Remembering the LAN is a 2020 Tailscale launch-era post by David Crawshaw (now building the wonderful exe.dev). I loved it then. Reading it six years later, I realize those same sentiments apply well beyond networking.
This essay could just as easily be about Vibe Coding.
All the technology is better. The resources to learn are better. But it is not clear to me I would program at all today. Learning how to store passwords or add OAuth2 to your toy web site is not fun. So much of programming today is busywork, or playing defense against a raging internet. You can do so much more, but the activation energy required to start writing fun collaborative software is so much higher you end up using some half-baked SaaS instead.
Say what you want about how agentic coding affects software quality. Building software in 2026 looks nothing like this bleak year 2020 vision.
The activation energy required to start writing software is so low I can’t stop starting new projects. I deploy most of them over Tailscale. Available only to me, my family, and a few select friends.
I need to help new programmers who never got to experience simple, pleasurable programming in a safe environment understand that programming can be fun. You can set up your environment so you can focus on being creative. Writing a web service for use by your friends should not be a form of combat, where you spend your days worrying about XSS attacks or buffer overflows. You should be focused on creating something new and wonderful in a place without bad people hounding you.
We’re tantalizingly close to this world. Thank you, Tailscale.
The author is now building a new cloud for reasons similar to why Tailscale exists:
This is the moment because something has changed: we have agents now. (Indeed my co-founder Josh and I started tinkering because we wanted to use LLMs in programming. It turns out what needs building for LLMs are better traditional abstractions.) Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software. Economists would call this an instance of Jevons paradox. Each of us will write more programs, for fun and for work. We need private places to run them, easy sharing with friends and colleagues, minimal overhead.
I’m running my projects in a personal cloud, but it’s also far from ideal. There is work to do.