Designing for Throwaway-ability in the AI Coding Era

The most impactful engineering leader I ever worked with was a guy named Bill Scott who led UI engineering at PayPal. What I loved about Bill was his constant enthusiasm for new technology. He helped lead the charge to take PayPal's old C++ and Java stack and modernise it into Java microservices and Node.js for the front end. And just absolutely surrounded himself with people who were looking for ways new technology could be used to create better experiences for our customers and improve the lives of developers. If he were still with us today, I think he would absolutely love the AI revolution taking place in software development right now. When I was interviewing at PayPal back in 2013 I spoke with him a an influential blog that he'd written called The Experimentation Layer. Reflecting on his time at Netflix, he was pushing back against the cult of reusability in software development and talked about designing for throwaway-ability instead. He was a huge proponent of Lean UX and A/B t