Martin Kleppmann, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the best-selling O’Reilly book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, talks to host Adi Narayan about local-first collaboration software. They discuss what the term means, how it leads to simpler application architectures compared to the cloud-first model, and the benefits to developers and users from keeping all of their data on their own devices. Martin goes into detail about how applications can synchronize data with and without a server, as well as conflict-resolution techniques, and the open-source library Automerge, which implements CRDTs and which developers can use out-of-the-box. He also clarifies what kinds of applications would be suitable for the local-first approach. In the context of AI, they discuss vibe coding, local-first apps, and how the conflict-resolution work that enables data to be synchronized between users can also work with human-AI collaboration.
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Show Notes
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References
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) — an O’Reilly book by Martin Kleppmann (The Wild Boar Book)
- Automerge Open source project
- The past, present and future of Local-first software. Local-first conference in Berlin (May 2024) The past, present, and future of local-first — Martin Kleppmann’s talks
- Local-first software and geopolitical risk Local-first software and geopolitical risk — Martin Kleppmann’s talks
- Very revealing post about the economics of publishing a very successful technical book Writing a book: is it worth it? — Martin Kleppmann’s blog
- Local-first software seminal essay Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud
- Local-first conf 2026
- Using automerge Practical Local-First Software with Automerge – Peter van Hardenberg
