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The Flawed Ephemeral Software Hypothesis Why software won't become disposable despite the rise of agentic AIs for coding

Full essay: www.blackhc.net/essays/futu...

www.blackhc.net/essays/futu...

I could be wrong. In the essay, I lay out specific conditions that would change my mind, including what I'd look for in regulated industries, artifact lifecycles and quantity

But those changes still go through verification, staged deployment, and real-world feedback. Code remains the source of truth

So my takeaway: while code generation is becoming trivially cheap, software engineering is not

My prediction: the future of software is malleable, not ephemeral

Code and artifact stacks become much easier to modify. AI lets you describe a change in plain language, have an agent draft the implementation AND update specs, tests, and migrations, then review the whole package

3. Interface stability: users build mental models. Variance across regenerations = user friction & frustration

4. Ambiguity & auditability: "we ran this prompt" is not a sufficient answer for SOC2, HIPAA, or any incident response, really

Four examples with structural barriers for ephemeral software:

1. Edge cases: discovered only through real-world use. Each regeneration resets the clock on them

2. State & integration: silent data corruption from "almost right" regeneration is worse than obviously wrong

Ambiguity equals variance in the behavior of regenerated code, which leads to risk and friction between the code and other systems (other software or end users). This is unavoidable in any app or software that is used more than once, really:

"But isn't this just the next abstraction shift, like assembly → C → Python?"

Every prior shift went from one formal language to another. The ephemeral software thesis suggests, however, that inherently ambiguous natural language serve as the persisted specification layer

This creates a structural dilemma:

Regeneration either preserves emergent properties, in which case you're investing heavily in continuity (the opposite of ephemerality), or it doesn't, in which case you're accepting production risk with every cycle

There is no third option

Ephemeral software is "just rewrite it" on a faster loop. The failure mode is the same: you throw away lessons embedded in code through trial and error

We can also look at the history of software:

In 2000, "Things You Should Never Do" told about Netscape's disastrous rewrite: it took 3 years, IE ate their market, and the rewrite shipped full of bugs because the team had to rediscover edge cases already resolved in the original

Code becomes cheaper, but 1) the bottlenecks remain where code meets reality (integration testing and UX) and 2) we still all use PRs, CI, and Git. this ≠ ephemeral

Like Amdahl's law, the speed for creating trustworthy software is limited by what can't be sped up by AI alone

But, first, let's avoid a motte-and-bailey fallacy:

Vibe coding and evidence that we produce code cheaper and faster has been used to argue that code as a persisted artifact will disappear mostly everywhere ("ephemeral software")

The ephemeral software thesis has serious people and capital behind it.

Also from Karpathy: "super custom, super ephemeral one-off apps by default"

Or Acharya (a16z): software "doesn't need to be permanent anymore"

PS: the evaluation of Lovable, Replit, etc is already at $50B

The Flawed Ephemeral Software Hypothesis Why software won't become disposable despite the rise of agentic AIs for coding

[The next tweets are a massively shortened version of the full essay, which you can find here: www.blackhc.net/essays/futu...]

www.blackhc.net/essays/futu...

A while back, Andrej Karpathy said the app store will be replaced by generated, disposable software," and Amjad Masad predicted that the value of all application software will go to zero

I think this "ephemeral software hypothesis" is wrong, though, and I want to explain why:

Bombing of Dresden - Wikipedia

100000t of bombs vs the civilian casualty rates in Gaza actually shows that the IDF went out of their way to protect the civilian population

Compare this to, I dunno, the Dresden bomb raids:

25000 deaths over 4 days from just 3900t of bombs

Was that genocide?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...

Lol this fake statistician has blocked me for calling out his stupidity 😅

Because the urban warfare during the counterinsurgency, 60% of the buildings were destroyed during fighting in the course of a couple of months. This is in line with the report you cited above.

How is this war in Gaza different to that war?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falluja...

Did the US also commit genocide in Iraq?

The Gedankenexperiment says they must be doing a pretty terrible job if this is supposed to be a genocide 🙄

x.com/BlackHC/stat...

Some thoughts on the comment paper

We launched CoverDrop 🎉 providing sources with a secure and anonymous way to talk to journalists. Having started five years ago as a PhD research project, this now ships within the Guardian app to millions of users—all of which provide cover traffic. Paper, code, and more info: www.coverdrop.org

This is going to be big news in my field. While we wait for the dataset, the stuff about post-processing makes interesting reading (if you're me)

Oh yeah I can't believe ai generated ASMR is also taking off. I've seen one or two of those!

What's your favorite Veo video?

Yeah but that's where most of the interesting things are 😅

I hope the authors (I QT'ed @MFarajtabar above) can revisit the Tower of Hanoi results and examine the confounders to strengthen the paper (or just drop ToH). This will help keep the focus on the more interesting other environments for which the claims in the paper seem valid 🙏

And other influencers exaggerate its results massively:

x.com/RubenHssd/s...