Architecture for Disposable Systems

Summary

Architecture for Disposable Systems Posted on January 15, 2026 • 3 minutes • 595 words As software gets cheaper to produce (thanks to coding agents) and quality expectations shift, we’re witnessing the rise of disposable software: code that you generate, use, and discard rather than maintain indefinitely. The Traditional Model Traditional software follows a well-established pattern: you build something once, maintain it indefinitely, and pay for it through high upfront capital and long-term maintenance costs. The economics made sense because rewriting was expensive. We accepted spending 80% of a project’s lifecycle on maintenance because the alternative (starting over) was often prohibitive (until the product reaches its EOL) This created a culture of careful engineering: clean code, thoughtful architecture, and refactoring to reduce technical debt. We optimized for the long term because the long term was inevitable. We have to live with it. The Disposable Shift But what happens when an agent can regenerate a functional replacement from a prompt in 5 minutes? The incentive to “clean up technical debt” or “refactor for the long term” vanishes. If the code works now and you can regenerate it later, why invest in perfection? We’re already seeing the rise of “vibe coding”: building tools that solve a problem right now. Need a specific data parser? Generate it. Need a one-off dashboard for a meeting? Generate it. Use it, and if it breaks or becomes obsolete, delete it and generate a new one. You don’t care if the code is “clean” as long as the output is correct. This isn’t laziness. It’s a fundamental shift in the economics of software development. When generation is cheap, maintenance becomes the expensive option. Architecture for Disposable Systems If we’re moving toward disposable software, how do we architect systems that can survive this shift? The answer lies in a three-layer model: The Core (Durable) The Source of Truth. This is the hardened, human-written, slow-c...