"File over App", Veeva at JPM Healthcare Conference

Back in 2023, Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, wrote an intriguing piece titled “File over app”. It’s a bit philosophical piece. Some excerpt from the piece:

“File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.”

As you may have noticed, Claude Cowork (which Anthropic describes as “Claude Code for the rest of your work”) is currently having a moment. I stumbled onto “File over app” piece through this tweet which essentially expressed the same philosophy as Ango:

“The longer I work with Claude Code, the more I realise I should start to have all my files locally instead of scattered around many cloud SaaS apps.

Can’t give context without owning it all on your device. Sure you can call the tools, but Claude just browsing your folders is so much more powerful for context.

True renaissance for local, open-source tools.”

What are the implications for software in “file over app” world? I will touch on that and share my notes from Veeva’s discussion at JPM Healthcare conference behind the paywall.

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