We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.

You might not be looking hard enough. There are a few sources you could look at, one is the GitHub Awesome YouTube channel. I am seeing a lot of several-hundred-stars open source projects with unreasonably large codebases starting to gain traction. This is the frontier of adoption, and my guess is this will start cascading outward.

I think you underestimate just how hard visibility is. If something is free or super low cost than they won't have any marketing budget for you to hear about it in the first place because it would be unprofitable...

One thing I've come to realize is that if something is cheap enough then people won't even want to promote it because if they get a commission on it then it won't be worth their time. So in some cases they will be better off recommending a much higher price competitor. Just go Google around for some type of software (something competitive and commercial like CRMs) and you'll notice why for commercial projects nobody is recommending free or really cheap solutions because it's not in anybody's best interest

Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works.

I'm not seeing that either.

Why? I don't want to bother making all the software that the AI wrote for me work on someone else's machine. The difference between software that solves my problem and that solves a problem many people have is also often like an order of magnitude of effort.

And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps.

Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?

> Local-first

> Not seeing any

Working exactly as intended?

I've built so many of these just for myself over the last year or two. A good two dozen from a cursory count on my Github.

They all work decently enough for my personal use and are 80-100% Vibe coded but about 0% vibe designed.

Why should you see a flurry of software?

What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up.

Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.