant access to a platform built to scale with your success, so your eng team can focus on shipping value to your customers instead of maintaining internal tooling. If you’re interested in learning more about how Graphite can specifically help your team, try it out for free here or schedule a demo with one of our engineers.