Disposable Software - How to Stop Worrying and Love the AI Code | Matt Rogish
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Disposable Software - How to Stop Worrying and Love the AI Code
April 3, 2026<br>· 20 min read
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It’s pretty clear we’re in the “disposable software era”. Plenty of blog posts chatting about it:
The Disposable Software Era
Disposable Software: How AI is Redefining What Software Means
etc. Just google “Disposable software”
For the most part, though, the examples referenced are about small, bespoke solutions to particular problems, often short-lived and/or non-production coded stuff, or things like “LLM needs to do a thing so it spits out some python, executes it, and deletes it.”
We should be thinking of how “Disposable Code” in production helps us move faster and take advantage of the gazillions of dollars spent on AI. We long ago accepted that infrastructure should be disposable; why should we treat code like cattle, not pets ?
Get over it
Some part of this argument is going to come down to “it just is, build a bridge and get over it.” This sucks. I wish that I could write terrible rails code and get paid $250,000 a year, but those days are quickly coming to an end. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime soon. It doesn’t mean the end of software development (in the near termThe spectre of AI taking all our jobs has always been a thing - we just thought it was a lot further away than it appears to today. The problem has always been there, we just thought we had more time. Oh well.<br>). It just means that the nature of the work is changing.
The way we wrote code prior to AI was akin to how people made furniture back in the olden days: with a high degree of quality and craftsmanship. If you wanted a chair, you’d have to learn to be a carpenter (or hire a master carpenter). Seating for 100 people? And you want chairs? Well, sorry, no you don’t, because that would take a decade and infinite money and several people would die in the process. You get a long bench and fill your building with those.
Then the industrial revolution came about and all of a sudden we could produce chairs by the boatload. The price dropped dramatically, and yes, the quality wasn’t as good.
Check out this really fancy old-timey desk:
It costs $38,000 and arrives in 24 to 36 weeks.
Check out this desk:
It’s $209 and I can get it delivered today.
They do the same job, right? There’s a tabletop and some drawers to hold things. Papers. Business papers.<br>But the $38,000 desk is for someone that wants an artisanal desk that someone broke their back to make and is willing to pay for it. The rest of us load up our blue shopping cart and eat the meatballs.
And now, humans went from artisans making hand-crafted code to operators of a non-deterministic AI machine that makes chairs code. So how do we take a non-deterministic token machine and produce high-quality, working code?
Plan to throw it away.
Throw it away?
We used to say that old code rusted. “Software rots” is a thing we’ve been talking about for a while. And we’ve all had an experience where you open up your editor, look at some code, scratch your head and say “Who wrote this garbage?” only to have git blame show you as the author.
Human thinking doesn’t scale. Large software doesn’t scale. Reading and understanding every line of code doesn’t scale. It never did, we have just been pretending. Let’s stop pretending.
We need to build a system with this in mind. Why?
A Simple Example
Back in the dark ages (late 2024/early 2025) at Studio Charter we needed a way for customers to get web access to onsite 4k video recordings.
This is...