Disposable Software
It looks like we’re heading toward using disposable software the way we use Post-it notes now.
When my wife, Amanda, had surgery and I needed to keep up with her medicine, instead of searching the App Store for an app, using the Reminders app, setting alarms, etc., I just vibe coded a medication app. I one-shotted a pretty decent start and then asked for features as needed. Whenever her medicine changed, I got back onto Claude and asked it to make it so I could change the medications.
When the doctor told us she was allowed 4,000mg of acetaminophen every 24 hours and not to exceed that, I went and asked it to keep track of how much acetaminophen was in each of her medicines. I was able to put that in, and then it gave me a graph at the top showing how much she had taken in the past rolling 24 hours and how much she was allowed to take.
Once things calmed down, I was able to look around on the App Store to see if there was something on the market that gave me this level of customization and I found nothing. There were no apps that met everything I needed, yet this application that took me 30 minutes to get started and 20 minutes here and there to customize was exactly what I needed when I needed it. Her surgery went well and pain management was phenomenal, so she was able to get off the pain medicines within a week. I just didn’t open the web app anymore.
I didn’t have to uninstall anything, didn’t have to unsubscribe, didn’t have to pay for any of it (other than my Claude subscription). Had I downloaded an app, there more than likely would’ve been a subscription, a one-time fee, or some kind of payment for something I only used for one week.
I don’t know what that means for app development and what it means for the future of software, but I was blown away by how easy it was to get it going, customize it to exactly what I needed, and use it for when I needed it.
Before this, my default move was opening the App Store and searching until I found something that was close enough to what I needed (and then paying for it anyway). Now my default move is opening Claude and just building it. I wonder how many of you are still searching the App Store when you could just build exactly what you want in 30 minutes. Are you still doing it the old way?