Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

07 Jun 2024 - 07 Jun 2024

language models will create a golden age of local, home-cooked software and barefoot developers.

The context is local-first which is some kind of anti-cloud movement? Related to Shirky's situated software (I guess these are good ideas, but I've been doing that kind of software development for 20 years, most scientific software is for tiny audiences ). Robin Sloane another proponent.

Ah and she makea a good distinction between what she is proposing and end-user programming. This is more, define a tier of workers who specialize not in general programming but in customization or "scripting". In fact a lot of the world already works that way (there are plenty of people whose job is crafting special -purpose scripts or Excel sheets). Much enterprise software is sold this way, there is a base platform and then for more money the company's consulting arm will develop customziations for your particular use cases.

At the moment, these are people like the teachers who make elaborate Notion spreadsheets for managing classes...At the moment, they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits. They are the kinds of people who would be thrilled to have more agency and power over computers...But they never make it over what I call the command line wall...This means most of their work is held hostage in the cloud and requires them to pay monthly subscription fees to access it. They have far less agency and power over their creations than full-blown developers.

Huh that is interesting, is the command line really so much of a barrier? I suppose it is. But the above seems to conflate a lot of different things. A commercial desktop application is just as resistant to user agency as a cloud application. But that is quibbling.

Hah, what she wants is something like the open source ethos but accessible to normal people, not just the hardcore code nerds. Which would be a big big deal actually. It's interesting that there is no mention whatever of the open-source or free software movements. They seem to share the same abstract ethos, which is roughly that people should have control of their tools to the level of being able to modify them.

The main thesis then is that LLMs can massively help with customization. There are already examples of AI user-inteface generators and other similar tools.

It's weird to combine a preference for local-first (that is, self-hosted computation, as opposed to cloud) and the use of ChatGPT or other LLMs, which tend to be very cloud-based and not localizable (you can run such things locally but that has its own challenges and the default is not to).