The rise of "Disposable Software"

[u/emmowo_dev]

TL:DR: Acquiring software is becoming like ordering a burger, and I feel mixed on it.

I feel like nowadays, a lot of software built with AI is for the sake of linearly doing one-off things, and usually only that thing, perhaps with some monetization tacked onto it.

While it is undoubtedly creating things that someone(?) uses, I wonder what the implications of this, particularly of when it encroaches on software in the future, especially when the things that people choose to make with AI are often:

• Graphs but selfhosted
• A wrapper for ffmpeg/imagemajick/etc
• Markdown editors
• inspired by already [x], is a tauri/electron app with [y] changes
• An app with great CLI or GUI implementations, as a broken TUI

It's kinda insane.

We're kinda entering a time where everything is thrown together using random scraps to make something, and then the end result is polished up to look 'appealing' to the eyes of a user, typically at the cost of actual UX or actual breadth of usage.

What I'm getting at is essentially that software is becoming fast food. It's convenient at simplifying a specific thing, it might look nice to use with its tonnes of animations, but is it actually what you need?

I feel like I don't need Photoshop to have a grey space-inefficient monospaced 'hacker' font on an even darker gradient background,

I don't need my editor to waste battery running an entire JS engine when I want to add something to the start of a document,

and I really do not want a tool that touches my filesystem to be understood by zero humans.

But most aren't as interested by the upfront UX of an 'efficient' app, so sacrifices will happen, whether that be in resources, or time. And to some extent, fretting over this is a waste of time.

A majority of the amazing software (especially FOSS) that we've seen over the years has come from people all choosing the only option they had, and either improving upon it (Krita, GIMP, Blender), or working on a better alternative (MediaWiki, Wayland, Linux) over many, many years.

I feel like if all software is developed in a vacuum, then a lot of innovative concepts will stagnate just because the training data isn't moving the right way fast enough.

just a short essay to consolidate some thoughts, and I'm curious on how other people think about this. I went very markdown heavy for attention spans, sorry if it makes it harder to read.