The Rise of Industrial Software

In the case of software, the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding.

I can see where spinning up a quick prototype might be a good use of vibe coding. Maybe even a little personal-use app could as well. But I would hate to see well built, and well designed applications become shells of their former selves.

The open question, then, is not whether industrial software will dominate, but what that dominance does to the surrounding ecosystem. Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren't. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?