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Our New AI Website Builder

wordpress.com

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Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Splitting the community in half? Nah. If Matt needs to go, the community who is more interested in just making money (we're not "post economic" like Matt) will move aggressively to cut him out like cancer. Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models. My ti…

Copium. Wordpress is dead. Argue all you want. 5 years from now the trajectory of installs/users/commercial opportunity will show that the last year was more than enough to incentivize/motivate the current and potential users to reach for something else. I say this as someone who makes my primary income managing a very large WP/WC shop. Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Li…

WordPress is so dead. Vibecoding a page using next.js and using something like sanity so they can make their own changes gets clients so much more for less than WordPress ever did.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#62
post #14
post #2

Speaking of WordPress, hows the entire WordPress debacle going with Matt Mullenweg?

Development has dropped off a cliff over the last couple of months. The release cycle has moved from quarterly to yearly. He's basically taking his ball and going home. My guess is we'll see more internal initiatives like this AI builder instead of focusing on the core product. This would be an okay strategy if his core product wasn't in such a state of disrepair. I've seen multiple issues on Github projects from Aut…

Disrepair is too right. 5k issues and 1.7k open PRs on the Gutenberg GitHub repository.

I wish this all had happened before Full Site Editing was put into .org.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#64
post #24

So they finally gave up on making "Full Site Editing" a thing, I take it. I maintain that trying to transition the product away from PHP into a React-ridden mess for the "Block Editor" in 2017 started us down this path of ruin. Clearly they felt threatened by site builder plugins like Elementor Pro, Beaver Builder, Bricks and others that massively improved the WYSIWYG experience to the point where WP was relegated to…

I run a WordPress agency and while I think the block editor was foisted on wordpress.org far too quickly, it's been a godsend in terms of allowing our clients much more control over their content. The prospect of going back to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor and templates makes me shudder.

I don't get the criticism either. Every time I try to post on a platform I miss the ability of just dragging a paragraph around to reorder it.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#65
post #49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI website will look about as unique as a Facebook profile in 2004. Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer "make it look like this other website that I like". An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer.

> Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer The vast majority of people who want to make a site don't have a designer, and if they could get one the comparison is something that's near instant and costs pennies. > An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer. Perhaps ignoring the "what makes it good in th…

> although I'd argue that point for many things, these systems often can surf the web, can locate sites, can take images as input and already know many major themes and major sites.

But that's not what's being offered here, and my bet is it won't be. It's more lucrative for businesses to put out LLM freemium shovelware and claim it replaces people than do the enormous work of developing the custom models that actually can.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#66
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI website will look about as unique as a Facebook profile in 2004. Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer "make it look like this other website that I like". An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer.

> An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web We've given the AI the ability to scrape websites, so I'm not sure that holds.

Scrapes are cached, it is too expensive and too long to do them on-demand based on a live query. Lots of sites change designs frequently and don't output semantic code in the html source either. And good luck getting the customer to prompt correctly for things like background images, gradients, carousels, animations and page transitions.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#67
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"it's pathetic that no other company benefiting from WordPress has stepped up either" ^<-- hard to justify doing so when Wordpress' package ecosystem (the open source platform) is tethered to Wordpress.org (matt's personal website)

Also, good luck sending in a PR and getting it merged. Unless you are part of Matt’s inner circle, it isn’t happening. Even the most basic bug fix PRs are routinely ignored.

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#68
post #24

So they finally gave up on making "Full Site Editing" a thing, I take it. I maintain that trying to transition the product away from PHP into a React-ridden mess for the "Block Editor" in 2017 started us down this path of ruin. Clearly they felt threatened by site builder plugins like Elementor Pro, Beaver Builder, Bricks and others that massively improved the WYSIWYG experience to the point where WP was relegated to…

This AI builder is actually doubling down on blocks - everything is block based and the canvas it works on is the full site editing. Without block editor, this wouldn’t be possible

Re: Our New AI Website Builder

#70
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web We've given the AI the ability to scrape websites, so I'm not sure that holds.

Scrapes are cached, it is too expensive and too long to do them on-demand based on a live query. Lots of sites change designs frequently and don't output semantic code in the html source either. And good luck getting the customer to prompt correctly for things like background images, gradients, carousels, animations and page transitions.

We are actually solving this problem by building the Huggingface Hub[0] for browser automations -automatically tested and updated around the clock, and a homegrown distributed automation framework [1] that can leverage your own browser, your community’s or your team’s up to millions of orchestrated browsers.

It’s not just for AI, we created a custom package format[2] for automations that can run in CLI as a one-off, a REST API server, an MCP server with a single command..

0: https://herd.garden/trails

1: https://herd.garden

2: https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations

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