According to Business Insider, Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel and former Meta engineer who helped build React, has introduced the concept of “disposable apps” enabled by AI coding tools like Vercel’s v0 service. These tools have dramatically reduced the upfront investment in software development, allowing developers to create applications for single-use purposes and then discard them. Occhino himself has built several disposable apps, including one that counts objects like light switches in his home and desks at Vercel’s office, and another that provides instant location information wherever he needs it. Despite being designed as throwaway applications, Occhino admits he continues using them regularly, demonstrating how artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing development economics. This emerging trend represents a significant shift in how we think about software creation and consumption.
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The Economics of Disposable Development
The disposable app phenomenon represents a fundamental restructuring of software economics. Traditional application development has always required significant upfront investment in planning, coding, testing, and maintenance. What AI tools are accomplishing is collapsing the marginal cost of creating functional software to near-zero for simple applications. This isn’t just about saving time—it’s about changing the decision-making calculus around whether to build software at all. When the cost of experimentation drops dramatically, developers can pursue solutions that would never have justified the traditional development investment. This creates a new category of “micro-applications” designed for specific, often temporary needs that previously went unsolved because the effort-to-benefit ratio didn’t justify traditional development approaches.
The Dark Side of Disposable Software
While the convenience of disposable apps is appealing, this trend raises significant concerns about technical debt, security, and environmental impact. When applications are created with the intention of being temporary, developers may skip crucial security practices, documentation, and architectural considerations. This creates what I call “ghost infrastructure”—applications that persist beyond their intended lifespan without proper maintenance or security updates. The environmental impact is equally concerning: every application, no matter how temporary, consumes computing resources and energy. If thousands of developers start creating disposable apps without considering resource optimization, we could see a significant increase in digital waste. Furthermore, the proliferation of single-use applications could lead to fragmentation in business processes and data management, creating integration nightmares down the line.
The Business Intelligence Implications
For business intelligence and data analysis, disposable apps present both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, analysts can quickly spin up custom tools for specific data queries or visualization needs without waiting for IT department approval or development cycles. This could dramatically accelerate decision-making and enable more experimental approaches to data analysis. However, it also creates risks around data governance, security, and compliance. When anyone can create applications that access sensitive business data, organizations lose control over data flows and security protocols. The rise of disposable apps will force companies to rethink their data governance frameworks and implement new security models that can accommodate this rapid, decentralized development while maintaining control over critical business information.
The Future of Open Source and Enterprise Development
This trend has profound implications for the open-source software ecosystem and enterprise development practices. As AI tools make development more accessible, we’re likely to see an explosion of highly specialized, single-purpose applications that serve niche needs. This could complement rather than replace traditional enterprise software, filling gaps that large-scale applications cannot address efficiently. However, it also challenges the traditional software business model. If companies can quickly build custom solutions for specific problems, the market for generalized software packages may shrink. The companies that will thrive in this new environment are those like Meta Platforms and Vercel that provide the underlying platforms and tools that enable this disposable development paradigm, rather than those selling finished software products.
The Real Limits of Disposability
Occhino’s admission that he continues using his supposedly disposable apps reveals an important truth about this trend: the line between disposable and permanent software is blurrier than it appears. What starts as a quick solution often evolves into something more permanent as users discover unexpected value. This suggests that the future of software development may involve a spectrum from truly disposable single-use tools to more durable applications, with the ability to fluidly move between these states. The real innovation isn’t just making apps easier to build and throw away—it’s creating development paradigms that support this entire lifecycle, from rapid prototyping to either graceful retirement or evolution into more permanent solutions. The companies that master this fluid approach to software lifecycle management will define the next era of technology development.
