Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Programmers: Maggie Appleton (Local-First Conf)

Industrial software can only serve the biggest problems of the most people; everything else is the long tail, and no one in Mountain View will build for it. Appleton’s bet is that language models move that line. Not for end users, who mostly don’t want to program, and not for professional developers, who already have it good, but for the people in between — the teacher with the elaborate Notion setup, the spreadsheet wonk — whom she calls barefoot developers, after China’s barefoot doctors. Embedded in their communities, they could build home-cooked apps for local problems, if something glued the models’ disconnected Lego pieces into working software. Whoever builds that glue decides the defaults, and she wants local-first to be one of them.