I have vivid memories as a child of my dad buying an Amiga 500 and letting me have exclusive access to the C64. I'd plugin in cassettes and 5 1/4 inch disks and play California games. One day I was in the local newsagent and I saw a comic about computers. On the front of the comic it had two little horned devil things called Rom and Ram. I have visceral memories of the smell of that comic, the paper, the cigarette smoke (the newsagent owners puffed like chimneys and would spend most of their money on their own supply of cigarettes) and in between me seemingly inhaling the magazine, I also devoured the contents. I could type in the listings and after much debugging and re-typing play the game.
My dad saw this and suggested that I actually learn to program, in fact I should look at loops and variables... I had no clue what he was talking about.
The magazine ended and a while later I got access to the Amiga 500 because my dad upgraded to a 386DX66. With access to this Amiga, not only could I "swap" disks with enthusiast in the Birkenhead computer club, I could see that people were making demos at the start of these disks... Many of these disks had the name "Pirate Pete" bouncing around the screen in ways that I'd never seen before. I can do that! and before long I found a little window in Workbench that said "Basic" and much like today, I thought maybe if I just mash my hands in style on the keyboard I would get a game out of the back of it.
I don't know why, but it didn't work. But by then Amiga was not much in my mind, I saw a new demo called DOOM and it looked awesome.
At the same time in high-school, our advanced suite of BBCs and Nimbus's (Nimbusi?) didn't fulfil me. I could see some kids writing BASIC to change the sides of the screens, and my friend Bob had written his magnum opus: "Bird pooh's", and I still didn't get it.
One eventful day on a school trip in Chester, by the River Dee there was an arcade where I saw Streetfighter II, and things clicked. Movements of the joystick and buttons would change the state of the program and the graphics. I'd have to loop around a lot of times to keep thing going... Hey, I knew how DOOM worked too...!
By fortune, my grandfather was a tinkerer. Heswall Computers sold him a top of the line 286 (don't ask...) that had QBasic on. My grandad had a problem. He couldn't pick his National Lottery numbers, and so was born my first actual computer program (btw - I nearly quit because I had no clue our chums in America spelt colour incorrectly).
From then until now I've spent huge amounts of time building software for businesses and myself. I tinker. I learn. Software let's me do mostly whatever I want.
What does this all have to do with "the disposable web" I hear you ask?
A lot of the software I've written in my life has been for me and only me. While I've improved my skills a lot of these things still take quite a lot of time to build and so there is always this thing that stops me starting.
Well, I'm back to mashing my hands on the keyboard but this time actually getting things out of it. I wrote the other day about websim.ai and this week I've been playing with repl.it's agent and I was able to build a full-stack application that is a PWA, with a UI, authentication, a Python back-end and a Postgres database that I can deploy with one-click, all in about one hour.
Scott Jenson and I were exchanging a chat on mastodon and he said the exact same thing that I was thinking:
"@paul that's what I'm using llms for these days. I'm actually writing all sorts of little web pages that I could do myself but I just wouldn't bother. They're just so easy to put together in minutes and then just throw them away."
Tools like websim.ai and repl.it are enabling me to create the things that I need and I've always wanted but didn't feel that I had the time to do... But what happens to that software? Do I scale it? I don't necessarily want other people to use the tools, they're really just meant for me. Maybe they will be useful.... It's not something that I always want to think about.
When I hand make something and put time into it, I have an attachment to it. I don't want to lose it. Maybe it's a sunk-cost fallacy thing, or just my ego... When I prompt it.... It doesn't matter, it's disposable.
I really believe that we're at a point where software can be disposable. You can now write once, run everywhere once, and that's ok. And for me the web is the best platform to do create and run software on even if it is only just for me.
This new tooling is stopping me from stopping starting.
ps - I know there's a lot of preamble, but that history of Paul has been on my mind for a while and I wanted to get it out.
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.
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