"solve security" - that's an April Fools joke if I ever heard one.
Given how shitty it looks and behaves, I was 100% sure this was an April Fools. But after reading the serious comments here on HN, I'm not sure anymore...
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EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
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Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#282Thanks, but I'll stick to WordPress.
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Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#283Convince me this isn’t vibeslop. If Cloudflare really have radically changed their software development philosophy lately, this would actually be an interesting project, being based on Astro and coming with some APIs for programmatic management. Them being so happy about the „cost of software development“ and not going very deep into ecosystem, community or project management doesn’t convince me that this is going to…
Coded with AI != slop. AI in the hands of the right person can actually be good. That's gotten _especially_ true in the past few months.
IMO, what matters is whether it's coded with AI or it's coded by AI.
Is AI merely being used as a tool to aid the engineer? Because that's what I do. I use it as essentially a super-autocomplete. It typically only writes a couple lines at a time for me. On rare occasions, I can write a function signature and let it fill out the body. That's coding with AI.
Anything more than that though? You're stepping into coding by AI, which utterly fails at anything beyond an MVP. Once you go over 2,000 lines of code or so, it falls apart. It can't reason about anything with even a small amount of complexity, and every "bug fix" either fails to fix the bug or it introduces two more.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#284I don't think it's the code that makes WordPress valuable. I've been learning WordPress recently and haven't been too impressed with the internals. WordPress is valuable because of the ecosystem and support. I have no doubt that WordPress will still be a thing in ten years. What's the support plan for EmDash? I see commits are mostly from a single developer. E: Oh, I think it's an April fools joke, I'm embarrassed. E…
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I did that once, employed someone on Fiverr to do a WordPress site. They installed a load of plugins for no reason, made a mess, then gave me my money back. I went back to a static site.
That has been my experience, low barrier to entry, low price, shoddy work. Or hire an agency, pay top dollar for little work.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#285Spiritually hollow; at this point, it reads more like marketing material than anything of genuine substance.
Yeah, they are churning out these AI slop projects for blogpost hits about once a week now
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#286> Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It’s written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is power…
I think this is true, however, when it comes to non-coding clients I've worked with they really do like the ability to make minor edits to a site with a UI rather than having to continually ping a developer. The problem with WordPress (and it looks like this solution largely just replicated the problem) is that it's way too cumbersome and bloated. It really is unlike any modern UI for really any SaaS or software in g…
There are two types of WordPress sites from my perspective as someone who got their start in webdev in that ecosystem.
The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.
The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.
These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).
WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#287As a (unfortunately) wordpress dev this seems to solve my single biggest painpoint with WP. Which isn't plugin security, but the overall plugin architecture. WP treats plugins as content, literally in the same top level `wp-content` directory as uploaded images. This makes CI/CD among other things, a nightmare. But EmDash plugins are just TS modules, which has got to make things easier even if plugin configuration do…
Wordpress has no concept of a "staging site" and no way to make changed and then "export" them from dev to production; you basically have to either restore it as a backup or just replay the changes by hand.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#288So it’s a WordPress successor that doesn’t support any WordPress plugins (since they’re written in PHP and this is written in TypeScript) and has baked-in support for blockchain payments. and also it’s “AI Native”, because the internet definitely needs more AI slop blogs.
This IS an April Fools joke, whether or not they intended it to be one.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#289I can't believe as developers we were worried about AI training on licensed code. It turns out it didn't matter at all. You can just point an LLM at some source code and you're off scot-free.
Almost all apps are just CRUD. The code is not that interesting. The valuable IP is the product.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#290Serious question: Why is everyone still using JavaScript to AI-code projects? You can vibe-code apps with real languages now. There's no reason to use an interpreted, bloated, weird language anymore. The only reason interpreted languages were a thing was so you could edit a file and re-run it immediately without a compile step. Compiling is now cheap, and you don't have to build expertise in a new language anymore. A…
Like it or not, it's the only language that'll cross over web backend, web frontend, iOS, Android, TV, Windows, Mac, et al. And with something like tRPC your data being fully end-to-end typesafe too.