I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would be making deployment extremely simple, reliable, and safe.

Yes, but I think we have a somewhat different idea about the market forces. My impression from your essay is that you believe app developers will add APIs that enable personal tools, and only then will local software crafting take off.

My belief is that it is happening already: local software crafting is happening now, before the tools are ready. People aren't going to wait for good APIs to exist; people will MacGyver things together. They'll scrape screens (sometimes with OCR), run emulated devices in the cloud, and call APIs incorrectly and abusively until they get what they need. They won't ask for permission.

A lot of software developers may transition from building to cleaning up knots.

This kind of list may be right for a trade school. If that's what you're referring to, then I don't disagree. Those students want to learn how to use those tools.

But if the class is computer science at a university, then the students want to go deeper and learn how to improve upon and compete with the existing tools. They need the theory first, which means Lisp (or a derivative) and an imperative language.

I agree, I feel like the authors are underestimating the effect the new AI is already having on the concept of local software crafting. For my entire lifetime, I've had friends ask me to help them build software that accesses some data somewhere, and I've always had to turn them down because there are too many unknowns.

I've spent countless hours thinking about how to build a business that would solve some class of problems my friends have encountered and I've almost always had to conclude that the business would probably not be profitable, so their ideas were never tested.

Now, with a 2025 chatbot, I can confidently estimate the feasibility of a basic project in minutes and we can build the thing together in hours. No one needs to make a profit, build a new business, or commit to ongoing maintenance. Locally crafted software is taking off dramatically and I think it will become the new normal.

What I wonder about is the pool of potential Go developers. Is the error handling issue serious enough to stop developers from even considering Go? Go would have been an obviously better choice than most languages 30 years ago, but today there are many more good options.