When Software Becomes Disposable, Trust Becomes Luxury
In a world where code generation collapses toward $0, attention stays expensive—and trust becomes the only durable value.
Something extraordinary happened in 2024. Cursor's team built a functional browser in one week. Chrome took two years and hundreds of engineers to reach the same milestone.
This isn't a story about one tool being better than another. It's evidence of a fundamental inversion: the cost of generating code has collapsed toward zero.
But here's what hasn't changed: the cost of attention. Someone still needs to understand what was built, verify it works, and decide if it matters. Production got cheap. Judgment stayed expensive.
Two kinds of disposable
"Disposable software" sounds like one thing. It's actually two—with very different implications.
The first kind is democratization. A product manager builds a quick internal tool. A designer prototypes without waiting for engineering. A student creates something that solves their specific problem. These throwaway personal apps are genuinely good. They expand who can create.
The second kind is dangerous. When disposability infects products people depend on, features become volatile. Updates arrive not because they're better, but because shipping is frictionless. The UI you learned yesterday changes today.
What enterprises actually buy
Here's something the move-fast crowd often misses: CIOs don't buy speed. They buy certainty.
When you're running mission-critical systems, calm is the product. Predictability isn't boring—it's premium.
Glass boxes, not black boxes
As we shift from reactive chatbots to proactive agents, autonomy becomes risk. Trust must be designed through visibility: show the reasoning trail, display the plan before execution, and make the "why" as visible as the "what".
The pause
A new interaction pattern is emerging: review-to-approve.
Designers are learning to create deliberate friction—moments where humans must engage before things proceed.
Speed got commoditized. Trust didn't.