Home-cooked Software

Craig Mod, one of my favorite online writers, has been running an increasingly successful membership program for the last six years. A few days ago, he announced The Good Place, a private, members-only online space, vaguely Twitter-like with short-form posts, but more focused on conversations. As of this writing, members get two posts and ten replies a day, each limited to a thousand characters. Posts and replies disappear after one week, there may be an option to add a single image per post coming soon. The Good Place is a great example of what Robin Sloan (another excellent writer to follow) called a home-cooked app.

Last year, Maggie Appleton connected this variety of personalized software to the growing power of Large Language Models, suggesting that LLMs would make it easier for non-professional programmers to write small pieces of usable, working software for their friends, families and communities. The Good Place is proof-of-concept for Appleton's idea, since Mod has been leaning on Claude to get things up and working quickly. The software itself seems to be functioning with only minor issues, and the community itself has quickly grown into it. Withig a few days interesting links, personal projects, stories and experiences have been shared, difficulties have been commiserated over, some advice given, and even a couple of physical-world meetings arranged. When contrasted against global social media networks like Twitter, Threads, even Mastodon and Bluesky, the analogy between industrial farmed and processed junk food and a home-cooked meal writes itself (though The Good Place is perhaps more of a local potluck dinner).

For a long time now I have been skeptical of two things: first, the idea that "everyone should learn to code", and second, that LLMs will be widely useful in any significant way. I'm still skeptical of both those ideas in isolation, but The Good Place might have convinced me that together they make for a useful combination. The computing industry as a whole has not made much progress in lowering the bar for non-professional programmers to build usable software for themselves. I think it's still pretty hard for someone with absolutely no programming experience to do useful things, but with LLMs it seems possible for people with some experience to do things that are more advanced, and to do it quickly.

Finally, to stretch the cooking analogy a little bit more, I wonder what will be the equivalent of the local grocery store, or the farmer's market for home-cooked software. A large part of the difficulty in building usable software is that the individual components are quite tricky to plug together and keep running. But if home-cooked software movement does gather enough momentum, it may make sense for people to start offering services around hosting or packaging components for them. I can imagine something like Heroku or Fly.io, but even simpler, and maybe with LLM integrations that make it possible for communities to build and manage independent systems with little administrative overhead. Maybe something like this exists already?