When Software Becomes Disposable, Trust Becomes Luxury

Something extraordinary happened in the beginning of 2026. Cursor's team built a functional browser in one week. Chrome took two years and hundreds of engineers to reach the same milestone.

The Great Inversion

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.

The difference matters.

Code Is Reality (and Its Discontents)

There's a philosophy gaining traction: "Code is reality." If you can generate working software faster than you can write a spec, why plan? Just build.

This works brilliantly for developer tools. Engineers expect change. They adapt quickly. They read changelogs for fun.

For everyone else, it creates what we might call a UX tax:

- Muscle memory breaks constantly

- Uncertainty about where things are

- Flow states become impossible

When the interface keeps moving, users pay the price in cognitive overhead—even when each individual change is "better."

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. The ability to say "this will work exactly like it did yesterday" becomes a luxury feature.

As software volatility increases everywhere else, reliability becomes differentiation. Stability is the new status symbol.

The Agent Problem

We're watching a shift from reactive chatbots to proactive agents—systems that don't wait for instructions but anticipate and act.

Autonomy sounds efficient. It's also risk.

Every increase in agent capability is an increase in potential consequences. And consequences demand trust. But trust isn't a feature you ship. It's built through visibility.

This is why the future belongs to glass boxes, not black boxes:

- Show the reasoning trail

- Display the plan before execution

- Surface evidence and artifacts

- Make the "why" as visible as the "what"

The Pause

A new interaction pattern is emerging: review-to-approve.

Instead of agents acting freely, they propose and wait. Designers are learning to create deliberate friction—moments where humans must engage before things proceed.

This isn't a limitation. It's architecture for trust. The pause is the product.

The Only Durable Value

Here's the takeaway: in a world where anyone can produce software instantly, trust is the only durable competitive advantage.

And trust isn't constrained by production capability. It's constrained by consequences.

You can generate a million lines of code overnight. You cannot generate trust. It accrues slowly, through consistency, transparency, and the willingness to pause before acting.

Speed got commoditized. What's left is everything speed can't buy.