Why Are Companies Still Outsourcing?
You could just hand it to Lee :) Looking at how things are going lately, I think it's fair to be blunt now: the game has changed. And not in some vague way — the structure itself has flipped.
Why are companies still outsourcing?
Looking at how things are going lately, I think it's fair to be blunt now.
The game has changed.
And not in some vague way — the structure itself has flipped.
Watching the recent Claude Code 510,000-line leak, my conviction only hardened.
People still fixate on things like "AI models" and "scale."
But that's not where the essence lies.
What really matters is what sits on top of it —
runtime orchestration, agent architecture, and the execution pipeline.
In the end, it comes down to one line.
Models are being commoditized.
The difference comes from how you wire them together and run them.
And yet most organizations still operate like this:
- They outsource
- They pile up planning documents
- They disburse development budgets
- The schedule slips
- The deliverable comes out wrong
- Revision costs explode
- And in the end, a dispute breaks out
It's hard to call this efficiency.
Structurally, this is just
a slow, expensive, high-risk way of doing things.
Now let's think about it the other way.
By a large-enterprise standard,
around 50 million won can change quite a lot.
- Building out high-end GPU-based local infrastructure (80% of the cost)
- Assembling the necessary model/tool stack
- Designing the automation pipeline and securing an execution environment
Up to here, it's a money problem.
And one more thing is needed.
One person who can actually wire it all together and finish it.
Here's where a lot of people get it wrong.
"Can one person really do it?"
Yes.
To put it precisely,
the one person who understands the architecture and can close the loop all the way to execution
is not just a single developer.
That person is, all at once:
- someone who translates problems into systems,
- selects the models and tools,
- designs the workflow,
- builds the automation,
- and closes it into an operable structure
— a single "small organization."
So by a large-enterprise standard, the structure shifts like this.
Outsourcing model:
- Cost: hundreds of millions of won
- Time: several months or more
- Result: a black box
- Risk: always present
In-house execution model:
- Cost: about 50 million won + 1 person
- Time: a matter of weeks
- Result: fully controllable
- Risk: minimized
This isn't a simple efficiency gap.
The game itself has changed.
The core isn't the technology.
The technology is already enough.
There's open source, and models are everywhere.
So what's missing right now isn't technology —
it's the ability to turn business logic directly into an executable structure.
That's what it is.
What happens the moment you choose to outsource is simple.
- You lose speed
- You lose control
- Costs go up
- Risk appears
To boil it down to one sentence:
You pay money, throw away speed, and buy risk.
Conversely, when one person builds it:
- you can improve on a daily basis,
- you can scale while understanding the structure,
- you can fix things immediately even when you fail,
- and the output remains, intact, as an asset.
So the question now isn't about technology.
This is a capital-allocation problem.
- The choice to spend 300 million won on outsourcing
vs
- The choice to produce the result directly with 50 million won
This single choice
- changes the company's speed,
- changes its cost structure,
- changes its risk structure,
- and ultimately changes its competitiveness.
In the end, only one question remains.
Are you going to outsource this,
or is one person going to finish it?
And more precisely:
do you have someone who can finish it?
This is not an era short on technology.
It's an era short on people who can execute.
"Designing the maze's corridors exactly so that AI has no choice but to follow me."