Architectural Patterns: Moving Beyond Cloud-Native to Local-First - Insights from Adam Wiggins - InfoQ

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Architectural Patterns: Moving Beyond Cloud-Native to Local-First - Insights from Adam Wiggins

Architecture & Design

Architectural Patterns: Moving Beyond Cloud-Native to Local-First - Insights from Adam Wiggins

Jun 29, 2026

Podcast with

Adam Wiggins

by

Olimpiu Pop

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In this episode, Heroku co-founder and Ink & Switch founder Adam Wiggins argues for a 'local-first' architecture that reconciles cloud-based collaboration with the performance and data ownership of local software. He explores the role of CRDTs and version control primitives in non-code domains, and examines how a hybrid AI future might leverage local models for core productivity tasks, challenging the current over-reliance on centralised cloud compute.

Key Takeaways

Local-first is not a rejection of the cloud, but a necessary correction to the "everything-in-the-cloud" paradigm, prioritising offline capability and latency.

Technologies like CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) have matured sufficiently to move from academic prototypes to robust, production-grade infrastructure, as evidenced by tools such as Linear.

The next major productivity leap will occur when we bring Git-like version control primitives (branching, merging, diffing) to non-code domains like documents and spreadsheets.

The future of AI integration lies in small, high-performance local models that handle 80% of routine productivity tasks, with large cloud-based LLMs reserved for high-compute tasks.

Moving to local-first requires a realistic assessment of use cases; it is not a silver bullet, but a toolset for specific domains where latency and user agency are high-value differentiators.

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Transcript

Olimpiu Pop : Hello everybody, I am Olimpiu Pop, and in front of me I have Adam Wiggins. If you are like me, probably you will not know too much only by the name, so I will have to name a couple of what he did previously. And the two things that probably are more than enough as a CV for him is Heroku, and the other one is the 12-Factor App. So without any further ado, Adam, can you please introduce yourself?

Adam Wiggins : Yes, thanks for having me, and indeed those are Heroku and 12-Factor App, although well in the past now, pretty foundational for my career. Yes, my name's Adam Wiggins, obviously a creator of all kinds of software, entrepreneur, and software engineer and designer and so on. Excited today to talk about local-first software, but if you go back in time, you know, I got interested in how computers can best serve human needs, and that led me through various paths to Heroku, kind of solving the deployment problem and making it faster and easier, and frankly more fun to get software out into the world and in front of your users. That led to the manifesto of the 12-Factor App. Following on from that, founded a research lab called Ink & Switch with some of my Heroku co-creators, and have been exploring the fringes of technology ever since. And again, all through this lens of how can computers improve human prosperity and make our lives as humans better, especially for things like art, science, creating things as opposed to consumption tasks.

Olimpiu Pop : And also as an early consumer of Heroku, that was quite nice, and definitely it was easier. I liked the integration with GitHub at that point and how the things were going, but also the detail into how it looked. Because on the infra side, most of the people were, okay, it has to work. Most of them were using the terminal. But Heroku had nice colors, and nice naming, and you can see that there was a lot of interest into the details, and that was what I really enjoyed to get started on small, like, projects that then...