LLM APIs are a Synchronization Problem | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

There’s a whole ecosystem that has dealt with this kind of mess before: the local-first movement. Those folks spent a decade figuring out how to synchronize distributed state across clients and servers that don’t trust each other, drop offline, fork, merge, and heal. Peer-to-peer sync, and conflict-free replicated storage engines all exist because “shared state but with gaps and divergence” is a hard problem that nobody could solve with naive message passing. Their architectures explicitly separate canonical state, derived state, and transport mechanics — exactly the kind of separation missing from most LLM APIs today.