There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on.
But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term.
There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.
One use case where SQLite is a good option is for embedding as a local database in an app. Starting local-only with SQLite allows you to defer a lot of the backend effort while testing an MVP.
Clarification: I'm not the author of the linked post.
I read your post some time back and feel it's been an organizing force for developers in this space — great job and thanks for the work you put into it.
I often wonder about terminology. What was the reason you chose "local-first" over "offline-first" (or even "serverfree" as in this case)?
But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term.
There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.