Maggie Appleton in her closing talk at Local-First Conf
We're in the industrial high modernism age of software where these standardized one size fits-all apps are made for us by people who don't know that much about us. They are primarily working for large Californian companies and shipping their software overseas. They're sitting in San Francisco trying to understand our problems and pains over Zoom calls and customer support tickets, but they have so little context on our lives - what problems we need solved and what we value.
When we are economically driven to build software to "solve the most common needs for the highest number of users", we become oblivious of the needs and values of people who are not consumers of products. User-centered design has brought us closer to the diverse perspectives from real users but there is a still a huge class of software that never entered the mindshares of silicon valley investors due to lack of economic viability.
Will End-user programming (EUP) with Large Language Model (LLM) solve this?
Maggie sees a coming "Golden Age for Barefoot Developer", where AI helps people write bespoke software, free from the financial and technical dependencies of the large tech. The notorious problems in EUP - learning cost, flexibility, leaky abstraction in low-code tools, poor UI - might finally see their solutions in LLMs.
I also agree with Maggie that AI coding isn't enough because of the missing "glue code" that LLM can't write for you yet: the auth layer, managing a database, building and deploying... These problems are hard for AI not because they are difficult to code against, but because they are optimized away as abstractions during the previous golden age for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platforms as as Service (PaaS).
To program against centralized services optimized for scale requires bloated glue code to orchestrate the components and specialized knowledge and skills to penetrate all the hidden layers of complexity when things go wrong. The SaaS and PaaS companies have disenfranchised the longtail of barefoot developers, depriving them of the right to understand, repair, modify, and share software in a free manner, especially when they can't afford paying a monthly subscription fee for every single service that makes their application tick. The makers are losing touch with the "local material" they can build upon.
I love how Maggie's closing quote (emphasis hers) from Ivan Illich is drawing us to the human side of technology. For everything made possible by a piece of software, there has been a thousand other things made impossible because machines and logic at scale is ridig and impersonal. I hope LLM will finally turn it around.
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others
Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich