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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 11.8 ms ] threadThink: 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 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.
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.