InstantDB
by alexander-opalic
A real-time, client-side database with relational queries and sync — offering a Firebase-like developer experience for local-first apps.
local-first
(55)PowerSync
by alexander-opalic
A Postgres-based sync engine with offline support, designed for mobile and web apps that need reliable local-first data access.
Vibe Coding with Jazz
by anselm-eickhoff
A hands-on workshop building a multiplayer chat app with Jazz — demonstrating how local-first shared state replaces traditional backends, databases, and file storage with a single reactive abstraction.
CRDTs for Mortals
by james-long
You don't need a PhD to use CRDTs — a Last-Write-Wins Map plus a Grow-Only Set on top of SQLite gives you production-grade sync in 630 lines of JavaScript.
CRDTs: The Hard Parts
by martin-kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann goes beyond CRDT basics to explore the hard problems: interleaving anomalies in text editors, moving elements in lists and trees, and reducing metadata overhead — showing that CRDTs are easy to implement badly.
15 Years of Local First: A Best-of Report from the Field
by jan-lehnardt
The strongest argument for local-first isn't developer experience — it's that offline-capable sync kept Ebola contact tracing running, COVID vaccinations documented, and humanitarian convoys navigating when no other architecture could.
Talk Outline: Building Websites with Local-First and Vue
by alexander-opalic
Outline for a talk tracing the journey from manual DOM manipulation to reactive frameworks to offline-first to local-first, with practical Vue examples and sync engine comparisons.
Offline-First Apps with TanStack DB and PowerSync
by dev-agrawal
Most offline conflicts never happen in practice — non-overlapping writes and orthogonal field edits cover the majority of cases, so the real engineering challenge is choosing the right escalation strategy for the conflicts that do.
Sync Protocols and the Truth Behind Local-First
by tom-redman
Offline writes destroy serializability — it's a mathematical fact, not an engineering limitation. Reconciliation is a product design exercise, not a computer science problem, and you should start with strong consistency guarantees and intentionally weaken them.
Local-First Software
A comprehensive map of local-first software — from foundational philosophy and CRDTs to sync engines, tooling, and real-world production stories.
The Local-First Litmus Test: Real Examples Across the Spectrum
by alexander-opalic
Not everything that caches locally is local-first. The real test: does the app still work if the company disappears? A categorized directory of real apps across the spectrum.
Local First & Social Software in the Era of LLMs
by zhanna-sharipova
Owning your data isn't enough — local-first must extend to owning your communication channels, and the same infrastructure that protects human social connections will become the foundation for a trustworthy multi-agent future.
Safe in the Keyhive: Local-First Access Control with E2EE and Capabilities
by brooklyn-zelenka
Auth must travel with data in local-first — Keyhive solves this with capability-based certificate chains and a membership CRDT, making the sync server unable to read your data while keeping the UX as boring as a Google Docs share button.
The UX of Local-First
by eileen-wagner
The tech for local-first has matured but the UX hasn't — four unsolved design challenges stand between us and mainstream adoption, and they require collective agreement, not individual solutions.
Why Local First Matters to Businesses
by adam-fish
Local-first technology only matters if it translates into business outcomes — reliability, speed, revenue. The biggest trap is optimizing for developer fascination instead of real-world impact.
rstore
by guillaume-chau
A reactive normalized cache for Vue and Nuxt that unifies query caching, cache normalization, optimistic mutations, form handling, and real-time subscriptions behind a pluggable data source architecture — the missing data layer between Pinia and full sync engines.
SQLite Persistence on the Web
by conrad-hofmeyr
SQLite in the browser is already production-ready if you pick the right VFS — OPFS with synchronous access handles solved the persistence and sync/async impedance mismatch that held it back for years.
Sync Engines for Vue Developers
by alexander-opalic
Vue already syncs your refs to the DOM. Sync engines extend that same idea to databases — keeping client state and server state in harmony. Here's how Replicache, Zero, Convex, PowerSync, LiveStore, Jazz, and Dexie each approach this differently.
Sync Panel Discussion
by aaron-boodman, james-cowling, johannes-schickling, kyle-mathews
Four sync engine builders reveal that the real disagreement isn't sync vs. no-sync—it's where you draw the line between server authority and client autonomy, and every position demands different trade-offs.
Panel Discussion: The Big Questions of Local-First
by adam-wiggins, martin-kleppmann, aaron-boodman, peter-van-hardenberg
The original local-first essayists and a pragmatic sync-engine builder clash on whether offline writes should ship today or wait for version-control UX — revealing that the real fault line isn't technical but philosophical: who does the tool serve first?
I Built a Context7 Local-First Alternative With Claude Code
by moshe-simantov
Documentation indexing for AI agents belongs on the local machine: pre-built SQLite databases eliminate rate limits, cut query latency to sub-10ms, and keep proprietary code queries completely private.
Unleashing the Power of Sync
by dev-agrawal
Sync engines collapse distributed state management into straightforward SQL by maintaining local databases that sync bidirectionally, and this architecture extends naturally to AI agents that read and write directly to the database.
Local-First in Production — FOSDEM 2026 Recap
by m-palanikannan
Shipping CRDTs to real users teaches lessons no demo can: save the binary as source of truth, never overwrite—always merge, and build fallbacks for when WebSockets inevitably die.
Local-First Software: Pragmatism vs Idealism
by adam-wiggins
Movements like local-first succeed when idealists define the vision and pragmatists build the infrastructure—neither alone crosses the finish line.
Building AI Agentic Apps in 2025
by sunil-pai
Every AI agent framework should be a sync engine—the pull-based architecture agents use today mirrors front-end evolution, and pushing data into agent context solves the fundamental performance problem of MCP tool fetching.
Local-First Software: Taking Back Control of Our Data
by cultrepo
Local-first isn't just offline capability—it's a paradigm shift where data lives on user devices by default, servers become optional infrastructure, and CRDTs enable collaboration without sacrificing ownership.
Native-Grade Web Apps with Local-First Data
by johannes-schickling
Web apps can rival native quality by replacing server-centric data architecture with client-side SQLite and automatic sync engines, eliminating loading states and enabling instant responsiveness
A Gentle Introduction to CRDTs
by matt-wonlaw
CRDTs let replicas update independently and merge automatically without conflicts
LiveStore
by johannes-schickling
A client-centric state management framework combining reactive SQLite with event sourcing and built-in sync, designed for high-performance local-first applications
Alkalye
by carl-assmann
A local-first markdown editor PWA with E2E encryption, collaborative editing, and presentation mode.
Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Programmers
by maggie-appleton
Language models will enable a new class of 'barefoot developers'—technically savvy non-programmers who build small-scale, personal software for their communities, and local-first should position itself as the default infrastructure before cloud platforms lock them in.
Implementing Fractional Indexing
by david-greenspan
A technique for maintaining ordered sequences in collaborative systems using string-based keys that allow arbitrary insertions without renumbering.
Local First: the secret master plan
by peter-van-hardenberg
Ink & Switch's three-part vision: local-first software enables universal version control, which enables malleable software — and the philosophical endgame is turning people from app buyers into tool users.
The Past, Present, and Future of Local-First
by martin-kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann traces local-first from CRDTs to a proposed definition: software where another computer's availability never blocks the user—including when the developer shuts down.
The Ultimate Mind Map Builder for Obsidian
by zsolt-viczian
Zsolt Viczián demonstrates his new Mind Map Builder script for Obsidian Excalidraw, enabling rapid visual thinking with keyboard navigation, markdown interoperability, and flexible layout controls.
Unexpected benefits of going local-first
by tuomas-artman
Beyond performance and offline support, local-first architecture dramatically improves developer productivity by eliminating network error handling and enabling synchronous data access.
How I use Obsidian
by steph-ango
Steph Ango's personal note-taking system emphasizes file-based storage, minimal folder hierarchy, and emergent organization through linking rather than rigid structure.
Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular
by marco-bambini
Explains why local-first apps remain niche despite their advantages—syncing data across distributed devices without losing information is genuinely hard.
Malleable Software
by ink-and-switch
A research agenda for malleable software—tools that users can adapt to their needs without relying on developers, restoring agency in an era of locked-down applications.
UX++ and DX++ with Sync Engines
by carl-assmann
Sync engines remove network latency from the user interaction path by maintaining local data stores that sync bidirectionally with servers in the background.
Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud
by martin-kleppmann, adam-wiggins, peter-van-hardenberg, mark-mcgranaghan
A foundational essay proposing that data ownership and real-time collaboration are not mutually exclusive, introducing CRDTs as the enabling technology for local-first software.
What is Local-first Web Development?
by alexander-opalic
An introduction to local-first web development, a paradigm shift that prioritizes storing data on users' devices first, enabling offline functionality, instant access, and greater user control over their data.
Basic Likes Feature with LiveStore
by bohdan-ptyts
LiveStore's event sourcing model makes implementing persistent, synced features trivial—define an event, a materializer, and a reactive query, and the framework handles offline support and cross-device sync automatically.
A Tale of Two Sync Engines
by arushi-bandi
Not all data fits the CRDT model — Figma runs two sync engines because ephemeral state, derived data, and server-driven features each demand fundamentally different sync architectures, and scaling the non-CRDT one turned out to be the harder problem.
Can Sync Be Network-optional?
by brendan-obrien
Sync is literally impossible (we have a formal proof), centralization is faster (we have a paper), and the real prize of peer-to-peer isn't ideology — it's sublinear scaling, the same physics that makes electrical grids and cardiovascular systems work.
CRDTs Solved Conflicts, Not Sync
by adam-fish
CRDTs are a solid substrate for sync engines, but transport reliability, multiplexing, compression, query-based sync, and distributed deletes are the harder — and more valuable — engineering challenges.
General-purpose Sync with IVM
by aaron-boodman
Query-driven sync turns out to be the key to general-purpose sync engines — and the trick that makes it work at interactive speeds is a novel IVM approach (ZVM) that pulls sorted data through operator pipelines instead of pushing everything.
An Interactive Guide to TanStack DB
by maxi-ferreira
TanStack DB fixes what TanStack Query got wrong — isolated caches, boilerplate optimistic updates, and no data relationships — by adding collections, live queries, and transactional mutations that make sync engines a drop-in upgrade rather than a rewrite.
Sync Engines and Local Data
by wes-bos, scott-tolinski
Wes and Scott explore local-first sync engines — why they make apps feel fast, and how LiveStore, Zero, Instant DB, Convex, ElectricSQL, and PowerSync each approach the problem differently.
Conflict Resolution x Notion Blocks
by angelique-nehmzow
Notion's block model breaks every standard CRDT assumption — they had to invent text slices, text instances, and search labels to make conflict resolution work across a document editor where blocks constantly split, merge, and move.
An Object Sync Engine for Local-first Apps
by sujay-jayakar
The object sync engine — three components (local store, server store, sync protocol) wired together with server authority — is the architecture Linear, Figma, and Asana independently converged on. Convex is building their version.
A Map of Sync
by sujay-jayakar
The sync ecosystem is a wilderness — nine dimensions (size, update rate, structure, latency, offline, concurrency, centralization, flexibility, consistency) map where every platform sits and why no single engine wins everywhere.
The why and how of building a local-first music app
by johannes-schickling
Building a native-quality music app in the browser requires treating the web as a game engine problem — custom schedulers, canvas rendering, and event-sourced SQLite replace the standard toolkit when you refuse to accept spinners.
Powering Offline-First Forestry in Europe's Wilds
by alexander-thiele
When your users spend entire days in forests with zero connectivity, local-first isn't a nice-to-have — it's the only architecture that works. OCELL's sync queue proves the pattern, but cascading failures from a single invalid GeoJSON reveal sync's hardest unsolved problem.
File Over App
by steph-ango
Digital artifacts that last require files you control in open formats—apps are temporary, but plain text endures.