My wife is an obesity medicine and women’s health specialist, so she’s been in my ear talking about ultraprocessed foods for years. That’s why the processed food analogy for AI-generated software resonates. We industrialized agriculture and got abundance, yes—but also obesity, diabetes, and 318 million people still experiencing acute hunger. The problem was never production capacity.
Chris Loy applies this lens to where software is heading:
Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. This is not because producers are careless, but because once production is cheap enough, junk is what maximises volume, margin, and reach. The result is not abundance of the best things, but overproduction of the most consumable ones.
Loy introduces the term “disposable software”—software created with no expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding. Vibe-coded apps. AI slop. Whatever you want to call it, the economics are different: easy reproducibility means each output has less value, which means volume becomes the only game. Just look in the App Store for any popular category such as todo lists, notetakers, and word puzzles. Or look in r/SaaS and notice the glut of single people building and selling their own products.
Loy goes on to compare this movement with mass-produced fashion as well:
For example, prior to industrialisation, clothing was largely produced by specialised artisans, often coordinated through guilds and manual labour, with resources gathered locally, and the expertise for creating durable fabrics accumulated over years, and frequently passed down in family lines. Industrialisation changed that completely, with raw materials being shipped intercontinentally, fabrics mass produced in factories, clothes assembled by machinery, all leading to today’s world of fast, disposable, exploitative fashion.
Disposable fashion leads to vast overproduction, with estimates that 20–40% (up to 30–60 billion pieces) go unsold. There’s a waste of people’s time, tokens, electricity, and ultimately consumer dollars that AI enables.
The silver lining that Loy observes is in innovation. Entirely human-written code isn’t the answer. It’s doing the necessary research and development to innovate. My take is that’s exactly where designers need to be sitting.
