This post is mostly about Puter, a great new open source project that is building a web-based operating system.
I decided to try it out. Now, I used to be a software engineer long ago, but occasionally I like to try my hand at coding in the 21st century. Puter apps are written in HTML/Javascipt, which is the basic coding for all web pages. They are not hard languages to learn, and there are plenty of online tutorials, development environments, and resources to write programs in these languages. Puter also provides a nice little playground to try out your programs as you write and debug them. I also made use of Claude from Anthropic, which is a pretty amazing AI to write code, and has a free tier.
Using all this, and some help from nice friends at Puter, I cobbled together a very simple program for my law practice.
The LEDES Problem
If you are a lawyer, you may already know this, but many companies require–or at least prefer–legal invoices to be delivered in a format called LEDES. LEDES is an outdated, clunky, deeply horrible standard. If you have used any of the biggest legal invoicing platforms, like Legal Tracker, CounselGo, Coupa, or Brightflag, you have probably used this standard, whether you know it or not.
LEDES is a pain because it is nearly impossible to create an invoice in this format by hand. It uses plain text with an odd delimiter (try to find | on your keyboard), requires complete invoice information on every line item, and has various unnecessary fields and other clunky features. So if you have to produce a LEDES invoice by hand, you are in for an unpleasant hour or two. Why would you need to do that? Well, some clients refuse to accept anything else, or use billing platforms that don’t allow you to do manual input.
You can get a service to prepare a LEDES invoice for you, and it costs about $100 per invoice. Yes, that’s right. If you are a solo lawyer sending out invoices for a few thousand dollars, that’s a bite into your pocket money. I never want to pay such a fee again, and I never want anyone else to, either. So I decided to make my program available under an open source license. That means you can run it locally if you prefer, but the easiest way is to run it on Puter here.
Puter is Liberating
Deploying on Puter was easy and quick. It’s free for developers. And my little program does not even scratch the surface of what you can do. For example, you can use file storage, databases, GPT-4, DALL-E, and other features that would otherwise be very annoying to access with Javascript.
My little LEDES program is just the first version. It is functional but clunky. It surely has bugs. I plan to improve it in the near future. For example, I intend to improve the input screen, and help with useful defaults. But in the meantime, enjoy, and don’t let the billing platforms get you down!
(Note: I am an advisor to Puter, so please consider that I am not unbiased in my praise for the platform.)
‘Puter’s a very cool platform. A powerful idea well implemented. Nice. I looked at this platform a while back and I’m glad to see that it’s still under development.
I think the difficult part is getting people to understand how it can be used. I built a similar platform some time ago and people just didn’t seem to understand what it was and what to do with it. I’ve been trying to target / re-brand the platform to appeal to very specific applications in order to make the use clearer to potential users. It’s unclear yet whether this will make any difference. Probably not.
I suspect that until a large tech company offers a similar product, people will discount the very idea of this type of platform. Up to this point, most of the interest in this type of platform seems to come from outside of the U.S. (NextCloud, OwnCloud etc.) At some point, a major tech company will pick up the idea and then our implementations will become irrelevant.
Still, very cool.