Local-First Software Is Winning: A Developer Guide to Building Without the Cloud

I lost two hours of work last Tuesday because my internet went down for eleven minutes. Not because I was using some exotic cloud-dependent tool. I was editing a document in a mainstream SaaS product. The kind with a billion-dollar valuation and a "works offline" checkbox somewhere in their marketing materials. When my connection dropped, the app froze. When it came back, my changes were gone. The conflict resolution had decided that the empty server state was more recent than my local edits.