I love this point about avoiding enshittification.
The most infuriating experience for me was the sudden pricing change of replit. I used to default to creating a repl when testing out an idea. However they did go through an identity crisis, and it feels like they are not interested in having people like me in their audience anymore.
I ended up cooking building my own platform for home-brewed apps: https://smallweb.run. Essentially, it allows me to have a new webapp available by just creating a new folder on my disk (with an automatic https domain).
I am intensely sympathetic to the ideas of “programs as a home-cooked meal” or the linked article about “barefoot software developers”; I think making personal programs to solve personal problems is very empowering, and building tools to make that sort of independence and “sovereignty” more accessible is very valuable.
I am, however, consistently disappointed and frustrated at how often the people interested in this ethos choose to link those ideas to code generation viz. LLMs. The most advanced and popular models are centralized, opaque, for-profit services which, like the other software Robin decries, constantly churn and enshittify. They are by design not knowable, not stable.
Even in the more limited domain of “open-weight” models that can be self-hosted and “pegged” at a frozen state if desired, I feel using these tools is actively disempowering: it discourages deep understanding and learning in favor of trusting and leaning upon an unreliable, inscrutable oracle shaped by the priorities and values of corporations with the capital to train those models.
Moreover, they represent a purely extractive form of participation in online communities. Asking a question in a public forum and getting suggestions from other people has the side-effect of enriching the body of knowledge that future people could stumble upon when faced with similar problems or interests. Asking an LLM to cobble together a statistical approximation of an answer to a question (itself usually derived from public exchanges) leaves no traces of value behind for others. A search engine brings people to new places; a scraper to feed LLMs only takes.
Yes! I am a huge fan of building your own tools when nothing on the market fits your needs or price point. That’s how I ended up writing my own wiki and building my own bandsaw.
I love this point about avoiding enshittification.
The most infuriating experience for me was the sudden pricing change of replit. I used to default to creating a repl when testing out an idea. However they did go through an identity crisis, and it feels like they are not interested in having people like me in their audience anymore.
I ended up cooking building my own platform for home-brewed apps: https://smallweb.run. Essentially, it allows me to have a new webapp available by just creating a new folder on my disk (with an automatic https domain).
Nice take on the moderately dynamic website.
I love that this is basically self hosted val.town!
yeah val.town is one of my biggest inspiration ! I also took some ideas from https://blot.im and https://pico.sh.
If you’re interested in following the development, please join the community discord at https://discord.smallweb.run !
Smallweb is a neat idea! Thanks for sharing :)
I am intensely sympathetic to the ideas of “programs as a home-cooked meal” or the linked article about “barefoot software developers”; I think making personal programs to solve personal problems is very empowering, and building tools to make that sort of independence and “sovereignty” more accessible is very valuable.
I am, however, consistently disappointed and frustrated at how often the people interested in this ethos choose to link those ideas to code generation viz. LLMs. The most advanced and popular models are centralized, opaque, for-profit services which, like the other software Robin decries, constantly churn and enshittify. They are by design not knowable, not stable.
Even in the more limited domain of “open-weight” models that can be self-hosted and “pegged” at a frozen state if desired, I feel using these tools is actively disempowering: it discourages deep understanding and learning in favor of trusting and leaning upon an unreliable, inscrutable oracle shaped by the priorities and values of corporations with the capital to train those models.
Moreover, they represent a purely extractive form of participation in online communities. Asking a question in a public forum and getting suggestions from other people has the side-effect of enriching the body of knowledge that future people could stumble upon when faced with similar problems or interests. Asking an LLM to cobble together a statistical approximation of an answer to a question (itself usually derived from public exchanges) leaves no traces of value behind for others. A search engine brings people to new places; a scraper to feed LLMs only takes.
Yes! I am a huge fan of building your own tools when nothing on the market fits your needs or price point. That’s how I ended up writing my own wiki and building my own bandsaw.