SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software

Martin Kleppmann , Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the best-selling O'Reilly book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, talks to host Adi Narayan about local-first collaboration software. They discuss what the term means, how it leads to simpler application architectures compared to the cloud-first model, and the benefits to developers and users from keeping all of their data on their own devices. Martin goes into detail about how applications can synchronize data with and without a server, as well as conflict-resolution techniques, and the open-source library Automerge, which implements CRDTs and developers can use out-of-the-box. He also clarifies what kinds of applications would be suitable for the local-first approach. In the context of AI, they discuss vibe coding, local-first apps, and how the conflict-resolution work that enables data to be synchronized between users can also work with human-AI collaboration.

You can listen to SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software is an episode from Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers by SE-Radio Team.

This episode is 55:14 long.

This episode was published on Apr 15, 2026.

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