From Maggie Appleton’s conference talk on Home-Cooked Software:

For the last ~year I’ve been keeping a close eye on how language models capabilities meaningfully change the speed, ease, and accessibility of software development. The slightly bold theory I put forward in this talk is that we’re on a verge of a golden age of local, home-cooked software and a new kind of developer – what I’ve called the barefoot developer.

Like everything on Maggie’s site, it’s worth a read.

For my part, I share Maggie’s hopefulness that LLMs will help make software development more accessible to a wider audience. I also appreciate her attempt to broaden the definition of “local-first software” away from its technical roots. I want a flourishing world of community software built by and for the communities it serves.

(An aside: “local-first” has always implied “sync engine” to me. And sync engines nearly always end up being complex hard-to-build systems. That’s one reason why I’m skeptical that we’ll see local-first software architectures take off the way the community seems to hope.)