Fast Food Software and the Lonely Path of the Craftsman

Walk down any busy street in the world and you’ll see the victory of speed over craft. The Starbucks line moves faster than the small café that still grinds beans by hand. McDonald’s feeds more people in five minutes than a traditional kitchen could in an entire day.

The same story repeats online. Every week, you see headlines:

• “I built an app in 48 hours.”
• “I launched 10 products in 10 months.”
• “Here’s how I automated an entire SaaS over a weekend.”

And you pause, staring at your own codebase — the one you’ve been wrestling with for weeks, maybe months. One feature, still unfinished. You wonder: Am I broken?

But you’re not broken. You’re simply walking a different path. You’re not cooking fast food. You’re crafting a meal.

How the World Learned to Love Fast Food

Let’s go back.

Before factories, most of the world was a workshop. Shoes were stitched by hand. Tables were carved from wood that a craftsman selected himself. Bread was kneaded slowly, baked in ovens that could only make a few loaves a day.

These objects were never perfect — no two pairs of shoes were identical — but they carried a human story. A shoemaker’s patience. A baker’s rhythm. A carpenter’s stubborn pride.

Then the machines came. Suddenly, instead of a few pairs of shoes, you could flood the market with hundreds. The stitching was weaker. The leather thinner. But they were cheap. And when the price fell, demand exploded.

People knew these factory shoes were worse. But they could afford them. And the world voted with its wallets.

Today, we are at that same turning point in software. AI and automation are our new industrial machines. A developer with ChatGPT, a no-code tool, and a weekend can assemble something that looks like a working app. They don’t need to understand the grain of the wood, the heat of the oven, or the architecture of code. The machine fills in the gaps.

Is it good? Not really. But it’s good enough.

The Three Tribes of Builders

You can already see the new social classes forming in software:

1. The Corporations.

   These are the castles of the old order. They move slowly, weighed down by committees and legacy code. Their apps are usually reliable, sometimes even elegant. But their cost is high, and their speed is low.

2. The Fast-Food Builders.

   Armed with AI, they build apps like burgers: fast, cheap, and often disposable. If one fails, they toss it aside and cook another. Their game is not mastery, but volume. They win by throwing spaghetti at the wall until one noodle sticks.

3. The Craftsmen.

   And then there’s the smallest group: the lone artisans. They treat code the way a violin maker treats wood. Slowly. Patiently. With love and sometimes with despair. They don’t want to “ship” — they want to ship something that lasts. Their curse is that they often feel invisible, building in a world that scrolls past their work in seconds.

Why the Fast-Food Builders Win

You open one of these overnight apps and think: This is terrible. The UI is ugly. The UX is confusing. The backend is fragile.

And yet, people pay for it.

Why? Because users rarely buy “quality.” They buy timing. They buy visibility. They buy hope.

Think about diets. Every year, new miracle solutions appear: a shake that melts fat, a pill that erases hunger, a plan that promises results in a week. Millions rush to try them, even though deep down they know the real solution is dull: eat well, move daily, rest. But the truth is slow. The miracle is fast.

Fast food software works the same way. The promise of “Here’s an app that solves your problem right now” will always seduce more people than “Here’s an app carefully crafted for long-term stability.”

It’s not rational. It’s human.

The Craftsman’s Burden

If you are a craftsman, you know this feeling:

You open an old project and your stomach turns. The code embarrasses you. It feels clumsy, naive, full of shortcuts. You mutter to yourself: I will never ship something this bad again.

And so, you spend weeks refining the next one. Fixing. Improving. Polishing. You add a feature, then realize another one is just as “necessary.” Soon, everything feels critical, and you are lost in the forest of your own standards.

Meanwhile, someone else pushes out an app in two days. It’s buggy. It’s ugly. But people use it. And worse — some even pay for it.

It feels unfair, doesn’t it?

But here’s the paradox: what makes you “slow” is also what makes you valuable. You care. You improve. You build with the weight of your past mistakes on your shoulders. That is not perfectionism. That is growth. That is craft.

The Future We Risk

If the fast-food path dominates, imagine the world 20 years from now.

Banks running on hastily glued-together scripts. Medical devices patched by “weekend hacks.” Airplanes controlled by code written in one frantic sprint and never revisited.

We laugh when a to-do list app crashes. But what happens when the same mentality builds the infrastructure of our lives?

Craft, in that world, becomes not just valuable, but vital.

Why You Should Keep Going

Yes, the fast-food builders will keep flooding the market. Yes, corporations will keep lumbering along. But your role as a craftsman is not to beat them at their game. It’s to play your own.

Because not everyone wants fast food. Some people want a real meal, even if it takes longer to cook. Some people want to trust that when they click, it works. Some people are tired of living in a world built on duct tape.

And when those people come looking, they will look for you.

Closing Thought

The real danger is not that you are too slow.

The real danger is that you forget why you started.

You are not here to churn out disposable code. You are here to learn, to grow, to build things that matter. Every old project you hate is proof that you’ve become better. Every long feature you sweat over is an investment, not a delay.

Fast food software may win the sprint. But craftsmanship wins the marathon.

Because when the stakes are high — in finance, in health, in security, in the simple trust people place in tools they rely on every day — speed collapses. Only care endures.