I burst into laughter when I read this, holy shit if I'm not doing the exact same thing right now. You could probably graph my mood by HN comments frequency.

Basically, it boils down to: commit to either doing most of it yourself, with carefully considered bits of outsourced help, or go for an outsourced solution and deal with the bits you need to change.

The former usually is more fun, and probably works best for stuff you need to work on (as in, alter) over time.

The latter is less fun, but if you can handle working within the boundaries presented and if the thing you're doing is throwaway or relatively unchanging, it's probably the best way to go.

When it comes to CRUD web stuff, for example, I find that Wordpress is often the best way to go, even though I hate most of it with a passion. But the fact is that with just a few plugins (Advanced Custom Fields primarily!), it's often one of the best solutions available for a typical website, especially if it has news/blog type stuff and if it's not mission-critical to yourself or the client.

The same applies to smaller 'units' of code. Every time you add code that isn't your own, you add limitations and risks, but in practice it's often worth it. The skill I'm trying to improve is to know when to make what choice in this regard.

(to be clear, when I choose Wordpress, I'm basically accepting that almost the whole thing is a dumpster fire. Most of my work then involves isolating myself from the resulting mess, whether by avoiding WP's templating/querying system, or making sure a site runs on its own server. And yet it's still worth it at times)