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Will AI use cause a rise in local-first web and mobile apps?

I finally got on the Obsidian bandwagon after years of wandering the note-taking desert. A little Notion here, a bit of Apple notes there, some things lost in email, a few bookmarks on X — basically, ever since I quit Evernote, I've been floating between note-taking solutions.

So, what does this have to do with digital product architecture?

Well, the combination of Claude Code and Obsidian is transforming my personal knowledge base and content creation experience. I find myself looking to create as many local markdown files as I can, so Claude has a local context of them.

For example:

  • I save transcripts of all my Granola meetings so I can ask it about people and projects
  • I mined all my previous podcast episodes, articles, and meeting notes for opinions and saved each as a separate markdown file
  • I save exports of my bank statements so I can query my transaction history

This setup allows me to work locally, with sometimes sensitive information, and interact with Claude (or other LLM's) in my own knowledge base. I can envision many products adopting a similar architecture for similar reasons.

Ok, so how might this be bad?

Not bad per se, but harking back to an older paradigm.

There was a long form X post this week lamenting this trend back toward local-first in a product design context, from @dorukkavcioglu and he made a few good points:

  • Design tools moved away from Photoshop’s messy local files to Sketch’s semi-cloud setups with Abstract, but both still needed heavy discipline and tool-switching for prototyping (remember final.psd, final2.psd, reallyfinal.psd, etc?)
  • Figma brought everything online eliminating local-file hassles and making real-time collaboration the expectation.
  • AI coding tools might drag users back to frustrating local setups with file versioning, "it works on my machine" issues, and makign complex syncing tools necessary

It will be interesting to see how this pattern evolves and if it does lead to a file-first or local-first shift in product architecture.

I'm already seeing tools in use like ElectricSQL and Powersync, which do some manner of keeping a local SQLlite database in sync with a remote API.

What do you think?

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