[HN Gopher] Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
Author : stevekrouse
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-06-10 12:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (maggieappleton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maggieappleton.com)
| anotherhue wrote:
| Great talk, more for the new-developer than the cynical seasoned
| pro but I love the direction.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 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.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > we have power over & can shape & share
|
| This is where She's being way too optimistic.
|
| What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds.
|
| She thinks the tools we have are going to enable home
| cooking. Software is way harder than that.
|
| The step between is "local" restaurants. You dont need to
| build software for 8 billion people, or 300 million
| Americans. You can build for a region, or a niche group.
|
| > It allows more. It allows soul.
|
| You might not be old enough to remember zine's but they
| were a thing. We're about to have the software equivalent.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
|
| 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, 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 wrote:
| Not a single mention of Open Source Software. The author is
| missing a huge piece of the puzzle.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| Open source is the natural conclusion of "barefoot
| development".
|
| Sure, now a days there are lots of big professional projects,
| but the core of open source/Free software, is people making
| stuff for themselves and their neighbours.
|
| Linux didn't start with the goal of taking over the world. It
| started as one guy's amateur project.
| iwontberude wrote:
| More than just a license, free and open source is about us
| leveraging each other's effort for problems deemed too
| unprofitable for major companies. It's required for the
| authors solution to scale but they don't mention it.
| ozim wrote:
| Only if people would start using OSS projects that are out
| there for them for free and contribute (where contribute
| means, using, supporting, adding to documentation) it would
| be solved already.
|
| You know there is libre office, there are tons of other OSS
| apps - accounting, CAD, image manipulation.
|
| Whole idea that people somehow need to be developers is
| crooked and making it worse. There are tons of already useful
| local first software rotting out there - only because
| ,,everyone uses Photoshop" ,,everyone uses Excel".
|
| I don't agree with ,,barefoot developers" - it should be
| ,,OSS promoters" that promote open standards and open
| applications and not come build up each and every piece of
| software by reinventing the wheel.
|
| I as a developer don't need to make every app for myself -
| 99% of my needs for software in personal life is covered by
| excel and 1% is communication apps that cannot be local and
| someone has to run server anyway.
| meiraleal wrote:
| What open source? The VC backed ones that are split into
| community version and Enterprise? Computing sovereignty and
| open source are completely detached of each other nowadays,
| unfortunately.
| panphora wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| luke-stanley wrote:
| 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.
| therobots927 wrote:
| How would this new intermediate be different from SQL?
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| skadamat wrote:
| 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://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html
|
| https://dynamicland.org/
|
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
|
| https://www.geoffreylitt.com/
|
| https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces
| luke-stanley wrote:
| Fixed link: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/
| 9dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| _"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..."_
| JohnFen wrote:
| > you don't learn by figuring out a new concept
|
| This.
|
| If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my
| code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using
| them would prevent me from learning new skills and would
| actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade.
|
| The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am
| always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that
| discourages that smells like career (and personal) poison to
| me.
| fragmede wrote:
| It sounds like you've discouraged yourself from learning the
| skill of using an LLM.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is not really a new problem, the previous version being
| "idk, I copy pasted it from stack overflow." True expertise
| realized that the answer often lay buried in sub-comments and
| the top voted answer is not often the correct one. LLM's
| naturally do not realize any of this.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I kind of disagree.
|
| chatgpt will make something that looks much more like it
| should work than your copy-pasted code from stackoverflow. It
| looks like it does exactly what you want. It's just riddled
| with bugs. Major (invented an api out of whole cloth; it
| would sure be convenient if that api did exist tho!) or
| subtle (oh, this bash script will bedshit and even overwrite
| data if your paths have spaces.) Or it will happily combine
| code across major api revisions of eg bootstrap.
|
| I still use it all the time; I just think it makes already-
| expert users faster while being of much more limited use to
| people who are not yet experts. In the above case, after
| being told to make the paths space safe it did so correctly.
| You just had to know to do that...
| liampulles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An _immediate_ visual representation, at that. HMR at best
| offers a pale shadow of the feedback loop Excel users get for
| free.
| matrix87 wrote:
| 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
| ozim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, "scratching your own itch" was a driving force for a lot
| of the OSS stuff
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