The Illusion of Disposable Software
The age of disposable software was supposed to arrive with AI. It didn’t. What arrived instead is worse — and harder to see. There’s a strange inversion happening in software engineering right now, and most people are too busy shipping to notice it. For decades, the constraint was supply. Good engineers were scarce, so demand for software always outpaced the ability to build it. That scarcity shaped everything: how companies hired, how products got prioritized, how “build vs. buy” decisions got made. If you wanted software, you either paid a lot for someone to build it, or bought something generic off the shelf and molded your workflow around its limitations. ...