Internetless Software Development

Internetless Software Development is a concept and living experiment documented by Jan Wilmake in early 2024. The premise: dedicate a second MacBook Air as a machine that has never touched the real internet — running a large local LLM, local DNS resolution, and a Vercel-compatible serverless environment — producing a complete software development setup with no external dependencies.

Jan's framing: "I imagine a device that goes back to basics. It has no internet, just a huge LLM."^[1]

Motivations

Jan identified several distinct reasons to pursue a fully offline setup:

• AGI containment: a device that cannot reach the internet cannot be exploited by a rogue AI to cause external harm — the machine is a safe sandbox for running powerful models
• Privacy: with no outbound connection, activity on the laptop is fully private — no remote hacking, no telemetry, no AI panopticon
• Security: no internet means no malware exfiltration vectors
• Distraction elimination: no social media, no news, no notifications — pure focus
• Battery life: Jan noted from prior experiments that a base-model MacBook Air without WiFi can last three days on a charge
• Remote resilience: useful in locations with poor connectivity; also useful if a government shuts down the internet during an AGI crisis

Technical Challenges

macOS Installation

Apple's M1+ recovery tools require internet activation during initial setup, making a truly internet-virgin installation impossible on modern Apple hardware. Jan found that older Macs without the activation requirement would be necessary for a purist approach; on a modern M1 Air, the internet is only needed at install time, not during operation.

Local DNS and Vercel Resolver

Jan's design for the local network layer:

• A custom DNS resolver that maps standard domain names to localhost
• A Vercel project resolver that:

- matches incoming requests by domain - serves public/ static files - follows vercel.json rules for rewrites, redirects, and serverless functions

• The development environment doubles as the production environment — a Cmd+S deploys to the local web

This would enable standard browser-based development against web standards, with no code changes required between local and (eventual) real deployment.

Local npm Registry

Jan explored hosting a local npm server at the standard registry address, pre-seeded with common packages, so standard package managers would continue to work without modification.

External APIs

For code that calls external APIs, Jan proposed an LLM-backed mock layer: the model generates plausible responses based on the OpenAPI spec of the target service, caches them, and returns them to the calling code — preserving functional development without real connectivity.

Deployment

Without internet, deployment would use physical media (USB) and a batch-deploy script run periodically — prioritising development speed and privacy over continuous delivery.

Significance

The experiment sits at the intersection of several recurring themes in Jan's work: the Agent_Friendly_Web (what infrastructure does an AI agent need?), the Outcomputed scenario (what happens if the internet gets shut down?), and his practical interest in reducing external dependencies across his toolchain. It is also an extreme expression of the monorepo-to-connected-repos architecture: if every package is a self-contained repo, offline development becomes far more tractable.

See Also

• Jan_Wilmake
• Code_From_Anywhere
• Agent_Friendly_Web
• Outcomputed