AI is really shaking up everything.
I think putting software as a entire, like industry a little bit in a different
light now, and, I think this does not make local-first at all, less relevant.
I think this is, as for most things, a huge tailwind.
But given that, both of us have been really like, immersed in that new AI
space as well, now, I think we can come with a perspective where we can speak
as insiders from the local-first space, but also as insiders from the AI space.
And with that fresh perspective, I think we wanted to give this year's
Local-First Conf a new, code of paint.
Hey Adam, so great to have you back.
How are you doing?
Hey Johannes.
I'm good.
Looking forward to the arrival of Spring here.
So I was just joking that the two of us have been on the last
localfirst.fm episode since it hasn't really been on a regular cadence
over the last couple of months.
I'm taking a bit of a, pause from the podcast to reorient myself
in this new crazy world of AI and coding agents, et cetera.
And like, I wanted to get my own hands even more dirty again.
And yeah, little bit recalibrate, and I think that's also gonna be quite the theme
for, an announcement we're making today.
And to foreshadow a little bit.
What this year's Local-First Conference will be about.
So with that out of the way, yeah, curious what's on your mind, Adam?
Well, obviously as we ramp up to this Conference and we're,
we're doing something pretty different this year, I think so.
I don't know.
Maybe I can give some, some history for, I espect a lot of your listeners have either
been to the Conference or know about it.
but just for context, this will be our third year and we started in 2024.
we really weren't sure honestly, if there was enough demand for it.
You sort of had the idea of like, Hey, I think there's space for or
interest, you know, a latent interest in local-first and we could build a
conference around it on data ownership and CRDTs and all that goodness is
things that yeah, need a venue and a place to meet in person and share ideas.
And we were genuinely really concerned.
We just wouldn't sell enough tickets and we'd lose money on the
venue and all this kind of thing.
Instead, what happened was, I think our venue held like 150 or 180, something
like that, we sold it out within a week.
It was actually kind of embarrassing because we had to be turning wonderful
people away and plus ones for our speakers and things like that, just
'cause we were at the venue capacity, so.
And for me it was also a big question about bringing together eclectic mix
of people, you had both academic people who had been working on CRDT theorems
and things for a decade and more kind of fringy, you know, Brett Victor, Alan Kay.
Tools for thought, perspectives with more practical software
engineers build React apps, just looking for the newest and greatest
technology to make their jobs easier.
Startups, there was, sync vendors were starting to become a little
bit of a thing then, and, you know, would these people even gel?
And I think the answer was yes.
The event was a huge success one day.
Single track, everyone loved it.
and it was a pretty obvious thing then the following year, 2025 to
expand it, we had a venue for 350.
We did two full days plus a community day, to more talks, more people.
Everything was 2 to 3x the scale.
And I think it really showed that we had this, community here and
that, that there was a lot of cohesion and people wanted to come.
Come back to it at the same time, I think, because sync and sync engines were
having a pretty big moment last year that ended up being a, at least one of the
day, was largely given over to that topic and we explored that pretty thoroughly.
So now we find ourselves thinking about, okay, one, we just enjoy
bringing this group of people together in this community of people together.
We want to get our friends back together in Berlin in the spring or the
summertime to just spend time together.
But at the same time, we also know the industry's changing and we also
know that it would be a little boring to just retread the same ground.
So that's causing us to want to be a little more creative with the
direction we're going this year, which is I think why we wanted to get
together and talk about that today.
Yeah, and I think if you're
just now looking back over the last two to three years, I feel that the
world is just such a different place.
When we look back then, local-first was really like, a wake up call
in this kinda like very almost.
not by today's standard, almost like static world, where things have
feel like seem pretty settled in terms of technologies, et cetera.
And we have like our best practices.
And local-first at that point was much more of sort of like a provocation,
hey, we can think differently about this and like rethink, the
typical like cloud model, et cetera.
And like it stirred up quite a bit of dust.
And I think this is what, what got people really interested about like
insiders who've been thinking about those lines for like many years.
Some even like, decades and have always built software this way.
And, then last year's conference I think has really shown a huge step to the year
before in terms of like how much further, how much mature the ecosystem has gotten.
But, I think it would be, like this year is different.
It's not just like, yes, the ecosystem has gotten a lot more mature and like
all of those technologies are more production ready, there's like more
players, et cetera, but the world around it is like, entirely different.
AI is really shaking up everything.
I think putting software as a entire, like industry a little bit in a different
light now, and, I think this does not make local-first at all, less relevant.
I think this is, as for most things, a huge tailwind.
But given that, both of us have been really like, immersed in that new AI
space as well, now, I think we can come with a perspective where we can speak
as insiders from the local-first space, but also as insiders from the AI space.
And with that fresh perspective, I think we wanted to give this year's
Local-First Conf a new, code of paint.
this is where, you've been this year leading the effort around the CFP.
And yeah, so I'm excited to, talk through the different themes we're expecting
for the conference where we have a set of curated speakers already, but
we think, the best content is really brought up from the community, who is
building things in the local-first space.
And this is, like the people who are maybe listening to this podcast, or who
have attended, the last few conferences.
So yeah, this is, what I would love to talk to you about.
Yeah, well, maybe we can just start with that call to action really upfront, which
is we're broadening the umbrella for what kind of talks we want a lot this year.
And so if you do nothing else, you can just stop listening to the podcast.
Go read the CFP page.
If you think there's any chance of what you're working on, which has something
to do with empowering users or making, computers and software and the internet
freer and more capable for enhancing human life, then you should submit
a talk that's your CTA right there.
To drill, one level deeper.
you already mentioned the AI topic and obviously that feeds into this.
There's also the desire to continue to build and expand on the themes of this
community and respond to other things that are happening in the tech industry.
On the AI side, obviously, where I believe, you know, creation of software
is changing fundamentally with AI assisted coding, and I think people in our
community have a very wide mix of views.
There's people who come from a. very skeptical point of view, I probably
lean more in that direction myself, especially up until recently, there's
some bubble, it's gonna burst soon, it's overhyped, it's, you know, whatever.
And on the other end, there's probably plenty of maximalist, people that,
you know, I think it's not even such a bold thing now to say that 2026 might
be the last year that humans do all that much direct coding in terms of
like writing out programming syntax.
and I suspect people listening fall in a wide range of, views there, and
we wanna make room for all of that.
But, you know, at the same time, we're acknowledging that this industry shift is
happening while also staying grounded in our values and what we're all here for.
For the record, October, 2025 was the last time I wrote a
single line of code by myself.
So, but I'm leaning into that, quite heavily.
But I think as you say that's a wide spectrum.
And nonetheless, I think that makes, even more clear that we need really
good principles for the software we're creating, and that we also want to use, I
think, software through AI, like through the terms like slop software, et cetera,
I think has made it even more, even more important to really care about like what
we're using, not just for the perspective of that "it's nice to use", but also for
the perspective of like, data ownership, privacy, security, all of those.
And I think local-first is still the guiding light for us.
It's kinda like the gold standard for what software should feel like, what
software should be architected around.
And I think this is where we hopefully get the best of both worlds, where we
can have the cake and eat it too in that regard that we can dream about
software that follows those principles.
But now it's a lot more feasible to build those and to build those,
not just for the sake of like building software for potentially
like a million target users, but for yourself, like personal scale software.
And this is where we had this amazing closing keynote from Maggie
Appleton at the first Local-First Conference about Homecooked software.
And I think in a way this year,
barefoot developers, I think was the term she, she used.
That's right.
And certainly what you could do with language model assisted coding
back then was, you know, much.
more limited than what you can do today.
But even then, she predicted that, which I think is a good, a good illustration
of the kinds of people that are in our community that, you know, were
values driven, but very forward facing.
She, she saw what was coming years before.
Exactly.
And like now, this year's conference is basically like, really like double
clicking on her entire vision here where like everyone can dream about
software and like now make it a reality.
And local-first doesn't just make it, more secure and private, but like overall
also like solves a whole bunch of other problems that is still hard with software.
So I'm really excited how like those two or the, how the conference
can be a place where those two different worlds can come together.
All of like the relentless, accelerated AI community, who wants to, build things
really quickly, but also the people who like really care about software
quality and like those principles.
And this is something where I think it can be, a really nice meeting space for folks.
So, Adam, how about you wanna give us a broad overview of the different
kinda like, themes and then we walk through them one at a time?
Yeah, sure.
So the overall theme for the conference this year is user empowerment.
that comes from, actually a panel we had last year.
I host a panel and one of the, panelists was Martin Kleppmann, who
this year is a keynote speaker for us.
Obviously he's really one of the, founding fathers of, local-first.
But the way he described it was, we were talking here a little bit about the kind
of the specific implementation details of sync engines and CRDTs versus the
broader set of values and principles.
And I think he put it really well in saying.
It's all about user empowerment.
If something gives users more empowerment, more control, more capabilities, more
options, more freedom, then that to him falls under the umbrella of local-first.
And if it's something that sort of takes agency away, which there are times
where that makes sense, especially in consumer software or whatever, that
people want less control over how they're using their computers, that's fine.
But that, leaves it outside the realm of local-first.
So we're borrowing that idea and expanding on it.
User empowerment, greater agency, obviously a lot of that tends
to flow through data ownership.
'cause the data ultimately when you're creating documents on a
computer, the data and feeling like it belongs to you is, tends to be
core to that feeling of empowerment.
So with that overall theme, took together with our, collaborator, Eileen Wagner,
also a long time member of the community who is, helping us here with the CFP.
But she basically sorted us into three categories here.
We've got new territories, which of course includes plenty of AI stuff.
We've got local-first maturity, which is trying to see, you
know, now we're pretty far along.
There's a lot of great sync engine vendors.
There's some real world success stories, but there's also
interesting new challenges to face user experience challenges, legal
challenges, or legal frameworks.
And then where we're really trying to expand here is the larger ecosystem.
And there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in, whether it's in something
like the area of game developments, but also something like social media.
I think, you know, with ATproto and to a lesser extent sort of the masked
on ActivityPub world of things is having their own moment and kind
of causing people to ask questions about data ownership and freedom and
decentralization in this realm that traditionally has been a very kind of
centralized, closed, big tech, you know, inscrutable algorithm world of things.
And to what extent are data ownership and local-first values applicable there.
So those three frames, the kind of new territories, the maturity of local-first
and the larger ecosystem are where we have kind of a few subtopics for each
one, and we're trying to hope, hoping to get a good coverage on, CFP submissions.
Awesome.
Thanks so much for providing this great overview.
I would actually love to double click on each of those and dig a
little bit more in, since I think each topic has, so much potential.
And I think we could, like, if we'd had a lot more time and space for the
conference, we could almost like make each of those their explicit like theme day.
And so now we only have, well, those two days for the conference.
for the talks in one extra day.
So we need to curate and pick.
But I think this gives us like a really nice broad buffet of like different,
topics and talks to choose from.
And ideally, those, themes speak to people who want to submit a talk.
So yeah, let's go through them.
So maybe starting with the, local-first maturity, maybe that is, where we, can
reconnect the most from where we've left off the first two years of the conference
and also Sync Conf and, I think this is like local-first maturity is really like
that that is the essence of what last year's conferences, were about, where we
had local-first success stories, companies like Linear, et cetera come to mind.
The UX challenges of local-first.
This is, you've mentioned Eileen before.
She's given an amazing talk about that last year legal framework.
Maybe a little bit more top of mind this year around, let's start with
those like local-first success stories.
Anything that comes to mind for you in particular.
Well, for sure the success stories should be, there's obviously people building
libraries, you know, the sync engine vendors who are well funded and have a
lot of customers and that sort of thing.
But what I really wanna hear about is the end user applications.
You mentioned Linear, Linear CTO Tuomas has been kind enough to give us
excellent talks the last two years but I also think of on a smaller scale,
there's something like, we had a talk last year that was about someone
building a forestry application.
So this is where someone walking around with a phone that needs to basically
tag each tree in the forest with what's going on with it, whether it has a bug
infestation, whether it needs whatever else and it's a pretty simple thing.
And you know, I like that talk a lot because also they basically said,
look, our data modeling is very simple.
They built their own sync that needs to, of course, not only work
offline, but for a big chunk of time.
But it's a pretty simple queue.
And unlike full text editing, that is a rich text editing that's very
complicated you actually can accomplish all the goals of local-first with not a
huge amount of engineering for some of these simpler, use cases and domains.
So I think there's plenty of people in the community that have their
hobby projects or whatever that they use together with their friends.
But what I like to see we're far enough along now is what is at scale.
I wanna see a Linear and Obsidian or some of these smaller scale things
like the forestry app that have been doing this for a long time.
You have real world data and you can talk about the challenges of debugging.
You can talk about the challenges of accumulating data history.
You can talk about what are the ugly and difficult parts of this
that we're grappling with from using this frontier technology.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think there's, just thinking through like the software and new
software that I've been using over the last like year or so, I've been
using like Rayon for example, quite a bit, which is like a Figma like,
software, but for more like architecture use cases as I'm like remodeling
the house I grew up in and that's been like really nice to get sort of the
benefits that I'm like spoiled with of like using production software
like Figma now for more use cases.
And I think that's just like one example for like, that seeping into more and
more parts of the software we're using.
And I think that will just, continue and like, particularly
now where, AI is another driver of like personalized software.
I think it's just like very clear that we want those benefits of
like collaboration, that things should work offline, et cetera.
Like if anything, those problems are now even more pressing, where when
we have software that is like meant for individuals, and to have like
that software, be shared, across like family members or, friends.
This is where you don't like, you, probably don't build it out as like
a SaaS architecture from the get go, but you're building this like
in a different way to begin with.
SQLite certainties having a bit of a moment again as well.
So I think we're gonna see a lot more of that.
Files are, are, are are the hot new thing again.
Unix
tools.
Yeah.
Honestly.
Honestly, files could have almost been like another category, in itself.
Like it should really also, and not to sound like a broken record,
but like, yeah, with the AI hat on, files and folders are like the best
foundation for agents to do good work.
And it has, intentionally or not really, like, become, again, a main way of like
how data collaboration works, et cetera.
And so, yeah, I think there's a lot to be explored there.
A lot of creative people doing weird, interesting things.
So if you're, if you're like that, please submit a talk and, yeah, I
think there's like whatever, you've been working on in regards to like
traditional local-first in the sense of like the previous conferences, we would
love to hear from you, but also around the UX challenges, of, local-first.
I think we're still just scratching the surface of like trying to
understand that, trying to like deal with the implications of that.
I think we're allowing ourselves to dream a little bit bigger or a little
bit more nichey with software now.
And now that might require like new user experience paradigms and like,
particularly also when it comes to extending collaboration just beyond
people, but also like collaborating with like other agents, is another
aspect that I think squarely fits into the realm of local-first as it's
another like kind of trust boundary.
You wanna understand what has happened.
Do you want to collaborate?
Do you wanna like detach, be by yourself?
Do you want to like revoke authentication, authorization, et cetera.
Maybe real time collaborate.
I think there's a lot here, whether you want to look at us for the AI lens or
not, but I think that area is like super underexplored and if you've been exploring
that, we'd love to hear from you.
Yeah.
The UX challenges for me as part of the.
I don't wanna say quite say fun part, but sort of it is because it's a chance
to rethink those computing primitives.
Right?
And the files example is a good one to me, where files and the Unix
methodology and everything as a tool and pipes and redirects was really kind
of a first love for me in many ways.
In computing, especially creative com, you know, computing that's
designed for creating things.
And then, you know, mobile basically abstracted files away.
And that's kind of a win for most of the consumer use cases.
but actually is kind of disempowering for creative work that you wanna do.
And now again, the files are, somehow having a moment again.
But now we live in this world of things like real-time collaboration, version
control pull requests, yeah, live collaboration, async collaboration, and
thinking about how all those people pieces fit together or how you can use those
building blocks for the particular piece of software you happen to be building.
That is very interesting to me.
So another one is legal frameworks.
So we are working with, like, we're building those systems, maybe just
for us, maybe for others, but, like we're not building this in a vacuum.
Sure, I can build some software that might just run like locally
on my, phone or on my computer.
Or like on like a little shared server in my home.
But in that regard, no one cares.
But like once I put it a little bit more out there for the world to see and to use,
or possibly that it's like still meant to be used for a smaller group, but it's
still accessible for others, possibly.
So you need to think about the implications.
You need to possibly lock it down.
You need to constrain it, you need to set expectations.
And one like way of setting expectations or being constrained is through like
our legal system, whatever legislation we're falling into, like Germany, where
we're doing this conference in like.
Very particular set of legal constraints, also like European constraints, et cetera.
But we're not building this in a vacuum.
We need to like fit into the constraints, realities of the real world.
One big question is like, where does data live?
But also of like, other questions?
Well, like what sort of rights do I as a user of software have?
Like, GDPR is certainly something that really changed, the ecosystem
quite a bit for better or for worse?
I think actually one, funny aspect of GDPR, like maybe one intended or
unintended consequence that I'm quite excited about is that GDPR has had a
massive impact on data compatibility.
Where you can now go to like pretty much every service and
through the right to be forgotten.
Like you can still export your data, but that exported data now actually
gives you all the data for that service.
So you can now like go to LinkedIn.
It's like, hey, like give me all my data or like, go to x.com, give me all
my data, and like now you can export that and like build tools with it.
So I think that's like one interesting ways of like how a legal framework
has unlocked data compatibility, even though that like, and not in
a very rigorous way, but at least something better than nothing.
And so that just like as one anecdote of like.
How something has changed and unlocked new opportunities.
And I think there will be a lot more like that.
Like good developments, bad developments.
Another real world analogy might be if you're going to Linear and you
create a team, you need to set like, Hey, where should the data be stored?
Do you want to have it stored in the US?
You don't wanna have it stored in EU.
Like, that's another way to like really model that.
And I think that's just like, scratching the surface of how
we need to bake those realities into the software we're building.
And, I think there, this is an area that that's really worthwhile thinking through
and be hopefully inspired by, new ideas.
Yeah.
I'm weirdly interested in the legal frameworks area and I hope we get
some good submissions on that.
I think it is natural for people in the tech world to dismiss or
downplay that aspect of things.
Especially maybe if you come from the Silicon Valley, American
Maverick laws just get in my way.
I'm gonna ignore them perspective.
but yeah, we're, we're both here in Europe.
I, two, two things that come to mind for me on that, that are
interesting and of this moment.
One is, yeah, you mentioned GDPR and much maligned in some ways.
You know, the cookie banner thing is an unfortunate consequence of
how that all played out, but it also has provided real front guidelines
for handling of person identifying information that I think genuinely has
made the internet a safer place, right?
It's full of threat and attacks and that's only getting worse
now that, that stuff can all be superpowered with language models.
But, you know, when I was working on an AI powered browser called Dia
last year, it was actually genuinely helpful to us to basically go and ask
the question, what is GDPR recommended?
And it basically comes down to, okay, we wanna be able to train on user data
that's incredibly valuable to our users in the same way that, you know, Google's
magic results and auto complete works so well because they're training it on
what other people are searching for.
And that's how it can seem to kind of read your mind.
That's the same thing is true with, Cursor and the auto complete.
So there's huge value in training on user data, even though there's, you know, but,
but there's obviously some, things you need to be really cautious about there.
And GDPR gives actually really good guidance.
It basically says if you strip all information that can tie
it back to a particular user.
Certainly anything personally identifiable, like a name or an email,
but also you're decoupling it from the user ID at the moment of collection
and anonymizing there and you throw it away within 30 days, you're all good.
That's a very simple framework and actually we could do a lot with that.
We could really, go pretty far with training our own,
models with data in that frame.
And it was actually nice to have that, not just from a legal
perspective, but from just a best practices guidance perspective.
so GDPR has been a mixed bag in some ways, but has also I
think provided genuine value.
The other thing I would throw out that is also probably kind of
from the Europe perspective that's top of mind now is sovereignty.
Basically data sovereignty and software sovereignty.
And I think a lot of the European Union as a whole, but also individual countries
are thinking about how to decouple themselves a little bit from US providers.
And I think we can put aside, or we don't wanna make a political conference
or be too tied to whatever current event happens to be in the news at the moment.
But I think in general, this is a good perspective for nations to have
and it is just a scaled up version of local-first data ownership.
It is just a version of the same reason I say it's good for me to have control
over my data and have the ability to make choices about it, not only in
the short term, but in the long term.
Where do I back it up?
Can I delete it, can I duplicate it, et cetera.
There's a version of that for nations.
And I think that's a little bit what, Europe is grappling with right now.
And I think totally separate from anything happened in the current moment.
That's a good thing to think about.
That's a long-term thing that helps create greater agency and autonomy
and security for your nation, just as it does for an individual.
And I think there's also really like a window of opportunity, around that, where
like, whether, what do you wanna call, like, big players like Monopoly or not?
that aside, I think there are now real cases of precedent where I think certain
German states, for example, have made the switch away from Microsoft to like
some, open source software, et cetera.
And like, I think that sets a, like me as someone who has like, very good
feelings towards open source and wants to see open source software succeed,
I think there's new momentum here.
And I think local-first can really also through that perspective,
play a more mainstream role.
Since like you don't just, yes, you can have like your open source react
components, but that does make like fully functional software where you
can replace other software with it.
Yeah.
Like you need to think about data and if you're making that painful
switch from one software stack, that might even like include all the way
to the operating system, you probably like experience a lot of pain there.
And ideally, you now choose a foundation that gives you more
optionality in the future when you might want to do another switch.
And this is where things like, data compatibility, et cetera,
all like play into this.
And where ideally, like legal frameworks set a good foundation and like encourage
things like data compatibility, et cetera, but in a thoughtful way where it does
not, introduce so much overhead and like bureaucracy that it grinds down like the
velocity of like hurricane ship software.
And I think this is like the best of all worlds that
local-first wants to empower that.
Where if you build with like those local-first data layers.
The data layer takes care of that for you, and you can focus on the software.
So I think this is all like a very rich area, to talk about and I think that
what's makes it really interesting is to hear it through the lens of like one
particular story, whether it is like a company having made that switch, whether
you've built software and like you've made your software more compatible and
interoperable in some way, or, yeah, there's like all of those stories that
I've heard over the years and I think those deserve a broader, audience.
And so if you have something to share in that regard, please definitely take
the step and like, submit it to the CFP.
That's a great point.
It almost makes me wanna make data portability or something to that regard.
a top level topic.
But I think this comes back to the principle in local-first,
which we call the Long Now.
Which is, yeah, once you've been around for a while, you
can see the gray in my beard.
I've been working with computers for many decades now, and I've
seen many products come and go.
Software platforms come and go.
But being able to preserve that data for a variety of reasons.
'cause it's important for your company.
'cause it's important for you personally.
There's emotional meaning and saving your old family photos or the, master thesis
he wrote in university or whatever.
And then of course it is natural that especially the startup industry,
which skews young and people are building products and moving fast
and thinking about tomorrow and next quarter and not 10 years from now.
That's, that's fine.
and well and good, but maybe that is a role.
Governments can play a little bit, but it's also a role that, yeah, maybe our
community can play, which is encourage people to think a little bit about that
long term, both as users, what's going to make my data be a little safer, give me
that long term optionality, as you said.
but also product makers to think in terms of like, okay, may maybe
my product won't be hero, will have changed a lot in five or 10 years.
Am I empowering my users, to take their data and go to where they need
to go when the time comes for that?
And I think it's just like a wonderful way to think about the world a bit more, like
positive sum, where I think we've, like in some areas of software, we've already
figured us out, like in a pretty good way when we have like languages and like
ideally like typed languages, et cetera.
Like you have an API that you can compatible with and then
you can like reuse modules.
We even got that all the way to like UI, et cetera.
But for data, this is where we're struggling still the most.
And I think this is like one of the core themes around local-first where
there has been tremendous progress to, to make, progress in that regard.
And in that theme of like user agency, et cetera, personal software,
I think this will play an even bigger role, where we are gonna
have like more software than ever.
Whether it's like we've built this ourselves, whether it's agents
have built it, and then those things can, can talk to each other.
But I think it's also like changing in an interesting way where the
contract between that does not have to be like absolutely perfect anymore.
But like now AI can also like, shoulder a bit of that burden of like talking
to each other, where now we can like get away with having fuzzy software.
Where it has like CSV over here and like a JSON API over there, and the
agent can like very easily either ad hoc one-off, like convert something or
create a script that talks to each other.
So I think we're like, we're getting closer and closer having like some
bridges and ideally over time we'll get to like really having very reliable
bridges that just, in our minds when we hear a story like over there and
like we write it down over there, like we are a bridge and just works.
And ideally software can be like that in the future.
I like that a lot and I like that point that software is becoming
cheaper to make, so therefore it will be more ephemeral, more throwaway.
You'll be more likely to make something that's purpose-built for
a, a shorter period of time, whether it's an internal tool at a company
or a personal app or something.
Something like that.
And in the past we've really relied, or to date you could say we've
really relied on, my Gmail is still readable 20 years ago because Gmail
still exists and is well maintained.
but instead, maybe if we have a system that is more based on, well, I can
use an email tool that's a little bit bespoke and gets stops being relevant
or stops being maintained two years from now, and it's no big deal because
getting my email out or whatever data came from that tool and into the next
thing that I'm going to use is pretty straightforward to do from through some
combination of export data portability.
But also, as you said, that importing and ingesting data and making data
coherent with the help of AI is easier.
So I like that idea of a lot.
This, the software is kind of ephemeral and fits the need you have in the exact
moment, and then you can move on from it.
The data is something that has a longer lifespan.
It can move with you from, product to product.
Exactly.
Great.
So this was local-first maturity, and we've already teased a little
bit of like some adjacent topics, but the, the other, big pillars here,
as Elene put it, is like the new territories and the larger ecosystem.
So maybe if we spend a bit of time on the new territories where we have like,
designing for agency, then around like AI, local and open weight models, and
then also AI assistance for local-first.
Maybe starting with the first one, design for agency.
What should people think about here?
Yeah.
For me, this would come to the topic of, I like computers as a tool for thought,
a way to augment, thinking, a way to make humans more creative, more capable,
able to accomplish our goals better.
I sometimes think, especially as consumer products have have come to
dominate, for example, just sort of usage and revenue in the computing world.
There ends up being this weird race to the bottom of, hey,
the computer will think for me.
that's what we like about AI.
Good.
I don't need to think anymore.
The computer can do it for me.
And that to me is a very sad perspective.
And rather I would think, wanna think that, AI or other capabilities
that we continue to develop as, we continue to explore the computing
space are things that help us do more and better the things we enjoy
doing, being creative and thinking.
and so I think the design for agency topic is the idea of, okay.
So if you're doing something with language models, with computer vision,
with agents, whatever it is, what can be part of your design, in the sense of how
your product works, that really engages and creates more agency and more deeper
understanding from your users, right?
The negative scenario or the people often quote is that Star Trek
next generation episode, right?
Where people have this, these omniscient computers that do everything and
then they lose all the capability to understand not only just how to
fix the machines, but just really how the world around them works.
And then when those computers start to fail, they're suddenly
like helpless children.
And I think for me, good computing tools of all sorts, and that includes everything
to do with AI and language models deepens our understanding of the world, deepens
our understanding of the technology by freeing us from some of the fussy details
of where exactly does the semicolon go, and allowing me to spend more time on the
mental models and the frameworks and the principles and how things fit together and
how we use those to accomplish our goals.
Yeah.
And I think this is, I mean, for, for me, AI has been like one of the biggest
unlocks to like just learn new things.
I've gotten into so many new areas, like I've gotten deeper on like
some hardware related things.
I've gotten deeper on understanding how wifi works,
like band channels, et et cetera.
Like gave me a deeper and a broader understanding of the world, like
I have been on an accelerated pace of, learning and understanding.
and I think that's like the positive sum, version of that or like the
flip side or the other, scenario, of an like the utopia maybe of that
Star Trek, anecdote you shared.
So, one other much more concrete topic that I think has been, a very
new one that's come, about over the last few years as, like off the
shelf models became available at all.
And now we also have like, open weight models and they're even small enough
that you can run them on your own device, whether it's on a very beefy, desktop
grade machine or whether it's like, scaled down models that might even work in the
browser, that might even work on like a phone or other much lower end devices.
I think that opens a whole new category of software and use cases, et cetera, whether
it is, like that you built a little system that relies on like detecting
certain shapes to do a certain thing.
Maybe you're building, like maybe you have chicken at home and you wanna like
automate a little gate that like, opens when a chicken walks through or whether
you have like some other use cases.
But this is you ideally wanna do that like reliably, locally, efficiently, et cetera.
And there's so many, like we can, we can just like dream so much bigger now
of like what we can build in a way that does not rely on like Anthropic currently
not having an outage and us like paying whatever, a lot of money each time.
We are like using a bit of like API quota and, I think this is
gonna be like right now, this is.
Probably similar to the early days of like computers being room
sized, and not very capable yet.
And I think that's just gonna, like at some point our little like devices like
this, will be able to do like really, really impressive, inference capabilities.
And I think this is like, now is the time to start thinking about
that and start already embracing that in all sorts of different
scenarios, form factors, et cetera.
So I think this area could be about like if you're building
infrastructure, building tool, like maybe you're the company behind some
of those open models and you wanna show people what's already possible.
I think that's really great.
if you are building applications, systems, et cetera, that already
use, open models, local models.
that is like a story we'd love to hear.
We had last year, Thomas from Google already share, some earlier versions
of like how you can run, Gemini Nano in Chrome and showed some really cool demos.
And all of this has come a really long way and, I think across all sorts of
different devices, platforms, et cetera.
So if you're doing cool things in that regard, please definitely apply to speak.
Yeah, I think so much attention is on the frontier models and the
sort of one giant chat bot that can do everything, multimodal models,
ChatGPT, and Claude and so forth.
And those are of course impressive and very useful and there's a lot to that.
But I really have, opened up to the value of things like
lightweight classifier models.
Yeah, embeddings, including, there's plenty of text embedding, models that
you can just run in a Python server with PyTorch that are great, really
almost as good as basically as good as what you can get in the big providers.
Things like computer vision and OCR have actually been good for a pretty long time.
I think in some ways, you know, maybe myself, I almost feel a little,
surprised, you know, something about the AI hype, you know, around chatbots
and large language models then caused me to take a closer look at a lot of
these other ML technologies that have been getting good for a long time.
A lot of the text embedding stuff and semantic search and things like
that have been, you know, really had their breakthroughs 10 years ago.
Computer vision has also been very good for a long time.
We know that because captures keep getting harder and harder.
And you can do a lot with these, in those very specialized cases, like what you
were describing with, yeah, whether it's a robot in your house or, something like
that, but also software where you can have the model run on each keystroke, right?
You can do all kinds of things.
They're very different versus needing to wait several seconds for
a heavy inference to come back from the big language model provider.
And just broadly, the story of computing is one of taking these
computing things that are originally are heavy and slow and as you said,
require a room size computer and making them smaller and cheaper and faster.
And that just opens up all kinds of new use cases.
And there's really great open models out there from Quinn
to Llama to many, many others.
And yeah, I think if you're working either on open weight models, or open
models of any kind or the libraries behind it, like Transformer.js or
PyTorch or something like that, we'd love to hear a talk from you.
Awesome.
So the next topic in the new territories, area is AI assistance for local-first.
This is, I guess more around like the application of those new materials
to those new building blocks we got.
And I think that can be really, like wide ranging, can be going in
all sorts of different directions.
Like, and I think the exciting part is actually the stuff that we can't
even, like, think about right now, but that maybe some of you are,
actively exploring and have built like surprising things on top of this.
But just some things that came, to mind for me as I've been like,
experimenting myself or thinking this through, like just to, generate ideas.
How can AI address like some of those open problems in the local-first
space or like some challenges that are so like kind of hard to crack
and if we're allowing ourselves.
To go beyond the realm of like deterministic, traditional software.
And like, we're using those fuzzy materials a bit more.
And like we're thinking of like, hey, if we're actually, embedding
them into our local software stack, what becomes possible through this?
So like, just one way, for example is let's say you're building a power tool and
like you have a very, very sophisticated set of like system settings, et cetera.
Like for me, for example, the Apple system settings come to mind and
they're really like, I don't think they're the pinnacle of modern software.
And, I always need to use search.
And like five different things come up and then it's like the 15th one
that I was actually looking for.
And like, it's just like very painful.
Now where we are so spoiled by like using things like ChatGPT et cetera,
like it really feels like worlds a part of like how good something could be.
So why not use something like a, ChatGPT chat interface to interact with your
own app that like, you can, instead of have to click the clock settings,
like why not allow your entire app to begin configurable through AI models.
And so to make that actually happen now you need to bring in like that
fuzzy LM piece into your software.
But like exploring that, like figuring out best practices, figuring out
like how can you actually, constrain that, that you don't, give the, users
so much, power that they can like accidentally tear apart the app and
it's no longer functional, et cetera.
I think there's a lot to be explored there.
So just as one area.
Another one is to give even more power to the user or build systems in a way
that wasn't really feasible before.
We talked about the data interoperability before data exports, et cetera.
Now we can actually build like fuzzy bridges between different
software that were never meant to be talking to each other.
Whether it's like in real time or whether it's just like making
sort of, export interfaces a little bit more ergonomic to use.
And now you could imagine whatever, like using your, local supermarket
that might have like a certain, online shopping, like not even API,
but just like a maybe connecting that with your own home build to-do app.
And, there is not really like the end all be all integration API, yet
you can make those things happen now.
So this is just like one of many, many ideas where hopefully you all have
been exploring some interesting use cases that we'd love to hear about.
So this is what comes to mind for me about AI assistance for local-first.
Yeah, using these new technologies to make the world more local-first,
especially maybe parts that have been resistant to that.
I think breaking down data silos is one of the biggest ones that's been such a long
running topic at you could switch with projects like Cambria, but almost always
it involves kind of a convince everyone to build their software on a completely
different stack, which sort of Yeah.
Is very much an uphill battle.
Right.
And as you point out, there's a great agency in our personal lives.
I've experienced this already with, yeah, being able to pull out, I don't know.
You know, there's some website that has a list of things and I want
to put that into a spreadsheet, but it doesn't offer a CSV export.
Okay.
I basically could do that with a screenshot or a PDF and let the language
model do the hard work of, you know, turning it into something coherent.
Similar idea there is just downloading.
I like to download my transactions from my bank account on a quarterly basis, so I
have a record of that that's separate from whatever clunky interface the bank has.
But inevitably, if you have a couple of accounts and then they're all in slightly
different formats and trying to like bring them all together into any kind
of unified ledger is nearly impossible.
It's just not worth the bother for an individual or whatever.
But actually now with language model, it's pretty easy to do an ad hoc thing where I
can go do the download effort myself once a quarter, but then pull that all into a
spreadsheet with a normalized data set.
That feels very empowering for me.
It's like, okay, now I have all my transactions in a place that I control
in a format that I want that isn't dependent on, you know, my bank letting
me, you know, I go to login to download something and it tells me, oh, sorry,
we only support transactions, you know, back six months or whatever thing, right?
Very disempowering user experience that instead it's something that data
that feels like it belongs to me, my banking and transaction data, and I
have it in a place and a format that I can control for the long term.
Exactly.
it's just so cool to see like how far people take, like how much they embrace
the new forms of like, agencies that they, I guess they, they've been always like
longing for, but now, like it becomes feasible to, like really go for it.
And I think it's so, also so liberating that you can build software for
yourself unburdened by like making it enterprise grade, et cetera.
And so you can like, you know, I need to hold it this way and it's
gonna work, otherwise it falls apart.
But that's fine.
And I think that's like the, beauty of like building tools for yourself
and like local-first gives us the glue that they actually can bear like
real weight and like work together.
So that is the new territories, which I think is very related to the larger
ecosystem where we have, a set of like other, very interesting topics.
So like some of them we've teased before, but just to run through like on a high
level and then we can go into them like again, we have like self-sovereign
identity, we have social media and data ownership, encrypted messaging,
game development with local-first and malleable software in the age of LLMs.
So maybe starting with the self-sovereign identity, what
should people think about here?
Which sort of stories might we be interested in having at the conference?
Yeah.
Well in general, this category of the larger ecosystem is one I'm excited
about because I think there are so many adjacent communities that are
interested in, yeah, for example, things like freedom, you know, the open source
community, obviously the Linux world.
The Open Web and open standards, as well as things like the end-to-end encryption,
kind of privacy, nerds out there.
You know, there's, that's not exactly what local-first is
about, but it's very adjacent.
There's a lot of shared technologies and things, and this is an invitation
for folks in those communities.
And I'm even sending out some emails and so forth to folks to try to invite them in
to say, look, let's see where we overlap.
Let's, find the edges there.
yeah.
The identity topic though, this is a big one for me.
It's something I've been fussing about my whole career.
I have whole, article about it in my making computers better
essay, from a few years ago.
But it basically boils down to, I think the way we identify ourselves to
computers is kind of an embarrassment, usernames and passwords, identity theft.
Now you've got, I don't know, magic login links and login with Google
passkeys and whatever, and it's just endlessly confusing for most
users and even for power users.
Yeah, the amount of time in my day, I end up spite typing in two factor
codes and digging magic links out of emails and just trying to convince
the computer that I am who I say I am.
And I know why it's that way.
Of course, as a professional that's worked in this field and particularly
in the security, space, on and off, over the course of my career.
But it really is a shame to me.
And then in the meantime, you have this more and more control and
more and more ownership over our identities that go to the companies.
And basically it's been a kind of a good deal to say like, look, I'll
just let Google manage my identity and then I can click the login with Google
button everywhere, because it is such a hard problem and I can just kind
of outsource that to them, sort of.
But there, it's kind of like a little bit of a deal with the devil there
comes with a lot of trade offs.
and local-first is a chance to, rethink that, reinvent that.
and of course there are also a lot of adjacent communities.
Things like Open ID for example.
We'll talk a little bit more about, app proto and ActivityPub in a moment.
But they have their own concepts of identity and how you give people ownership
over your online handle, in a way that's sort of secure and safe, but doesn't
put the user in the position of needing to manage a bunch of cryptography keys,
which they're inevitably going to lose.
so I think anyone working on anything in this space, whether it feels
local-firsty or not, if you're working with passkeys, if you're working
with, any kind of identity system, yeah, we'd love to hear from you.
Yeah, I think this is a highly.
unsolved area.
I wouldn't say under explored.
I think, people are really exploring it.
It's a hard problem in really interesting ways.
It is a hard problem and I think we've, we've also come a long way already.
Like for example, like if you're depending on, which pact with the
devil you've made, you can already have a slightly more convenient life.
So me being, in pact with the Apple ecosystem, I am very thankful for things
like Touch Id, et cetera, that are then like nicely working together with things
like 1Password, Passkeys, et cetera.
and like being able to understand how those things work and like thinking
through the implications, et cetera.
Like let's me be for, for this point in time, in a relative sweet
spot between, like living a secure life, but also having convenience.
But there's still like great levels of like lock in, et cetera.
And I think this is also like all of that aside, like we're now also,
having this like phase shift in regards to software where we are no
longer the only ones who are doing things on our behalf, with computers.
Like if we're, now whatever, like maybe ordering, like some food or
we're doing some other things, maybe we're, like scheduling something on,
the calendar or whatever it might be.
It's no longer just us, but there's like another thing that needs
identity and even more fine grains.
And I think one aspect here as well is like if you're going from beyond
authentication to authorization, so far we have like, all off scopes, et cetera,
but like it's very all or nothing.
And it's all like, okay, you, now get access forever.
But maybe for like those agentic use cases, you might want to think about it
like, okay, you get to do this like one time, or you get to do this like for five
minutes, or you get to do this like only for this email address or for this scope.
So I think we want to make this like much more fine-grained, but in a way
where you like, it's, it's frankly like going through like the permission
granting on like a Google OAuth flow is already overwhelming for most people.
And now making this even more fine granular
Yeah,
I think is like really
tough challenge.
Thinking of a
giant
array of check
check
boxes on the GitHub, token generation and there's a reason for it.
But then yes, again, that trade off of, convenience and security is ever present.
I think it's that intersection of like user experience
design and also cryptography.
Like how do you make it actually secure?
and I think that to, come together in the best of both worlds.
I think that is like a area that's like highly deserving of like
more resources, more investment, more smart people working on it.
So if you're working on that, we'd love to hear from you.
ideally where you cover quite a bit of that intersection.
I think this is probably not the best, conference to share
like your new breakthrough of like some cryptographic nuance.
But I think where we can like bring those two things together where you can also
with the focus of like, or one aspect can be the solve sovereign, aspect.
I think it doesn't have to be a prerequisite, but I think if
something points in that direction.
And also I think another, tricky part here is like that we need to kind of
create a bridge from like today, where people are like, defacto using things
like login with Google, et cetera, because it strikes A, acceptable balance
of like convenience and security.
And if there's like a much to esoteric, version out there that doesn't have a
credible path to becoming mainstream, I think that also is something that
needs to be taken into consideration.
So this is a very nuanced topic and I think as one of
the harder nuts to crack here.
but if you're working on that, we'd love to hear from you.
And I think with that it is like a natural transition to, things like
BlueSky ATproto where we talk about, social media and data ownership.
So you've already mentioned initially.
That Martin Kleppmann is affiliated with the ATproto ecosystem, and I think that's
just like one example for a broader, set of design challenges and like goals
that I think is like nicely adjacent or partially overlapping with local-first.
So do you want to give a little bit more detail on this topic?
Yeah, for sure.
I think social media and data ownership is so interesting because social
media is the classic centralization and the classic opaque appliance
with a mysterious algorithm that you can't and don't know how it works.
And in general, I would say we could, obviously could, and indeed I have
in the past done whole podcasts on social media and the both the
positive and negatives that that has.
Impacts that has had on society and us as individuals, but narrowing in
a little more on this kind of, yeah, user empowerment around, and data
ownership in our computing lives.
It is the nature of the classics like an Instagram or a Facebook or even a
Twitter back in its heyday that, you know, it, it is a very centralized
closed, you have little ownership.
You can just participate in this stream of, content.
and now we have this new crop of, creations.
I think Mastodon and ActivityPub was, kind of early out the gate,
but now there's some really good energy around, BlueSky and ATproto.
Actually, I think even as right as we record this, the ATmosphere
Conferences is happening.
which yeah, just a lot of good energy in there and it's
a different set of problems.
I think the classic local-first app is something more like Linear
or Notion or Figma, which is a document editor, heavy creative work.
You're collaborating with a small team.
You really care a lot about the output of that data.
Social media where it's sort of global town square, little fragments of
data, everyone gets merged into a big stream is on the surface, a completely
different, both technical and kind of design or user experience, challenge.
But at the same time, when you look at what ActivityPub and ATproto have
been grappling with, including things like personal data servers and how
you have ownership over your identity, how you make your handle portable,
but still kind of globally unique and especially verifiable, trustable, right?
not easy to impersonate that you're the New York Times or a
politician or something like that.
So there's some really interesting technical and design work that has
been done in both of those communities.
I think we already have, some folks lined up to speak on some aspects of those.
But I think there's, that's such a rich area that if you're working on something
in this space with either one of those communities or otherwise in the kind
of broader, how do we make social media something more empowering for users,
yeah, we'd love to hear that, we'd love to see a, talk submission from you.
Yeah.
In particular also like using those protocols, those ideas to go beyond
social media where you can basically like to, draw that bridge to the
previous, like, identity question.
Like right now I think this is, we we're blind to it at this point, that
when there's new software, like, okay, of course I need to create an account.
And like, depending on, which sort of patterns you use, maybe
you automatically like, look for that sign in with Google button.
Or if it's a developer oriented thing, like sign in with, GitHub, I'm more in
the camp of like, where I always try to like just, create a standalone account
just in case, something were to happen.
but does it have to be this way?
Are there other ways and like, and not just for.
social media use cases, but for something that spans a much, wider range of
scenarios, whether that is like something, I don't know, like maybe there's something
in between where it's something in between Figma, Linear and, and social
media, whether it's like a, smaller scale community that you are part of where
you do some very interesting things.
Maybe a community for a school that you volunteer in, or you have a much
richer set of different, kinds of media you deal with, whether it's documents,
whether it's chats, whether it's like some, posts, some forum like things.
Then you also have like things like identity.
And I think this is just like an example for thinking about
this a little bit more broadly.
So if you're using, some of those technologies or exploring that.
And see how we can bridge those worlds.
we'd love to hear from you and, going from one, one, tricky technical,
nuanced topic to another one.
Another like evergreen in local-first and beyond is like
encryption and encrypted messaging.
So, I think highly related to the areas that we talked about before.
And I think is another, aspect of software.
I think for a lot of software, kinda like still an optional part because it's hard,
but ideally over time it becomes just like a no-brainer to have to have encryption,
for your, data, for your applications.
It is, I think also dependent on the kind of like app you're working with.
So for example, if you're working in the finance space or the
healthcare space, I think it's much more, table stakes already.
And then there are other areas where it's much less common.
but ideally this is a quality that does not, quadruple the effort it takes
to build the app, but it's some just something, a data library, for example,
like Automerge takes care of for you.
And so yeah, those are like some preliminary thoughts
on this topic from, my end.
But yeah, curious to hear yours, Adam.
I mean, end to end encryption is first of all just such a powerful technology.
You know, I think wars have been one with, it is one frame you could use yet remains
hard to put into practice in a way that is approachable for users because, you
might think of it, everything boils down to a key management problem, but managing
keys is really difficult and incredibly abstract, even for very power users.
And certainly for a more mainstream computer user.
Yet you see all these places where encryption, when it has been brought to
bear effectively in the computing world, it is a complete game changer, I think
of like SSH for connecting to servers versus Telnet, which came before it.
I think of HTTPS for website encryption has, I think, literally brought trillions
about dollars of value into the economy through enabling things like e-commerce
and online, stock brokerages and so on.
Something like password managers and how they can provide a secure, setup,
based on their, encryption arrangement.
And then more recently you've got, for example, encrypted messaging like Signal.
And I think when we find ways to bring those to bear in a way that
is approachable for end users, it can just unlock so much value.
But it remains the case that there are a lot of areas where we haven't really
effectively brought it to bear fully.
And yeah, if you're working on any of these, whether it's something
relatively well established like encrypted messaging or something a
little more, on the cutting edge.
Like last year we heard a, an amazing talk from Brooklyn Zelenka about
Keyhive, which is a kind of adding an identity encryption layer to Automerge.
This just remains an area that is very hard, but I think again, just has the
potential to provide so much value.
Awesome.
so another adjacent topic, a little bit more lighthearted, and yet probably one
of the most, OG adopters of local-first, and they've always built software
this way, which is game development.
I think most games, particularly in the era of like internet not
being as ubiquitous as it is today, have like, out of necessity.
They needed to be local-first.
So you can play single player campaigns or whatever, but also like
in that gold, era you had, a lot of games also having multiplayer modes.
And this is where you had like LAN parties, et cetera.
And like, software was just like built in a different way where like internet
a lot of games, even didn't like support it or like was one, feature
that was added a little bit later.
And it's just like a.
I think an interesting case study for how like a different parallel universe evolved
and like did very complex data management with a lot of like similar challenges
where you needed to have like, reactivity you needed to be like, very efficient.
You needed to like care about persistence.
so I think there's like a lot of parallel universe lessons learned
that maybe never really, fully percolated into the web ecosystem.
Probably sometimes for, the worst.
I think I always feel, I can learn a lot from the game ecosystem overall, as
a lot of like lessons have been already much, earlier been learned there.
And I think now it's like that, that is still true today.
And video games have always been like the, one of the most demanding use cases
and where like latency really matters, where like all of those things, matter.
And, I think it's just about time that we bridge the world from game
development to the local-first ecosystem.
So if you're, doing things in the game development space and you have
some interesting stories to share about how your game has always
been local-first, then, please definitely consider submitting a talk.
So that, that's kind of my, my perspective on it.
But I think you have even more nuanced takes on this, Adam.
Well, yeah.
I don't know about nuance, but it's definitely close to my heart.
I actually began my career in video games.
I probably like a lot of little kids, I basically got inspired to
learn to program, to make games.
And, began my career there.
I worked for four or five years in the game industry, including on
PlayStation 2 games and Dreamcast games.
And that was kind of the era then.
And it's an incredible world of technology that's very separate from the productivity
software, web operating system, thing where you're just drawing 60 frames or
120 frames per second on a blank canvas.
The APIs to the underlying system are just a very, very different thing
than perhaps what we're used to, in some ways easier to work with, in some
ways harder, but yeah, the performance and being able to use it wherever.
even certainly in the age before internet connection was ubiquitous,
but even nowadays, yeah, you expect if you have a game on your device, that
you should be able to play it on the plane and not be worried about whether
you have internet in that moment.
Even think something like, you know, even once you start to add some
internet connectivity, Hey, I wanna post my high score to a global thing,
but you don't expect the game will just stop working the moment that the
high score API is not available, so.
And then you have so much going on in the world of these different engines like
Unreal and Unity and Gadot engine slash game development tools and yeah, I just
feel like there's, maybe a lot these communities can learn from each other
and yeah, if you're someone in that, tough space, we'd like to hear from you.
Yeah, I think there are just so many amazing stories waiting to be heard in
the local-first ecosystem, whether it's someone who like struggled to scale
World of Warcraft, to like massively multiplayer scenarios where I mean,
it's already hard to build multiplayer.
like systems for 10 users, but now, like, think about this, like in the, tens of
thousands of users, in like, in much harsher, real time scenarios, et cetera.
So, or whether you're building like, more modern games that, they're currently
like scaling things even further.
so yeah, we'd love to hear from you.
if you think this is interesting for the local-first community and as the
last topic, in the list, we, we probably like the, kinda like the key topic that
is the, center for us this year is like malleable software in the age of LLMs or.
malleable software like at all.
But then also in the age of LLMs, that's new.
That was not really like the, we got like the early glimpses of that last
year, but at last year's conference, but I think it was still so early, I don't
think like Claude Code was released yet.
ChatGPT was out there, of course, but I think it was not yet at a
point where it like really clicked for everyone that this is real and
not just like a niche use case.
And I think now it's like, already so ubiquitously available that we can
make this a part of our application.
And I think there's like really one of the broadest topics here, almost like a
catchall for a lot of, different, talks that could fit into the conference.
the anchoring point here is like, uh, what we've talked about before with
like Maggie's, closing keynote from 2024 was it, with like barefoot developers.
And I think this can, cast a really wide net.
And, what are your thoughts on, this topic?
Yeah, we'll probably first just defining malleable software.
For those not familiar, this is the idea that software systems are ones
that could be modified by their users as we're using it or to adapt to our needs.
and of course, Ink & Switch has a, I dunno, 8,000 word essay up on the website
if you search for malleable software, that can dive into detail on that.
But, you know, how does language model assisted coding it seems to enable so
much the ability to create new software and especially for people who are on the,
not necessarily professional software developers, even if they're technical and
good at thinking about software systems.
But when you think of the classic, let's call it vibe coded app, it's
let me make a one-off website that I can post, but that's very different
from being able to modify the tools that I'm relying on in my daily life.
My text editor, my email client, my web browser, et cetera.
so I think on one hand, language model coding should, in theory,
really open up some major new possibilities for malleable software.
On the other hand, I think we have some of the same old problems we have always had
around data siloing around kind of closed ecosystems, closed appliance heavily.
You know, the control, the locus of control lies completely with the software
vendors and very little with the users.
and how has this world evolved or what new possibilities are opened by the
existence of language model assisted coding or other AI things or other things
that have changed in the technology world since we last convened in 2025?
Yeah, I think this is, I mean, this topic in itself has been sort of like a core
pillar for this year's conference, and I think we've like added quite a lot other
ones just because, it felt like the right moment to, to broaden the net a bit.
But I think here, like malleable software, this was, a theme that I
mean, is is one of the key tracks of, the Ink & Switch, family.
But I think now with AI models, et cetera, it's really something
that's becoming mainstream.
And where before I think it was like very something that developers
maybe had romantic thoughts about.
Like, oh yeah, this was like, also on my list of side projects I wanted to build.
And now you can actually build it for yourself.
Or maybe you built software for like someone in your family, or it's
just like a, almost as an act of kindness of like supporting someone
like this is through your abilities.
And now it becomes so easy.
I think now that will lead to so much, creation of, new software that will also
have like interesting new consequences.
whether it's that we need to wrestle with, the quality of the software,
or the interoperability of it.
And also like, yeah, how much control do we give to, users?
How much control, do we, like where do we draw the line between,
a developer building the software versus a user using the software?
Like a lot of power tools are very customizable.
But now I think that line gets more and more blurry.
We'd love to hear from people who have been wrestling with, those
blurry lines and trying out different ideas and sharing your learnings.
What sort of software you've been building as a barefoot developer.
Yeah.
I think this is, quite the portfolio of, different themes and
different topics that we're gonna have for, this year's conference.
That's right.
We maybe even run the risk of being too scattershot or too wide
ranging, but in some ways I'd rather.
take the risk of having too many ideas, too many interesting,
intellectual, avenues to pursue, then get stuck in a rut.
And now seems like a great time to do it with the changes happening, in the
technology world, but in general because of the foundation of success we've had
in the event to date and the community we've built around, that just seems
like the perfect time to, broaden and bring new people in and fresh ideas.
And like all of that is not to say that we ran out of ideas with like the,
traditional way how we did the Local-First Conference, the last two years before.
But I think what it's always been all about for me and for I'm sure for you as
well is like the people who actually come and like the conversations we're having.
And it is like no one in that ecosystem has been there only because they
only care about the data sync engine.
It's always been in service of like some broader vision and like some specific
use case that really like, had real impact and real meaning for their life.
And like I think all of those different themes we now talked
about is like one manifestation, one direction of that and local-first.
It's like the foundation of that.
It's kinda like what brings us all together.
And I think what all of those people who have attended and have contributed to
the conferences have, in common is that they have a very, deep understanding of
the, technical world and of the world more broadly, but, also a broad interest
and, are always keen to be inspired to think a little bit different about,
like be beyond their current horizon.
And I think this is, what we, try to, also, facilitate through the conference
where those, different talks are hopefully little points of inspiration that can
lead to further exploration by everyone who's attending and paying interest.
Well said.
Well, I think we hammered in the, you know, submit a talk call to action.
we'll say it one more time.
The CFPs open till I think, end of April.
So you have a little bit of time, but not too much time.
But also if, even if you don't wanna give a talk, buy a ticket,
just come listen to all the ideas.
we got sponsorship booths available as well.
If, the folks at the, an event like this are interesting to, talk
to for your, for your company.
So we'd love to have you come participate in any of those three forms.
Awesome.
Well, Adam, thanks so much for talking this story together.
I feel like this is also already Yeah.
Given me so much excitement for, what we're gonna hear, at the conference
and like in a way where we still don't fully know which stories we'll hear,
but we'll know about the broad topics.
So that've got me very excited already and I can't wait for, the conference and
to meet a lot of familiar and new faces.
Same here.
I'm excited for the new themes.
I'm excited to see old friends, and I'm excited to enjoy beautiful,
beautiful Berlin in the summertime.
All righty.
Thanks so much.
Take care.
Bye.