Simon Willison’s Weblog

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. I really enjoyed this talk by Maggie Appleton from this year's Local-first Conference in Berlin.

For the last ~year I've been keeping a close eye on how language models capabilities meaningfully change the speed, ease, and accessibility of software development. The slightly bold theory I put forward in this talk is that we're on a verge of a golden age of local, home-cooked software and a new kind of developer – what I've called the barefoot developer.

It's a great talk, and the design of the slides is outstanding.

It reminded me of Robin Sloan's An app can be a home-cooked meal, which Maggie references in the talk. Also relevant: this delightful recent Hacker News thread, Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

My favourite version of our weird new LLM future is one where the pool of people who can use computers to automate things in their life is massively expanded.

The other videos from the conference are worth checking out too.