When to Trust an Open Source Library: A Solo Builder's Due-Diligence Rule
There’s a moment every solo builder has had: you find a library that does exactly the thing you need, it’s free, it has thousands of stars, and npm install is one keystroke away. It feels like the fastest possible decision you’ll make all week. That moment is the most expensive place to be fast. A dependency isn’t a purchase — it’s a relationship. You don’t pay for it up front; you inherit it. You inherit its bugs, its security posture, its maintenance schedule, and — the part nobody thinks about until it’s too late — its custody problem. When the single maintainer who wrote it walks away, or gets their GitHub account taken over, it doesn’t stop being your code. It becomes your code that you can no longer maintain. ...