I keep seeing the same pattern play out: someone has an idea on a Tuesday, “vibe codes” an app by Thursday, tweets a shiny demo on Friday… and by next month it’s basically digital driftwood.
It feels especially loud right now in the MacOS and MacApps subreddits. Every other post is “I built an app for…” or “I just shipped…” and a lot of it gives off the same energy: fast, flashy, and built to prove it can exist, not necessarily built to last.
And I’m not anti indie developer. I love indie developers. Some of the best software I’ve ever bought came from a single person who cared deeply and kept showing up months and years later. The problem isn’t “one person.” The problem is what happens after the vibes wear off.
Because when it’s that easy to ship an app, it’s that easy to abandon it. That’s how we end up with what I’m calling abandonware overload: a growing pile of half-maintained tools, micro-SaaS projects, browser extensions, and tiny utilities that briefly collect users and then quietly stop getting updates when the creator moves on to the next shiny thing.
A half-finished woodworking project in someone’s garage just sits there. Abandoned software doesn’t. It keeps running, keeps requesting permissions, keeps touching your data, while its dependencies age out, security holes go unpatched, APIs change, certificates expire, and app store rules shift under it. The “simple tool” you used to export notes or manage a niche workflow suddenly breaks, and you’re the one stuck dealing with the fallout. Sometimes that fallout is just annoyance. Sometimes it’s worse: your data trapped in an app no one is maintaining anymore.
Zoom out and it gets messier. The ecosystem fills up with noise. Discovery becomes a slot machine—ten “good enough” clones for every product that’s actually built to last. Users download something that looks legit, assume there’s a real support pipeline behind it, and only later realize the “team” is one person… plus a prompt history.
I get why vibe coding is popular. It feels like magic. It is impressive. But the unsexy truth is that software isn’t defined by the launch. It’s defined by the maintenance. And if this gold rush keeps going the way it’s going, we’re going to be living with the maintenance hangover for a long time.
Developers are shipping, walking away, and leaving the rest of us to find out the hard way which tools were real products and which ones were just a weekend mood.