I started building a project by trying to wire in existing open source stuff. When I looked at the build and stuff that would cause me to bring in, and the actual stuff I needed from the open source tools, it turned out to be MUCH faster/cleaner to just get Claude to check out the repo and port the stuff I needed directly.

Now I do a calculus with dependencies. Do I want to track the upstream, is the rigging around the core I want valuable, is it well maintained? If not, just port and move on.