27 ms·

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

322 points by stevekrouse 2y ago

anotherhue 2y ago
Great talk, more for the new-developer than the cynical seasoned pro but I love the direction.
- throwanem 2y ago
  As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes. Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.) And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...) Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  > the cynical seasoned pro Im that guy. She is way off the mark on some trivial points in there and they are easy to overlook. Right now the big players are pouring money into hardware. There is a lot of talent out on the street. If they aren't resting and vesting in those orgs what are they going to do? It's possible for a small team to bootstrap with ZERO money. How much do you need to earn enough to support 3 devs? Apple only takes 15% if you make less than a million a year. Is that a staff of 3? They only take 15 percent of subscriptions!!! That dosen't include android. If you dont piss away money on on cloud (vps), on everything as a service (login, metrics) the economics are amazing. There's room in the market for 1000 founders who do very well, you wont be google but you can live a more than comfortable life.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad old pre-connected paradigm, entrenching top down systems control. What Maggie is tapping into is more than the 15/30% cut. It's about possibility & connection, about software we have power over & can shape & share. The software we have today is all dead software, delivered to us on a platter, and that dead modality is not befitting the greatness humanity can & should be tapping into. Local First is inherently not bound, not fixed into interaction with the golems created by far off others. It allows more. It allows soul. That earnest engage-ability is something that's been missing from the consumerized world, has created enormous disbelief & disdain in a place where hope & possibility once sprung freely. http://malleable.systems http://malleable.systems now! ---- Regarding whether users will or not? Local First has a set of first principles to keep us from being too bound by software. The particular tools we have at any given point are arbitrary, secondary. Who knows what would happen if we did have the capabilities, because right now we don't have the capabilities. Yes, Local First is about bootstrapping something new. No it doesn't create the barefoot developers automatically, doesn't make that imminent. But it makes it possible. And some will convert in, some will start being barefoot developers as it becomes possible. If & only if we make it possible. The cynicism about those who won't or the state of our tools is not yet due.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.
iwontberude 2y ago
Not a single mention of Open Source Software. The author is missing a huge piece of the puzzle.
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  Yeah, that's a legit criticism... but her broader point still holds. OSS provides "legos" which still require the "glue", as she puts it.
- skadamat 2y ago
  Well, from my POV, the licensing part of this is only a small part of the puzzle. Open source software that’s insanely complex to run and is developed like industrial software still doesn’t make it amenable for home cooking / barefoot use. The bigger limiter is the missing culture of deliberately small and individualized software to specific people, families, or small communities. That’s the mindset Maggie is trying to espouse. Then, you can carve that space into closed vs open source, free vs paid, etc. But Excel and Notion aren’t open source and people have gotten really good at using them for these home cooked meals.
  - ubertaco 2y ago
    Exactly. Licensing is the easy part. Deploy + run are the hard parts, IMO. You can build something amazing like Immich, a shining example of open-source software that, after a lot of setup, "just works"....until the next release wants you to make well-informed decisions to your `docker-compose.yaml` file. My wife, who likes Immich but has no interest in learning to code, is not going to do those things if I get hit by a bus, because she won't know how. She's gonna give up and just go with paying some service for photo storage, or else losing photos like everyone else.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      There's a lot of complexity to software and you either learn how it works or find someone that does. And it's not a tangible item like a car, where you can intuit your way around. But I much prefer to host something locally and give my family access than letting them suffer the whims of big tech.
panphora 2y ago
This is my dream to. It goes something like this: - Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud. - Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online. - Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a little bit of HTML and serve it to the whole internet with the press of a button. - If your app takes off and goes viral, part of the economic value provided flows back to you through micropayments. Basically: portable HTML "objects" that can be treated as mutable apps instead of only static documents = like GitHub + Codepen + Vercel + NoCode in one neat little package.
- grugagag 2y ago
  Micropayments is still not a thing yet. I think that if it were it would give rise to a lot of interesting movements like this one, organically more or less. The problem with open source and giving away things free is that people just take without giving back.
- RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
  The first two points are foundational design principles for Decker[1], a programming environment which can be used as a local application or as a single-file self-contained web page which still retains all the development tools. The same is true for TiddlyWiki[2]. The web ecosystem already provides the substrate necessary to realize these visions, it's a matter of building things with a particular perspective in mind; a rejection of centralized infrastructure which is in many cases simply not needed. 1) http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/ 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
- bawolff 2y ago
  That doesn't seem all that different from netscape and how it included a wysiwyg editor. Obviously this is much harder given how much more server side the modern internet is. But i think the more fundamental problem is that 99% of users dudn't want this in the past and still dont really want this.
- 2y ago
chrisweekly 2y ago
I love ~everything about this. I've been doing software engineering as a career since the late 90's and think she's spot-on about both the local-first movement and "barefoot developers". @stevekrouse, thanks for posting -- and @maggieappleton, please keep doing what you do!
runningamok 2y ago
There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on. But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term. There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.
- rsolva 2y ago
  Anytype is such a tool, local-first and synced via IPFS. It just works. And it's so flexible! And it recently got support for shared spaces, which works really well.
bawolff 2y ago
Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs. Call me a skeptic, but i remain very unconvinced that LLMs will be the enabling tool that lets non programmers program.
- therobots927 2y ago
  How would this new intermediate be different from SQL?
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Well, if i knew what the solution was i would be making it instead of waxing poetic about it on hn. While sql (or say microsoft access) could be seen as an intermediary, i don't really think it is. It is very specialized to specific applications, and arguably rdbms are more complex than basic python.
- luke-stanley 2y ago
  I agree that something between Python and Excel is a good idea. But still, LLMs are good at using in context learning to convert natural language to a given pattern language or format, and where people don't know what the syntax is. Making visual interfaces that are so easy to use that they don't need to use such magic would be nice. But it seems hard to do that.
- reilly3000 2y ago
  Microsoft has gone and done it: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-python-in-excel-a33fbcbe-065b-41d3-82cf-23d05397f53d https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs. Maybe Lua[1] and Excel. Python's significant whitespace is unsuitable for doing the one-liners that spreadsheet experts do. Writing code for the spreadsheet should not require putting that code in a separate file just so the significant whitespace can be maintained. Whatever you write in a single cell should be the programming language. If you later want to move it to it's own file, module, package, CLI, etc, you should be able to. [1] Visual Basic turned out to be very usable with spreadsheet experts.
skadamat 2y ago
For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces
- luke-stanley 2y ago
  Fixed link: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/
- Bjorkbat 2y ago
  See also: https://chrisnovello.com/teaching/risd/computer-utopias/ https://chrisnovello.com/teaching/risd/computer-utopias/ Kind of funny that someone's syllabus from a class taught in 2015 has done more to broaden my mind concerning speculative computing futures and "what-ifs" than anything else I've come across.
- sprobertson 2y ago
  Where would one find more?
  - wonger_ 2y ago
    Ink and switch has several projects and articles: https://www.inkandswitch.com/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/ Some folks from Ink and switch made a podcast that I've really liked: https://museapp.com/podcast/ https://museapp.com/podcast/ Bret Victor (from Dynamicland) has lots of projects, articles, and talks: https://worrydream.com/Home2011/ https://worrydream.com/Home2011/ The future of coding has a newsletter and a podcast, but I haven't dug into them: https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/ https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/
- jdougan 2y ago
  Also: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/a-small-matter-of-programming/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/a-small-matter-of-pro... Makes the observation that there are intermediate users that are a natural target for end-user programming.
9dev 2y ago
If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in for a lot of pain. Depending on the way you phrase questions, ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate. And in addition to that, you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept. If you already have a feeling of the code you would write anyway, and only treat the model as a smart autocomplete, that doesn’t matter. But for an apprentice, or a layperson, that will keep code as scary and unpredictable as before. I don’t think that should be the answer.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  > just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No This really, really, really needs to be fixed. It's probably the most irritating (and potentially risky) part of the whole ecosystem. Nothing more infuriating than being give code that not only doesn't work, but upon the most casual inspection, couldn't possibly work -- especially when it's done it four or five times in a row, each time assuring you that this time the code is gonna work. Pinky swear!
  - 9dev 2y ago
    “You‘re right, I apologize for the oversight. Let’s do the same bloody thing exactly the same way again because I don’t know how to answer your question differently but am forced to never admit that…“
    - Turing_Machine 2y ago
      Sometimes it goes in circles, fixing one problem, but unfixing one that it had fixed in the previous iteration. I've had that happen several times.
liampulles 2y ago
Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradually learn. Something you can engage in with friends. I know that there are things that meet the extendable part of the equation, its the fun hobby part that I don't think has been cracked yet. I think a big part of why I became a coder is because I enjoyed playing with Microsoft Access as a kid - but I'm a weird nerd, so I don't think that'll cut it for others.
- dan-allen 2y ago
  Oh that’s interesting and I think you’re right. Software as it’s developed today is very abstract but spreadsheets have a visual representation that makes them much more approachable.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    An immediate visual representation, at that. HMR at best offers a pale shadow of the feedback loop Excel users get for free.
- kragen 2y ago
  what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?
  - flir 2y ago
    Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.
    - kragen 2y ago
      ideally, things as different as possible from excel!
matrix87 2y ago
It isn't even that high of a barrier for entry though? If someone really wants a piece of software that does something, there's probably already some python library for it. calling some imported python function isn't hard if someone is too lazy to find some python library to import, but driven enough to come up with an unambiguous way of telling a model to do something in natural language, that's a borderline non-existent demographic really it's kind of baffling to me, some people just hear "code" and think we're talking about some undecipherable thing like the Voynich manuscript. makes me feel like the guy out of the Zen and Motorcycle maintenance book who was confused why his friend refused to figure out how to fix his own bike. some people just refuse to learn. if they wanted to, they would have already
- objectivetruth 2y ago
  [dead]
ozim 2y ago
Just use OSS that already is there and contribute to it and we have it covered - no need for „everyone becoming a developer” and there are tons of local first OSS tools. Where contributing is using OSS, commenting on it, sharing work done with OSS tools with others, filling in bug requests and maybe even paying something for it. Working with tools and sharing work done with tools is important because everyone is using photoshop instead of Gimp, everyone is using Excel instead of libre office.
- atrus 2y ago
  Yeah, "scratching your own itch" was a driving force for a lot of the OSS stuff
thebeardisred 2y ago
With all due respect to the author, I take umbrage with the statement "They never end up in the terminal, because that is a huge jump in complexity, usability, and frustration from using something like Airtable or Notion." Using the command line isn't more complex, it's differently complex. It's differently complex and writ large, schools make no effort to teach it.
- charlie0 2y ago
  The "huge jump in complexity, usability" refers to not being able to use a mouse, which a lot of people find intimidating for some reason.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I've rarely seen cashiers use their mouse. The issue is training. And the terminal lands you directly in the guts of the computer. The mouse is safe because there's limited actions you can do with it. But people are OK with learning the keybindings for whatever game they want to play. What's distressing is when the software changes randomly after an update. Imagine retraining from Office 2003 to 2007 with the ribbon. Or windows 7 to Windows 8.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Movies about nerds getting bullied who later used command lines to do nerd shit have left a generation of folks afraid of any command line anything. There’s a guy who got accused of being a terrorist just because he used a command line on an airplane. Don’t believe me? Look at the “Linux porn” and “ricer” communities on Reddit, who go out of their way to make their systems look as “TUI cool” as possible, complete with customized tiling WMs. Most of the people doing this do it because they’re going for the “l33t h4x0r” vibes.
fragmede 2y ago
The way I would support local-first databases is to promote Sqlite db files as the replacement for CSV files, and so everytime you see CSV file support, ask customer service to ask their tech team about when they will support the Sqlite db export format.
charlie0 2y ago
Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small steps to create a small app that solves my problem?" The majority of people are content with learning the bare minimum needed to get by and never having to learn anything new. Don't believe, the proof is self evident the moment you try to update a UI that requires users to do things differently than before. And this is all fine, I've accepted it by now. It's the way it's always been and always will be. Still, these new tools will empower a relatively small percentage of the population to create amazing open source apps that will be used by a lot of people. The tools also very much empower pro-developers to build a lot more apps with less efforts than before, which I'm looking forward to.
- titanomachy 2y ago
  > outside of the SWE field... half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking" This is probably true of SWEs as well (although in some places it's hard to get away without thinking at least a bit.)
- intelVISA 2y ago
  > outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking" Whereas inside it's closer to 90% :/
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically minded people -- have trouble with changing UIs, and it is not about them not wanting to think. Consider that the UI could be part of a workflow that is more of a side annoyance than their main job, and that they would rather conserve their mental bandwidth for problems that are more important to them. A doctor shouldn't have to get used to a new timesheet UI just because a designer woke up one fine morning with a new thought.
subjectsigma 2y ago
AI/ML is going to absolutely destroy the first generations of junior developers. They won’t get enough practice doing software development by themselves and won’t know enough to fix subtle bugs introduced by the code. It’s like using a graphing calculator in high school. Probably perfectly OK for a smart kid taking calc his senior year, but would absolutely be used as a crutch by struggling or lazy students in a pre-algebra class. Right now AI is mostly controlled by mega corps abusing copyright laws because they can get away with it. I seriously doubt this is going to drastically change. Basically, I don’t understand this authors cute, homely portrayal of AI.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
I don't know. My personal take is that low-code/no-code tools should have ushered in an era of homemade software, but it didn't. It's something I think about a lot, incidentally. We've had the technology to make software using a GUI rather than a text editor for a very long time, and yet programmers still use text editors, and programming in general hasn't really been all that democratized. At best, it's now possible to create a website without knowing how to code, but it usually isn't a particularly good one. A simple explanation is that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Edge cases and granular behavior are hard to capture except in granular snippets of code. I'm not convinced that LLMs necessarily solve this problem. Even if you are working with a theoretically quite competent LLM, there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself. You could argue that this doesn't matter in the case of simple software, but I think we underestimate what people really expect out of something that's "simple", and I think we underestimate people's tendency to grow bored of old toys, especially if they don't work as expected. If anything, my belief is that LLMs by themselves aren't necessarily going to make this a reality. You need an accessible and empowering UX/UI to go along with it. Otherwise, asking an LLM to build software for you probably won't be much of a fun experience aside from those who are AI enthusiasts foremost. Side note, I have painful feelings about so many UX researchers I used to admire jumping on board the AI hype train so uncritically. I kind of get it, their job is to speculate on new possibilities a tech offers without getting too hung up on external complications. Still, I feel disillusioned. It seems that prior to all of this these same people were questioning our implicit assumptions with how we interact with computers in really interesting ways (in the same vein as Bret Victor). Now, their takes are starting to converge with that of the usual anonymous midwit AI enthusiast on Twitter who pivoted from crypto. Put more bluntly, the idea that LLMs will usher in a golden age of people making simple software is kind of a boring speculative future, a speculative future shared and talked about by the most uninspired and boring people on Twitter.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  > there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself Yeah exactly. I've seen meetings between engineers get into a level of technical specificity where I've had the thought "we are just coding in english now." Even if you're able to communicate your intent with natural language rather than a "programming language," you still arrive at a level of concrete detail that is difficult or impossible to describe without some sort of standard technical shorthand or jargon. This is true whether the "listener" is an LLM, some other sophisticated machine interpreter, or just another person.
seabird 2y ago
People just don't care and won't do it if it requires more than a fleeting thought to get it done. Excel is comically powerful and only a tiny fraction of users have any interest in tapping into that. Every step of the way, for the last 50 years, pretty much all parties involved have actively worked to move away from end-user programming. Words can't describe how happy I would be if that wasn't the case, but it's better to walk than curse the road. Changing this would require pretty much everybody on the planet to re-evaluate how they interact with a computer, and I'm not holding out on that.
- mikro2nd 2y ago
  I think the point is that, rather than "requiring everybody on the planet to reevaluate how they interact with a computer", Maggie's idea is that computers should be reevaluated with regard to how they interact with people. Like another person earlier in these comments, I am much more skeptical than her that LLMs are "the answer" to enabling non-professional-programmers to create -- more importantly to modify and compose -- chunks of deeply custom software, but in principle I'm in sympathy with the sentiment. People do care. It's just that almost all software they interact with is deeply brittle, change hostile, black-box. You can change almost nothing about it beyond some superficial tweaks, and composing different pieces of software into a working "something else" is mostly impossible. I suspect that the very notion of an "app" is something we have to get past in order to make progress on this...
  - seabird 2y ago
    People love the very notion of an app. Computers went from something every user was expected to program to some extent to that brittle black box because users didn't want to program, they just want the benefits of software spoonfed to them. "We" evaluated the world where the computer was beholden to the non-programmer users ("our AS/400 administrator is some guy from supply chain, I put his data in an Access database for our team to process"), and then Apple made a gazillion dollars with "apps" because your average user thinks that shit is for dorks and a waste of their time. You would be floored at how many young people don't even own a computer beyond their phone because they see so little benefit to something they have control over. It is very much a values issue in the population at large.
password4321 2y ago
Sandstorm? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=sandstorm&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=sandstorm&sort=b... an open source platform for self-hosting web apps
tcsenpai 2y ago
The blog layout is truly fascinating
ximm 2y ago
The author makes it sound like most software in the world is software that is made to scale. I strongly doubt that. I would say that at least ~50% of software is ad-hoc scripts or specialized tools for single organizations. It is no wonder that the software that is used by a large number of people is talked about more than software that is only used by a handful. Home-Cooked Software already exists, it is just not as easy to see.
fire_lake 2y ago
Analysis seems flawed to me. They claim that large companies can never support the long tail since it’s too expensive to produce those features. But they also claim that cost of software production is going to fall dramatically such that people can build their own apps for small user-bases. I don’t mean to sound negative, since I love the picture painted by Local First, but I don’t think it will work out that way.
alabhyajindal 2y ago
> They [barefoot developers] are the kinds of people who would be thrilled to have more agency and power over computers. I don't think this is true. No-code software development solutions have existed for a while now and we have not seen a rapid increase in software being built. Technical people who are non-programmers are not interested in having power over computers at all. They want to get their work done. And if doing this work requires too much work, they'll give up on the task than learn the thing.
hermitcrab 2y ago
"I'm not saying everything Mao did was great" Understatement of the (20th) century! Some interesting ideas. But it seems to make out that nearly all professional software is developed by mega corporations in California. But there are lots of small software companies, open source developers and hobbyists developing a vast range of apps for different niches. More would be good, though.
hyfgfh 2y ago
I wonder if LLMs is the new low-code. A promise that is never going to work.
zokier 2y ago
I wish people gushing on ML code generation would familiarize themselves with SW development history bit more. For example the introduction of SEQUEL (predecessor of SQL) paper is worth reading, its just few pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/sequel-1974.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almade... Key quote: > Much of the success of the computer industry depends on developing a class of users other than trained computer specialists I believe COBOL had similar aspirations to be language for non-professional developers. One of the first high-level languages were called autocodes because they automated code generation. Sound familiar? The difference between compiler and ML model is not that great from high level. Both take human-readable(/writable) input and produce machine-executable code in the end. Huge amounts of SW engineering has been already automated and delegated. Consider how much effort setting up a CRUD application would be if you were writing machine code on bare metal system compared to writing high-level language and leveraging stuff like Linux and PostgreSQL.
- aragilar 2y ago
  Or more recent attempts to skill up researchers like Software Carpentries (which had been going for 25+ years!). Getting them to internalise that software is understandable (in spite of our attempts to make it not...) is a long process, and LLMs will only make that process longer.
leke 2y ago
Really interesting article. It feels a little like what I heard about VisualBasic and REBOL back in the day. AI definitely helps, but I'm still not convinced it will be able to create anything but really simple apps. Likely it will facilitate those people who are maxing out tools like Excel even further. As well as being a professional developer, I also do these local first types of apps, so I expect once the AI tools become good enough, we will be the first to figure out how to use them.
bitwize 2y ago
Back in the day (1970s-1980s), every computer came with BASIC or something preinstalled -- often in ROM. Growing up I thought computers were for programming as bikes were for riding or pencils were for writing with. Using someone else's program was always an option, but you always had the full capability of the machine ready to put to your own uses, and an easy way to get started. We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We gave the user ever more elaborate premade applications, which is nice; meanwhile, programming environments went from the default mode of interaction with the machine to expensive add-ins (thinking of early Windows with Visual Basic and ToolBook). HyperCard was free on the Mac, but didn't keep pace with the machine's expanding capabilities. QBasic was perfect for the DOS environment, but it didn't really transition to Windows except as Visual Basic, which again was an expensive add-on. Speaking of, even the RAD tools of yesteryear are largely gone. We have open-source dev environments now, but they aren't approachable the way microcomputer BASIC was. Getting someone set up with Node or even Rails requires command-line jiggery-pokery and installing all sorts of dependencies, just to get started. And now, we're somehow hoping that a somewhat cleverer Dissociated Press is going to bring back citizen programmers? Fuck no. If we want end users to program their own apps, we have to find our way out of the shit we created, not add new layers of shit to deal with the old layers. The pathway to citizen programmers is making programming accessible, with full capabilities available, with documentation, right from the jump. No toy languages (e.g. Small Basic). Kids should be able to write turtle-drawing programs with the same language/environment adults use to build real-world applications.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We forwent this in favor of empowering the huge number of people who didn't want to program, who just wanted to use the computer to be able to do (nonprogramming) things.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    It's not either/or. You shouldn't have to program, but programming should be made available to you by default.
Foreignborn 2y ago
kinda disappointing comments in this thread. Thanks to LLMs I have built more home cooked software than ever. I’m not an engineer, but I've written more code this year than ever. LLMs have helped me tackle a huge backlog of projects at home that I wouldn't have been able to justify starting before. And I know 3-5 others doing similarly (we have a group chat). Off the top of my head, this year I’ve made: - webscrapers - notification agents - websites - data manipulation and charting - IaC devops for my entire homelab - an RPG (well, a roguelike) - applets for OBS - chrome extensions to glue together a bunch of stuff I do to study Japanese I’ve written projects in languages I’ve never used like rust and elixir, and learned a ton. Am I gonna switch ladders to be a SWE? Nope, but for better or worse have stopped asking my SWE friends for help. And lately, between RAG and large context models, it’s much easier to improve existing projects. Typing, refactoring, linting, documentation generation, and GitHub ops are now practically effortless.
timmit 2y ago
I like this article, I just don't think it will work in capitalism world. I could be wrong.
yangcheng 2y ago
[dead]

322 points by stevekrouse 2y ago

anotherhue 2y ago

Great talk, more for the new-developer than the cynical seasoned pro but I love the direction.

throwanem 2y ago
As a cynical, seasoned pro, I loved it and I love the ideas behind it. The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes. Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.) And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...) Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.
zer00eyz 2y ago
> the cynical seasoned pro Im that guy. She is way off the mark on some trivial points in there and they are easy to overlook. Right now the big players are pouring money into hardware. There is a lot of talent out on the street. If they aren't resting and vesting in those orgs what are they going to do? It's possible for a small team to bootstrap with ZERO money. How much do you need to earn enough to support 3 devs? Apple only takes 15% if you make less than a million a year. Is that a staff of 3? They only take 15 percent of subscriptions!!! That dosen't include android. If you dont piss away money on on cloud (vps), on everything as a service (login, metrics) the economics are amazing. There's room in the market for 1000 founders who do very well, you wont be google but you can live a more than comfortable life.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad old pre-connected paradigm, entrenching top down systems control. What Maggie is tapping into is more than the 15/30% cut. It's about possibility & connection, about software we have power over & can shape & share. The software we have today is all dead software, delivered to us on a platter, and that dead modality is not befitting the greatness humanity can & should be tapping into. Local First is inherently not bound, not fixed into interaction with the golems created by far off others. It allows more. It allows soul. That earnest engage-ability is something that's been missing from the consumerized world, has created enormous disbelief & disdain in a place where hope & possibility once sprung freely. http://malleable.systems http://malleable.systems now! ---- Regarding whether users will or not? Local First has a set of first principles to keep us from being too bound by software. The particular tools we have at any given point are arbitrary, secondary. Who knows what would happen if we did have the capabilities, because right now we don't have the capabilities. Yes, Local First is about bootstrapping something new. No it doesn't create the barefoot developers automatically, doesn't make that imminent. But it makes it possible. And some will convert in, some will start being barefoot developers as it becomes possible. If & only if we make it possible. The cynicism about those who won't or the state of our tools is not yet due.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software. I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.
- throwanem 2y ago
  It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this. Too, in sketching out so broad a vision as this, I wouldn't necessarily expect any author to treat what's possible today as a hard limit, any more than anyone else working in tech does or should. I also don't understand why you'd consider LLMs as a blocker to local-only. You can run a 7B model on a $600 refurbished M1 Mac mini today. It won't be the fastest or the cleverest, and you probably will need an hour or so from someone who knows how to set up Ollama and Open WebUI, but it is absolutely usable after that with no Internet connection at all - I have a Mac mini so configured on my desk right now, actually. Or for an order of magnitude more outlay, you can get a Studio capable of supporting multiple concurrent users with 70B models producing tokens faster than you can read them. Again, sure, it won't be GPT-4o, and it won't be up to the standard of the sorts of tools described in the talk - not this year, anyway. In 2026 or 2027, though? Again, this talk looks to a possible future, not just today. And with a setup based on open models running locally as I've described, there is the countervailing advantage that once you have it, you own it. As for the term 'barefoot developer' itself - it's a cavil, I grant, but I still want to quibble, because as a child in rural Mississippi with an Apple IIc and a couple of books, I was a barefoot developer, writing my own programs to solve my own problems, and often enough going to play in the woods by the road cut when I got stuck. (It helped! These days I'm more likely to chase wasps with a camera, but it still helps, when I can force the time. For what it's worth, though, I do wear shoes these days.) Now I'm what Amazon would call an L5, earning as highly as almost anyone in this generation of my family - and not for a lot of student debt, because I never went to college. Whatever I am as a professional, I am in large part because I've been discovering and developing my craft since my single-digit days - and was free to do so without my parents having to pay anyone a damned subscription, besides. True, the technology has grown far away from the kind of locally and individually empowering model this talk describes, and that I recall from my own childhood and early career days - that proto-SPA I mentioned nearby, for example, was hosted on a machine that everyone who ever worked on it could physically touch without leaving the office we all shared. And this in 2011! It really has not been that long a time since a model very much like what this talk describes was actually present in reality. I see no reason in principle why that can't be true again. Certainly I'm convinced that it should.

iwontberude 2y ago

Not a single mention of Open Source Software. The author is missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

chrisweekly 2y ago
Yeah, that's a legit criticism... but her broader point still holds. OSS provides "legos" which still require the "glue", as she puts it.
skadamat 2y ago
Well, from my POV, the licensing part of this is only a small part of the puzzle. Open source software that’s insanely complex to run and is developed like industrial software still doesn’t make it amenable for home cooking / barefoot use. The bigger limiter is the missing culture of deliberately small and individualized software to specific people, families, or small communities. That’s the mindset Maggie is trying to espouse. Then, you can carve that space into closed vs open source, free vs paid, etc. But Excel and Notion aren’t open source and people have gotten really good at using them for these home cooked meals.
- ubertaco 2y ago
  Exactly. Licensing is the easy part. Deploy + run are the hard parts, IMO. You can build something amazing like Immich, a shining example of open-source software that, after a lot of setup, "just works"....until the next release wants you to make well-informed decisions to your `docker-compose.yaml` file. My wife, who likes Immich but has no interest in learning to code, is not going to do those things if I get hit by a bus, because she won't know how. She's gonna give up and just go with paying some service for photo storage, or else losing photos like everyone else.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    There's a lot of complexity to software and you either learn how it works or find someone that does. And it's not a tangible item like a car, where you can intuit your way around. But I much prefer to host something locally and give my family access than letting them suffer the whims of big tech.

panphora 2y ago

This is my dream to. It goes something like this: - Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud. - Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online. - Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a little bit of HTML and serve it to the whole internet with the press of a button. - If your app takes off and goes viral, part of the economic value provided flows back to you through micropayments. Basically: portable HTML "objects" that can be treated as mutable apps instead of only static documents = like GitHub + Codepen + Vercel + NoCode in one neat little package.

grugagag 2y ago
Micropayments is still not a thing yet. I think that if it were it would give rise to a lot of interesting movements like this one, organically more or less. The problem with open source and giving away things free is that people just take without giving back.
RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
The first two points are foundational design principles for Decker[1], a programming environment which can be used as a local application or as a single-file self-contained web page which still retains all the development tools. The same is true for TiddlyWiki[2]. The web ecosystem already provides the substrate necessary to realize these visions, it's a matter of building things with a particular perspective in mind; a rejection of centralized infrastructure which is in many cases simply not needed. 1) http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/ 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
bawolff 2y ago
That doesn't seem all that different from netscape and how it included a wysiwyg editor. Obviously this is much harder given how much more server side the modern internet is. But i think the more fundamental problem is that 99% of users dudn't want this in the past and still dont really want this.
2y ago

chrisweekly 2y ago

I love ~everything about this. I've been doing software engineering as a career since the late 90's and think she's spot-on about both the local-first movement and "barefoot developers". @stevekrouse, thanks for posting -- and @maggieappleton, please keep doing what you do!

runningamok 2y ago

There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on. But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term. There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.

rsolva 2y ago
Anytype is such a tool, local-first and synced via IPFS. It just works. And it's so flexible! And it recently got support for shared spaces, which works really well.

bawolff 2y ago

Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs. Call me a skeptic, but i remain very unconvinced that LLMs will be the enabling tool that lets non programmers program.

therobots927 2y ago
How would this new intermediate be different from SQL?
- bawolff 2y ago
  Well, if i knew what the solution was i would be making it instead of waxing poetic about it on hn. While sql (or say microsoft access) could be seen as an intermediary, i don't really think it is. It is very specialized to specific applications, and arguably rdbms are more complex than basic python.
luke-stanley 2y ago
I agree that something between Python and Excel is a good idea. But still, LLMs are good at using in context learning to convert natural language to a given pattern language or format, and where people don't know what the syntax is. Making visual interfaces that are so easy to use that they don't need to use such magic would be nice. But it seems hard to do that.
reilly3000 2y ago
Microsoft has gone and done it: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-python-in-excel-a33fbcbe-065b-41d3-82cf-23d05397f53d https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
lelanthran 2y ago
> Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs. Maybe Lua[1] and Excel. Python's significant whitespace is unsuitable for doing the one-liners that spreadsheet experts do. Writing code for the spreadsheet should not require putting that code in a separate file just so the significant whitespace can be maintained. Whatever you write in a single cell should be the programming language. If you later want to move it to it's own file, module, package, CLI, etc, you should be able to. [1] Visual Basic turned out to be very usable with spreadsheet experts.

skadamat 2y ago

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

luke-stanley 2y ago
Fixed link: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/
Bjorkbat 2y ago
See also: https://chrisnovello.com/teaching/risd/computer-utopias/ https://chrisnovello.com/teaching/risd/computer-utopias/ Kind of funny that someone's syllabus from a class taught in 2015 has done more to broaden my mind concerning speculative computing futures and "what-ifs" than anything else I've come across.
sprobertson 2y ago
Where would one find more?
- wonger_ 2y ago
  Ink and switch has several projects and articles: https://www.inkandswitch.com/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/ Some folks from Ink and switch made a podcast that I've really liked: https://museapp.com/podcast/ https://museapp.com/podcast/ Bret Victor (from Dynamicland) has lots of projects, articles, and talks: https://worrydream.com/Home2011/ https://worrydream.com/Home2011/ The future of coding has a newsletter and a podcast, but I haven't dug into them: https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/ https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/
jdougan 2y ago
Also: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/a-small-matter-of-programming/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/a-small-matter-of-pro... Makes the observation that there are intermediate users that are a natural target for end-user programming.

9dev 2y ago

If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in for a lot of pain. Depending on the way you phrase questions, ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate. And in addition to that, you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept. If you already have a feeling of the code you would write anyway, and only treat the model as a smart autocomplete, that doesn’t matter. But for an apprentice, or a layperson, that will keep code as scary and unpredictable as before. I don’t think that should be the answer.

Turing_Machine 2y ago
> just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No This really, really, really needs to be fixed. It's probably the most irritating (and potentially risky) part of the whole ecosystem. Nothing more infuriating than being give code that not only doesn't work, but upon the most casual inspection, couldn't possibly work -- especially when it's done it four or five times in a row, each time assuring you that this time the code is gonna work. Pinky swear!
- 9dev 2y ago
  “You‘re right, I apologize for the oversight. Let’s do the same bloody thing exactly the same way again because I don’t know how to answer your question differently but am forced to never admit that…“
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    Sometimes it goes in circles, fixing one problem, but unfixing one that it had fixed in the previous iteration. I've had that happen several times.

liampulles 2y ago

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradually learn. Something you can engage in with friends. I know that there are things that meet the extendable part of the equation, its the fun hobby part that I don't think has been cracked yet. I think a big part of why I became a coder is because I enjoyed playing with Microsoft Access as a kid - but I'm a weird nerd, so I don't think that'll cut it for others.

dan-allen 2y ago
Oh that’s interesting and I think you’re right. Software as it’s developed today is very abstract but spreadsheets have a visual representation that makes them much more approachable.
- throwanem 2y ago
  An immediate visual representation, at that. HMR at best offers a pale shadow of the feedback loop Excel users get for free.
kragen 2y ago
what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?
- flir 2y ago
  Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.
  - kragen 2y ago
    ideally, things as different as possible from excel!

matrix87 2y ago

It isn't even that high of a barrier for entry though? If someone really wants a piece of software that does something, there's probably already some python library for it. calling some imported python function isn't hard if someone is too lazy to find some python library to import, but driven enough to come up with an unambiguous way of telling a model to do something in natural language, that's a borderline non-existent demographic really it's kind of baffling to me, some people just hear "code" and think we're talking about some undecipherable thing like the Voynich manuscript. makes me feel like the guy out of the Zen and Motorcycle maintenance book who was confused why his friend refused to figure out how to fix his own bike. some people just refuse to learn. if they wanted to, they would have already

objectivetruth 2y ago
[dead]

ozim 2y ago

Just use OSS that already is there and contribute to it and we have it covered - no need for „everyone becoming a developer” and there are tons of local first OSS tools. Where contributing is using OSS, commenting on it, sharing work done with OSS tools with others, filling in bug requests and maybe even paying something for it. Working with tools and sharing work done with tools is important because everyone is using photoshop instead of Gimp, everyone is using Excel instead of libre office.

atrus 2y ago
Yeah, "scratching your own itch" was a driving force for a lot of the OSS stuff

thebeardisred 2y ago

With all due respect to the author, I take umbrage with the statement "They never end up in the terminal, because that is a huge jump in complexity, usability, and frustration from using something like Airtable or Notion." Using the command line isn't more complex, it's differently complex. It's differently complex and writ large, schools make no effort to teach it.

charlie0 2y ago
The "huge jump in complexity, usability" refers to not being able to use a mouse, which a lot of people find intimidating for some reason.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I've rarely seen cashiers use their mouse. The issue is training. And the terminal lands you directly in the guts of the computer. The mouse is safe because there's limited actions you can do with it. But people are OK with learning the keybindings for whatever game they want to play. What's distressing is when the software changes randomly after an update. Imagine retraining from Office 2003 to 2007 with the ribbon. Or windows 7 to Windows 8.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Movies about nerds getting bullied who later used command lines to do nerd shit have left a generation of folks afraid of any command line anything. There’s a guy who got accused of being a terrorist just because he used a command line on an airplane. Don’t believe me? Look at the “Linux porn” and “ricer” communities on Reddit, who go out of their way to make their systems look as “TUI cool” as possible, complete with customized tiling WMs. Most of the people doing this do it because they’re going for the “l33t h4x0r” vibes.

fragmede 2y ago

The way I would support local-first databases is to promote Sqlite db files as the replacement for CSV files, and so everytime you see CSV file support, ask customer service to ask their tech team about when they will support the Sqlite db export format.

charlie0 2y ago

Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small steps to create a small app that solves my problem?" The majority of people are content with learning the bare minimum needed to get by and never having to learn anything new. Don't believe, the proof is self evident the moment you try to update a UI that requires users to do things differently than before. And this is all fine, I've accepted it by now. It's the way it's always been and always will be. Still, these new tools will empower a relatively small percentage of the population to create amazing open source apps that will be used by a lot of people. The tools also very much empower pro-developers to build a lot more apps with less efforts than before, which I'm looking forward to.

titanomachy 2y ago
> outside of the SWE field... half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking" This is probably true of SWEs as well (although in some places it's hard to get away without thinking at least a bit.)
intelVISA 2y ago
> outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking" Whereas inside it's closer to 90% :/
mangamadaiyan 2y ago
A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically minded people -- have trouble with changing UIs, and it is not about them not wanting to think. Consider that the UI could be part of a workflow that is more of a side annoyance than their main job, and that they would rather conserve their mental bandwidth for problems that are more important to them. A doctor shouldn't have to get used to a new timesheet UI just because a designer woke up one fine morning with a new thought.

subjectsigma 2y ago

AI/ML is going to absolutely destroy the first generations of junior developers. They won’t get enough practice doing software development by themselves and won’t know enough to fix subtle bugs introduced by the code. It’s like using a graphing calculator in high school. Probably perfectly OK for a smart kid taking calc his senior year, but would absolutely be used as a crutch by struggling or lazy students in a pre-algebra class. Right now AI is mostly controlled by mega corps abusing copyright laws because they can get away with it. I seriously doubt this is going to drastically change. Basically, I don’t understand this authors cute, homely portrayal of AI.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

I don't know. My personal take is that low-code/no-code tools should have ushered in an era of homemade software, but it didn't. It's something I think about a lot, incidentally. We've had the technology to make software using a GUI rather than a text editor for a very long time, and yet programmers still use text editors, and programming in general hasn't really been all that democratized. At best, it's now possible to create a website without knowing how to code, but it usually isn't a particularly good one. A simple explanation is that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Edge cases and granular behavior are hard to capture except in granular snippets of code. I'm not convinced that LLMs necessarily solve this problem. Even if you are working with a theoretically quite competent LLM, there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself. You could argue that this doesn't matter in the case of simple software, but I think we underestimate what people really expect out of something that's "simple", and I think we underestimate people's tendency to grow bored of old toys, especially if they don't work as expected. If anything, my belief is that LLMs by themselves aren't necessarily going to make this a reality. You need an accessible and empowering UX/UI to go along with it. Otherwise, asking an LLM to build software for you probably won't be much of a fun experience aside from those who are AI enthusiasts foremost. Side note, I have painful feelings about so many UX researchers I used to admire jumping on board the AI hype train so uncritically. I kind of get it, their job is to speculate on new possibilities a tech offers without getting too hung up on external complications. Still, I feel disillusioned. It seems that prior to all of this these same people were questioning our implicit assumptions with how we interact with computers in really interesting ways (in the same vein as Bret Victor). Now, their takes are starting to converge with that of the usual anonymous midwit AI enthusiast on Twitter who pivoted from crypto. Put more bluntly, the idea that LLMs will usher in a golden age of people making simple software is kind of a boring speculative future, a speculative future shared and talked about by the most uninspired and boring people on Twitter.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
> there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself Yeah exactly. I've seen meetings between engineers get into a level of technical specificity where I've had the thought "we are just coding in english now." Even if you're able to communicate your intent with natural language rather than a "programming language," you still arrive at a level of concrete detail that is difficult or impossible to describe without some sort of standard technical shorthand or jargon. This is true whether the "listener" is an LLM, some other sophisticated machine interpreter, or just another person.

seabird 2y ago

People just don't care and won't do it if it requires more than a fleeting thought to get it done. Excel is comically powerful and only a tiny fraction of users have any interest in tapping into that. Every step of the way, for the last 50 years, pretty much all parties involved have actively worked to move away from end-user programming. Words can't describe how happy I would be if that wasn't the case, but it's better to walk than curse the road. Changing this would require pretty much everybody on the planet to re-evaluate how they interact with a computer, and I'm not holding out on that.

mikro2nd 2y ago
I think the point is that, rather than "requiring everybody on the planet to reevaluate how they interact with a computer", Maggie's idea is that computers should be reevaluated with regard to how they interact with people. Like another person earlier in these comments, I am much more skeptical than her that LLMs are "the answer" to enabling non-professional-programmers to create -- more importantly to modify and compose -- chunks of deeply custom software, but in principle I'm in sympathy with the sentiment. People do care. It's just that almost all software they interact with is deeply brittle, change hostile, black-box. You can change almost nothing about it beyond some superficial tweaks, and composing different pieces of software into a working "something else" is mostly impossible. I suspect that the very notion of an "app" is something we have to get past in order to make progress on this...
- seabird 2y ago
  People love the very notion of an app. Computers went from something every user was expected to program to some extent to that brittle black box because users didn't want to program, they just want the benefits of software spoonfed to them. "We" evaluated the world where the computer was beholden to the non-programmer users ("our AS/400 administrator is some guy from supply chain, I put his data in an Access database for our team to process"), and then Apple made a gazillion dollars with "apps" because your average user thinks that shit is for dorks and a waste of their time. You would be floored at how many young people don't even own a computer beyond their phone because they see so little benefit to something they have control over. It is very much a values issue in the population at large.

password4321 2y ago

Sandstorm? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=sandstorm&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=sandstorm&sort=b... an open source platform for self-hosting web apps

tcsenpai 2y ago

The blog layout is truly fascinating

ximm 2y ago

The author makes it sound like most software in the world is software that is made to scale. I strongly doubt that. I would say that at least ~50% of software is ad-hoc scripts or specialized tools for single organizations. It is no wonder that the software that is used by a large number of people is talked about more than software that is only used by a handful. Home-Cooked Software already exists, it is just not as easy to see.

fire_lake 2y ago

Analysis seems flawed to me. They claim that large companies can never support the long tail since it’s too expensive to produce those features. But they also claim that cost of software production is going to fall dramatically such that people can build their own apps for small user-bases. I don’t mean to sound negative, since I love the picture painted by Local First, but I don’t think it will work out that way.

alabhyajindal 2y ago

> They [barefoot developers] are the kinds of people who would be thrilled to have more agency and power over computers. I don't think this is true. No-code software development solutions have existed for a while now and we have not seen a rapid increase in software being built. Technical people who are non-programmers are not interested in having power over computers at all. They want to get their work done. And if doing this work requires too much work, they'll give up on the task than learn the thing.

hermitcrab 2y ago

"I'm not saying everything Mao did was great" Understatement of the (20th) century! Some interesting ideas. But it seems to make out that nearly all professional software is developed by mega corporations in California. But there are lots of small software companies, open source developers and hobbyists developing a vast range of apps for different niches. More would be good, though.

hyfgfh 2y ago

I wonder if LLMs is the new low-code. A promise that is never going to work.

zokier 2y ago

I wish people gushing on ML code generation would familiarize themselves with SW development history bit more. For example the introduction of SEQUEL (predecessor of SQL) paper is worth reading, its just few pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/sequel-1974.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almade... Key quote: > Much of the success of the computer industry depends on developing a class of users other than trained computer specialists I believe COBOL had similar aspirations to be language for non-professional developers. One of the first high-level languages were called autocodes because they automated code generation. Sound familiar? The difference between compiler and ML model is not that great from high level. Both take human-readable(/writable) input and produce machine-executable code in the end. Huge amounts of SW engineering has been already automated and delegated. Consider how much effort setting up a CRUD application would be if you were writing machine code on bare metal system compared to writing high-level language and leveraging stuff like Linux and PostgreSQL.

aragilar 2y ago
Or more recent attempts to skill up researchers like Software Carpentries (which had been going for 25+ years!). Getting them to internalise that software is understandable (in spite of our attempts to make it not...) is a long process, and LLMs will only make that process longer.

leke 2y ago

Really interesting article. It feels a little like what I heard about VisualBasic and REBOL back in the day. AI definitely helps, but I'm still not convinced it will be able to create anything but really simple apps. Likely it will facilitate those people who are maxing out tools like Excel even further. As well as being a professional developer, I also do these local first types of apps, so I expect once the AI tools become good enough, we will be the first to figure out how to use them.

bitwize 2y ago

Back in the day (1970s-1980s), every computer came with BASIC or something preinstalled -- often in ROM. Growing up I thought computers were for programming as bikes were for riding or pencils were for writing with. Using someone else's program was always an option, but you always had the full capability of the machine ready to put to your own uses, and an easy way to get started. We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We gave the user ever more elaborate premade applications, which is nice; meanwhile, programming environments went from the default mode of interaction with the machine to expensive add-ins (thinking of early Windows with Visual Basic and ToolBook). HyperCard was free on the Mac, but didn't keep pace with the machine's expanding capabilities. QBasic was perfect for the DOS environment, but it didn't really transition to Windows except as Visual Basic, which again was an expensive add-on. Speaking of, even the RAD tools of yesteryear are largely gone. We have open-source dev environments now, but they aren't approachable the way microcomputer BASIC was. Getting someone set up with Node or even Rails requires command-line jiggery-pokery and installing all sorts of dependencies, just to get started. And now, we're somehow hoping that a somewhat cleverer Dissociated Press is going to bring back citizen programmers? Fuck no. If we want end users to program their own apps, we have to find our way out of the shit we created, not add new layers of shit to deal with the old layers. The pathway to citizen programmers is making programming accessible, with full capabilities available, with documentation, right from the jump. No toy languages (e.g. Small Basic). Kids should be able to write turtle-drawing programs with the same language/environment adults use to build real-world applications.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> We forwent this in favor of getting that consoomer dollar. We forwent this in favor of empowering the huge number of people who didn't want to program, who just wanted to use the computer to be able to do (nonprogramming) things.
- bitwize 2y ago
  It's not either/or. You shouldn't have to program, but programming should be made available to you by default.

Foreignborn 2y ago

kinda disappointing comments in this thread. Thanks to LLMs I have built more home cooked software than ever. I’m not an engineer, but I've written more code this year than ever. LLMs have helped me tackle a huge backlog of projects at home that I wouldn't have been able to justify starting before. And I know 3-5 others doing similarly (we have a group chat). Off the top of my head, this year I’ve made: - webscrapers - notification agents - websites - data manipulation and charting - IaC devops for my entire homelab - an RPG (well, a roguelike) - applets for OBS - chrome extensions to glue together a bunch of stuff I do to study Japanese I’ve written projects in languages I’ve never used like rust and elixir, and learned a ton. Am I gonna switch ladders to be a SWE? Nope, but for better or worse have stopped asking my SWE friends for help. And lately, between RAG and large context models, it’s much easier to improve existing projects. Typing, refactoring, linting, documentation generation, and GitHub ops are now practically effortless.

timmit 2y ago

I like this article, I just don't think it will work in capitalism world. I could be wrong.

yangcheng 2y ago

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