The Disposable Software Era

I'm skeptical that disposable software of the "single use" variety will ever become a big thing simply because figuring out your requirements well enough to build a throwaway app is often more work than just doing the task manually in a text editor or spreadsheet, especially for non-programmers.

I suspect what we'll see a lot more of is software which is unapologetically written for a single person to suit their workflow.

As a personal example, I decided that setting up OpenWebUI seemed unnecessarily complicated and built my own LLM chat frontend. It has a bunch of quirks (only supports OpenRouter as a backend, uses a Dropbox app folder for syncing between my phone and desktop, absurdly inefficient representation of chat history), but it suits my needs for now and only took a weekend to build, and that's good enough.

I'm experimenting with a concept I call "disposable software": apps that are built instantly, serve a short-term purpose, and disappear.

Think: group trip planner, one-off microsite, weekend chore tracker.

I wrote about why I think this is inevitable (like disposable media), how AI is making it happen, and what this could mean for creativity and computing.

Curious to hear what HN folks think: Is there room in the stack for throwaway apps?

I think that's future is definitely possible, like a creating custom dashboard for express tracking, instead of just downloading an expense trucker. And customizable software that a computer would create on demand for you so that you don't so that you'll have a a good time of interacting with the computer.

We've been in the disposable software era already, for small things.

Any time you use a regular expression that you don't save somewhere for future use, that is disposable.

Command line one-liners that you either never use again, or type from scratch when you do.

Throw-away scripts to do some thing only once, ditto.

Same with search queries.

With AI, the throw-away programs just get bigger.

Darn, come to think of it, I just did this, days ago! I was changing my phone to a new mobile provider, and part of the workflow was entering my IMEI, for the phone number transfer workflow. I went over to Gemini and had it whip me up a Luhn's function for validating the IMEI. I wanted to make sure I don't make a typo which would delay the workflow.

Once I validated the number, I threw that code away.