Decent News for May

Create-Decent-App 2.0 Released

We've released Create-Decent-App 2.0, which is a project source code generator for local-LLM-based web apps. I say "we", but "we" is "me" right now. The Royal We, perhaps.

If you know how to write React-based web apps already, the tool will be very simple for you. Just run `npx create-decent-app` from the command line, answer a few prompts, and you'll have a web app running locally in 30 seconds with zero-cost LLM functionality. This isn't vibe-coding. The app that is generated is starting source code. You can edit the generated source the old-fashioned way.

There are quite a few improvements in 2.0, like the new DecentBar, and smarter division between imported dependencies and inlined source. For more info see my blog post. 

Fledgling Community on Our Discord Server

We've got a handful of people hanging out on our Discord Server now. You can see some "developer diary"-style posts from myself and Syntax, who is making a really cool app. You're quite welcome to join us.

Invite link to Decent Apps Discord server

Food for Thought - Privacy as a Charter

Hoai Huong Tran is helping Decent Apps with her product management knowledge. She sent me this article today that I found interesting.

Article: Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg lack moral values : Apple offers an ethical alternative

Is Apple so morally wonderful? We could argue about that. But the more important point is that there is room in a commercial marketplace for some players to compete on privacy, security, and not being evil. Another way of looking at the situation: what really stopped Apple from turning over user data to the FBI in 2016?  Or opposing the UK government this year when asked to add a backdoor to iCloud?

Because Apple had defined itself to its users in a certain way, they could not break their own privacy charter without losing goodwill and customers.

I can think of another company that failed to live up to its own definition this year - Mozilla. Things haven't gone well for them.

With Decent Apps, I'm aiming for an architecture that bakes in the privacy promise rather than asking for users to trust me, a company, or the people associated with it. At the heart of Decent Apps is the idea that it's your data - not mine.

More Coming

I'm busy putting together the Decent Partner Service, which will provide deploy/promote/rollback for developers that want to host their apps from our website. We need some platform-as-a-service (PaaS) features like this to support app developers.

-Erik Hermansen
Founder, Decent Apps