For the last few years, a single golden rule has echoed throughout the Odoo world: "Customisation is evil". The message from the broader ecosystem has been loud, clear, and strict: stick to standard features, protect your upgrade path, and avoid building custom code at all costs.

Our view on customisation has been a bit more.. nuanced. We're the first to admit that we've not always got that balance right.

We love standard Odoo - it's incredibly powerful out of the box. But we also know that real businesses have real, unique wrinkles. We believe in customizing when it genuinely creates a competitive advantage or makes a team’s daily life easier. We believe in what works.

The elephant in the room

But recently, a game-changing feature arrived in the ecosystem: native "vibe coding" built right into Odoo.sh. Suddenly, the technical barrier to building custom software in Odoo just dissolved for non-technical Odoo.sh users. You can now describe a custom feature in plain English, and an AI agent builds the code, views, and security rules for you in minutes.

Now, this isn't new. Vibe/Agentic coding has been here for a bit. But having it embedded right there in Odoo.sh is. It kind of flies in the face of "don't customise" message.

A lot of our customers don't use Odoo.sh. But the fact it's now included made us stop for a moment... Maybe we're holding it wrong?

The dream: Our bespoke C4 documentation app

As a busy support and development team, we manage a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. We frequently need to map out how different software systems and custom modules talk to one another. In the technology world, there is a fantastic, structured framework for this called the C4 model. We've used this in the past and it works great, but we didn't have anything inside our Odoo installation.

Why not build a custom Odoo  module? We can save a few quid and get exactly what we need! We gave the AI a few prompts describing our perfect module. Within a few hours, the AI scaffolded the entire app including some quite complex client side UI that we would never have bothered to write. It wasn't perfect, it didn't pass linting, but it was pretty close.

With a lot of excitement, we tidied it up and rolled our shiny new creation out to our internal team. We expected cheers. Instead? Absolute crickets.

What did our team actually end up doing? They bypassed our custom module entirely. Instead, they opened up simple, free-form digital whiteboards like Excalidraw. They dropped a link into our project chat and just started drawing boxes, scribbling notes, and dragging arrows with their mouse, and updating project tasks and knowledge articles. Just like they had always been. Because it was easier. Because it was better.

We had used cutting-edge AI to build a highly sophisticated digital filing cabinet, when what our team actually needed was a digital whiteboard. 

We should have known better - Just because we can build something doesn’t mean we should...

I mean we preach this... and yet we fell victim. Because it was easy.

And this isn't just an internal hiccup; it's becoming the new norm. There's a YouTube advert I keep seeing for a shall-remain-nameless AI company. The ad proudly features three different characters in a business, all using AI to build the exact same app to solve their department's problems. The ad frames it as a beautiful triumph of modern productivity. Without realising it, that ad perfectly illustrates the ultimate tech nightmare: we are trading "Excel Hell" for "App Hell". Instead of a dozen fragmented, messy spreadsheets floating around the office, we are about to have a dozen fragmented, messy, custom AI apps doing the exact same thing.

But true pragmatism is knowing when to step away from the machine.

Now, don’t get us wrong - we still aren't anti-AI. Far from it! This experiment actually highlighted just how incredible this technology is. What used to take hours of manual scaffolding, tedious syntax checking, happened in the blink of an eye. We're not frontend experts at all. Having a completely bespoke and mostly working client action was amazing! AI gives us the freedom to spend more time thinking about user experience, strategy, and how to actually solve our clients' problems. It doesn't replace the human element; it elevates it. If used right.

But, the next time you get the urge to build a complex, hyper-custom system just because modern technology makes it easy, take a moment and touch grass. 

Maybe the future is that we'll all be making our own apps. Maybe we'll group those people together, into a new team. We could call them software engineers... Or just maybe a simpler solution is already staring you right in the face.