Disposable Tools: Build It, Use It, Throw It Away
featuring Mike Carlo
The idea is simple but powerful — build something with AI, use it, and when the models improve, rebuild it better in minutes.
Mike Carlo and I have been talking about this concept for months, and now it's more real than ever: disposable tools.
What Are Disposable Tools?
The idea is straightforward. You have a problem. You use AI to build a tool that solves it. You use it. And when the language models get better — which happens every few months — you rebuild it better. The app itself becomes a commodity.
Mike predicted this on our podcast a few months back, and we've been living it. We built an app, used it, then rebuilt the entire thing from scratch on a new architecture. The AI documented all the features from version one, and that became the spec for version two. Faster, cleaner, better.
The Star Trek Analogy
I liken this to Star Trek. You have a computer on the spaceship, and you just tell it to do something. We're getting to a point where instead of building a question-and-answer thing, the computer can develop a full piece of software for a single question you're asking. It builds you a 3D map, a full UI, an immersive experience — and because it's so cheap and easy for the AI to generate, you just throw it away when you're done.
Treating AI Agents Like Employees
One thing Mike and I have been experimenting with is treating AI assistants like onboarded employees. Give them their own identity on GitHub, their own credentials, proper security boundaries. You wouldn't give a new hire access to everything on day one, right? Same principle.
We created a new organization on GitHub, gave the bot its own account with least-privilege permissions, and now it operates independently while we can see everything it's doing through shared repos and databases. It's a better security model than handing over your personal credentials.
The Takeaway
The models are getting better every couple months. If building something takes 20 minutes and saves hundreds of hours, who cares if you rebuild it next quarter? The cost of creating has dropped so dramatically that the old way of carefully building once and maintaining forever might not be the right approach anymore.
Build it, use it, and when something better comes along — throw it away and start fresh. That's the era we're in.