Re:The Disposable Software Era
by kazinator on Monday April 21, 2025 @12:39PM
(#43753858)
We've been in the disposable software era already, for small things.
Any time you use a regular expression that you don't save somewhere for future use, that is disposable.
Command line one-liners that you either never use again, or type from scratch when you do.
Throw-away scripts to do some thing only once, ditto.
Same with search queries.
With AI, the throw-away programs just get bigger.
Darn, come to think of it, I just did this, days ago! I was changing my phone to a new mobile provider, and part of the workflow was entering my IMEI, for the phone number transfer workflow. I went over to Gemini and had it whip me up a Luhn's function for validating the IMEI. I wanted to make sure I don't make a typo which would delay the workflow.
Once I validated the number, I threw that code away.
Any time you use a regular expression that you don't save somewhere for future use, that is disposable.
Command line one-liners that you either never use again, or type from scratch when you do.
Throw-away scripts to do some thing only once, ditto.
Same with search queries.
With AI, the throw-away programs just get bigger.
Darn, come to think of it, I just did this, days ago! I was changing my phone to a new mobile provider, and part of the workflow was entering my IMEI, for the phone number transfer workflow. I went over to Gemini and had it whip me up a Luhn's function for validating the IMEI. I wanted to make sure I don't make a typo which would delay the workflow.
Once I validated the number, I threw that code away.