A few years ago, the discussion forum Hacker News, where engineers collectively decide what other engineers should read, developed a quirk. A new phrase had entered the coder lexicon, and it seemed to propel links to the top of the page with such force that to some the rankings might have looked rigged. The phrase—“local-first software”— had an artisanal, farm-to-table sort of ring, at once familiar and flicking at something new. Perhaps some engineers dismissed it as merely a marketing term. But others whittling away their workday afternoons seemed to see it as the solution to a problem they had long sensed: The software they were writing was broken.

One of the first Hacker News links referred to a white paper published in 2019, coauthored by a computer scientist then at the University of Cambridge named Martin Kleppmann and a group of open source developers at an independent “industrial research lab” called Ink & Switch. Kleppmann and the others were alumni of successful tech startups that had done what successful tech startups are generally meant to do: be acquired. They had taken a turn inside their larger buyers and emerged repentant, disappointed with certain aspects of their industry. There were more software developers than ever, but they weren’t coding better experiences for their colleagues or their users. They were coding for the cloud.

The lament was not exactly new. A slogan printed on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and water bottles in Silicon Valley has long mocked the hometown industry with the statement “There is no cloud. There is just someone else’s computer.” That “someone else” being a corporation. Come to Sand Hill Road with an idea for a consumer-facing app, and there are two routes to a check sizable enough to get you written up in TechCrunch: Either monetize your users’ data for resale or advertising, or charge them a fee for accessing that data. Whichever cloud-based business model you choose—“Senator, we run ads” or “Pay us or else”—it’s imperative that the data run through your own servers.

The local-first white paper (“manifesto” might be the more appropriate term) pointed to a third way. The beauty of the cloud, for the average user, is that it is accessible from many devices and allows collaboration between many people across rooms and continents. The authors proposed to keep all that, but with software that was essentially cloudless. The word “local” in the name refers to your personal computer. “First” means your computer is prioritized over “someone else’s.” If you and I wanted to work on a document together, we would no longer have to depend on some Google data center in the Oregon high desert to maintain the master copy. Instead, we would each have copies stored locally on our devices’ hard drives. I could edit my copy offline, and you could edit yours, and the two files would reconcile our changes anytime they connect, whether once a minute or once a week.

To build products like this would require fundamentally different ways of structuring data. Different math. The result of that effort? Less shitty software. Freed from worrying about backends, servers, and extortionate cloud computing fees, startups and indie developers could skip strings-attached VC funding and pursue more interesting apps. What’s more, they could take advantage of hardware improvements that cloud developers often missed out on. When an app is cloud-based, its performance is limited by the speed of its connection to the central server and how quickly that server can reply. With a local-first app, the user’s device runs all the code. The better your laptop or smartphone gets, the more the app can do.

To a developer, the opposing trends of accelerating machines and stagnant load times are rather silly. Offensive, really. You should be offended too, because it means you’ve been missing out on something. The cloud appears heavenly, until it isn’t. Haven’t you noticed, lately, as belts tighten across Silicon Valley, that your own personal internet feels less abundant than before? That certain things are getting a little more expensive, or a little less convenient? A monthly cost to keep all your photos in storage or back up your phone. A premium upgrade to allow multiple users to edit the same file. A video game that requires a subscription and lags just as you go for the win.