Local-first / CRDTs

Local-first architectures — CRDTs specifically — are compelling for anything collaborative: instant local writes, offline support by default, and conflict resolution that doesn’t require a server round-trip to feel correct.

I’m still weighing the sync and conflict complexity, though. The demos are convincing; the failure modes when two clients diverge for a long time, or when a schema changes underneath an existing CRDT, are the part that worries me before I’d put it in front of users.

Watching a couple of the production-grade libraries closely rather than reaching for a hand-rolled CRDT. This is a case where the theory is solid and the tooling maturity is the real open question.