I went the OpenAI DevDay keynote in person. The best demo was when the presenter used a web app to control the strobe lights at the top of the stage.

He prompted the app to run a whole sequence, showering the audience with an array of colors. Then he showed how he was doing it: a Next.js app running in dev mode, allowing him to change the behavior the app much more quickly than a traditional production setup would allow.

Traditionally, there's been a big distinction between web apps in dev mode and web apps in production. Production apps are built with a different set of assumptions and have a lot more guardrails - you needs all the types to check, a optimizations, and so on. That's been the norm in web development for the last ten to fifteen years, especially with frameworks like NextJS.

Dev mode is a more recent concept that emerged alongside complex bundlers and technologies like hot reloading, which allow changes to appear on screen almost instantly. But dev mode wasn't designed for general use. The trade-off is that it's slower, and it's more single-player—it's harder to share dev mode apps with other people because that's not how they were designed to work. Traditionally, you'd build the app in dev mode, fix the problems for the build mode, then deploy the production build to Vercel or your cloud platform of choice.

What the presenters suggested is that we're going to see more of these dev mode experiences in the wild—apps that are willing to share their internals, willing to adapt on the fly, but with the trade-off that they're not for everyone.

Openclaw (fka Moltbot, ClawdBot) is another example of this distinction being blurred. Traditionally, if you wanted to ship an agentic experience, it would be a lot more packaged. You'd have the tool for pulling from Slack or the tool for opening up a case. But with Openclaw, you had an app where everything was on the table to modify through the app, and the app would "Hot Reload" to handle the changes. If you wanted to change the name, the personality, the integrations - nothing is off the table.

It does create a lot of security problems - a lot of the friction around securing OpenClaw is ensuring others don't have access to your dev mode and screw around with it.

What's interesting about these new patterns is that maybe, because things are moving so quickly, and there is such a long tail - that personal software is here to stay.