I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to cloudflare or github pages. These sites cost 0 eur to run, and they always score better in all benchmarks compared to sites that are built on top of a separate CMS server.
I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not need it.
A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the future of platforms like WP.
I’m confused. Static sites are the opposite of the target market for CMS. Even assuming consistent behavior from an LLM that never makes mistakes, how does your system handle access control, or multiple users submitting, reviewing, and publishing content to the site simultaneously?
What do you use to edit texts on a dashboard or cms?
My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI.
Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli.
Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute.
Got an hosted email form with astro action.
The only thing left is integrating a CMS. I was thinking of keystatic but it’s not compatible with Astro 6 yet. That’s the issue with vibe coding a stack you don’t know as much, without realizing it picked a version of astro that was so new that some tools didnt quite integrate with it yet.
For some personal projects in the past I have used google sheets and cloudflare workers, I guess it could be called CMS, but it was quite restricted of course.
This project has a "shared" backend for the content management and its completely self built. Because there are many clients who use it to edit things its feasible to pay for the hosting.
For a solo project, id be quite interested if someone would build a native editor that can be just hooked with git, so it would make it possible to run the site serverless. Maybe one already exists. "IDE" for static websites.
I built the same thing and then just realized that I built a marketing funnel for Cloudflare lol. It's why Cloudflare is trying a bunch of different approaches to the same thing, they're the only ones that actually benefit from it because you can't actually build a business off hosting millions of sites on cf pages, it's a loss leader for them to convert you to a paid product if you end up one day getting a lot of traffic
Hosting a static site isn't free, they just don't charge you for it early on
NASA, White House, and which ever large organizations do not represent the most of the web.
When you have complexity, multiple non techincal users who need to update content, and frequent changes, a CMS is currently a very good solution. But thats just a small fraction of websites.
Most of websites are small, 1-2 person companies websites, non-profts, etc., that are basically business cards. Contact details, possibly a contact form, and few pictures. Thats it. There are likely at least hundred milloin websites like that, which are infrequently updated.
Majority of those sites are powered by WP and various site builders, which is far more complicated than what they need. There has not been good option for non-techincal users that makes it possible to make good looking and functional sites.
Also, please keep it civil. This is not Facebook. People can have different opinions.
Yes, I completely agree. The thing is, this kind of customer just doesn't want to bother themselves with the technical details, and has no frame of reference to understand or even care why Wordpress isn't actually a good fit for hosting their site.
They also usually don't want to self-serve. IMO this became abundantly clear once I saw who was using bolt.new and Lovable and what was being built. You'd think these would be perfect fits for non-technical business owners, but after talking to them more it turns out they just don't have the time or interest to spend hours on building some little marketing site, and want it to be someone else's responsibility. Conversely, I would never build something with Framer and have no interesting in allowing some fly-by-night agency hold my site hostage, but they do a lot better at actually delivering value to end users without making them spend their time on tech stuff they don't care about.
Conversely, the kind of person spending hours building a site on Lovable for some SaaS product nobody will ever use has an abundance of time and doesn't really want to pay for anything. Most of the time they won't even put their own name on the site lol. You just don't want to deal with that kind of person IMO. Cloudflare and Github allow it because there's a small chance that a small portion of that kind of person ends up actually making something valuable, and because they have a different cost structure due to their affiliations with massive infrastructure holders.
I got very, very close to launching a vertical static site hosting product a few months ago but eventually realized this was kind of a market for lemons. Our own site is on a Lovable-like platform we built that uses our own svelte-baesd FOSS static site generator called Statue. But in using it to try to make some visualization on our own site, and vibe-debug stuff like a non-technical customer would (this thing on this page is broken in this way) I realized that this wouldn't actually feel like magic to someone who values their time, or isn't getting paid a salary to be a web developer and doesn't understand/care that it's still quite labor-intensive to do this.
IMO the real money is in actually being willing to take accountability/responsibility for building someone's site, and building real tooling around it that works for non-developers AND developers, which is what we're building towards now. It's historically been treated as a kind of low-prestige/uninteresting/unscalable business doing agency web stuff, but if you can figure out how to make it scalable and give people beautiful websites, and not make people who value their time wade through slop, there's immense opportunity.
What is always astounding to me is that people talk as if caching isn't a thing. It could hardly be easier to cache the html output from wordpress at either the webserver or CDN level, and it will perform just the same as any "static site" (of course, images, css etc will dictate how it performs once the browser receives the cached html)
With a static site you know the output can be cached indefinitely and only invalidated by a new deploy.
With a server rendered site you can only recreate that by tracking ever piece of data a page is dependent on, tracking data changes, and invalidating any page a data change breaks.
No one does that though, so you may go for SWR or a short-ish cache window so changes take some set of minutes to roll out, looking like the delay in waiting for a static site to rebuild.
I'd never pick between static and server rendered based on caching. Factors like the size of the site, frequency of content updates, and technical skill of content authors (I've never found a git-based CMS I'd ask someone totally nontechnical to use).
You could do this with AI for at least the past decade. We saw lots of companies & frameworks spring up that targeted and did the ahrd work pushing this approach. That feels like the big change, with "using AI" to be an incremental gain here.
>Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that.
So? There's always somebody who needs this or that outlier shit. If all that shit combined is still a small niche, we can just ignore it. And it is.
>There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.
And there reason is not because it has some obscure plugins for features few care about, but about the maturity of the core offering. They're not having any exotic features or have some random niche plugin. And even if they did, they're larger than 99% of websites, so we can ignore their special needs when talking about what MOST need.
I agree. Now we have the ability to have agents reason over our notes, it's more important for them to be in plain text. It was a big part of the reason I developed the AS Notes extension for managing documentation and blogs in VS Code / Markdown (https://www.asnotes.io)
Ditto. Almost all of my internal tools are built in the same fashion and deployed on cloudflare itself.
It is so much liberating to have no overload of CMS and the bloated code they come with.
The limits in the max subscriptions are more generous and power users are generating loss.
I'm rather certain, though cannot prove it, that buying the same tokens would cost at least 10x more if bought from API. Anecdotally, my cursor team usage was getting to around 700$ / month. After switching to claude code max, I have so far only once hit the 3h limit window on the 100$ sub.
What Im thinking is that Anthropic is making loss with users who use it a lot, but there are a lot of users who pay for max, but don't actually use it.
With the recent improvements and increase of popularity in projects like OpenClaw, the number of users that are generating loss has probably massively increased.
I've spent $17.64 on on-demand usage in cursor with an estimated API cost of $350, mostly using Claude Opus 4.5. Some of this is skewed since subagents use a cheaper model, but even with subagents, the costs are 10x off the public API costs. Either the enterprise on-demand usage gets subsidized, API costs are 10x higher, or cursor is only billing their 10% surplus to cover their costs of indexing and such.
edit: My $40/month subscription used $662 worth of API credits.
oh, I figured out the costs for the enterprise plan. It's $0.04 per request, I'm not charged per token at all. The billing is completely different for enterprise users than regular users.
This exactly. I think this is why Anthropic simply don’t want 3rd party businesses to max out the subscription plans by sharing them across their own clients.
A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer. If we're assuming that we only know retrospectively whether the writing is important then the best course of action would be for people to write as a hobby and make choices that are likely (rather than unlikely) to lead to a comfortable life. Particularly in this current era where we might suspect that writing and publishing a book is getting much easier thanks to technology.
> A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer.
Sometimes artists suffer, but it's mostly a legend at this point. Plenty of great artists have perfectly fine lives. Look at like, any modern fantasy or sci fi author.
Are you arguing that most good writers from history were poor? This is after all the only "horrible experience" a subsidy would alleviate. I don't think that's actually supported by evidence, most great writers I can think of were relatively extremely sheltered (although they often were sensitive to the horrible experiences of others)
I think the argument is a) most writers have to do a lot of writing to achieve writing consumable/appreciated but sufficient to be considered successful, b) most great writers had to go through some shit in life to incorporate that in their writing to make it interesting in order to be successful.
This is not my experience any longer. With properly set feedback loop and frameworks documentation it does not seem to matter much if they are working with completely novel stuff or not. Of course, when that is not available they hallucinate, but who anymore does that even? Anyone can see that LLMs are just glorified auto-complete machines, so you really have to put a lot of work in the enviroment they operate and quick feedback loops. (Just like with 90% of developers made of flesh...)
I've came across llms.txt files in few services. I don't know how the agents.md compares to the llms.txt files, but I guess they could pretty much have the same content. See more also here https://llmstxt.org/
Anyhow, I have made few interesting observations, that might be true for the agents.md also:
Agents have trouble with these large documents, and they seem to miss many relevant nuances. However, its rather easy to point them to the right direction when all relevant information is in one file.
Another thing is that I personally prefer this style of documentation. I can just ctrl+f and find relevant information, rather than using some built in search and trying to read through documents. I feel that the UX of one large .txt file is better than the documentation scattered between multiple pages using some pretty documentation engine.
Tokyo might not be the best example. Shanghai, Peking, Moscow, as per my experience, there is a risk of getting stuck for 2+ hours with car. Even if it was faster sometimes by car, there is a risk of getting completely stuck.
I feel that it is a commom thing. You just have to "keep an eye on it". There are several failure modes with Claude. Maybe the most annoying is that it often uses kind of defensive programming, so it is harder to detect that there is a fatal mistake somewhere. It can hide those really well. And it loves to fix linter issues with any type in typescript.
Im using it regardless. Ive just learnt to deal with these and keep an eye on them. When it creates a duplicate interface I roll back to earlier prompt and be more explicit that this type already exists.
I try to not argue whether something it does is wrong or right. There is not point. I will simply rollback and try with another prompt. Claude is not a human.
Thank you for the hard work in this space! I think it is really important that there is a proper open source solution available.
I just found OptaPlanner and subsequently TimeFold few months ago, as I was searching for a solution for my wife's veterinary clinics employee scheduling problem. The problem is not big enough for anyone to pay for the solution, but big enough to cause stress for whom ever is dealing with manually doings the shifts.
It was interesting that there were a lot of online SaaS providers that claim to solve the problem but they just simply are not configurable for all kinds of constraints of a real workplace.
Unfortunately I also feel partially same with TimeFold, because designing those constraints really requires changing the way of thinking of many problems. While the engine is capable of doing what ever, there is a steep learning curve to do it.
So while the article mentions documentation, I would say that the documentation is far from sufficient for wide adaption.
Personally, I would have really needed documentation about a mental model of thinking about the problem, and then a ton of examples how to solve real employee scheduling problems. Problem written in a format which the business people use and then translated into an elegant constraint rule explained step by step.
I had to invest more than 40 hours to get a working MVP that solves real problems, not just those that are already coded in the example code. Most people are not willing to do that.
What I'm trying to say is that to making planner software popular, it should be also usable for trivial projects. I understand that it's hard to focus on everything, but just providing more information about real use cases and how they were solved and how to think about the design problems would make the market bigger, and bring you a lot more customers in the long run.
I just wonder how I might contribute to improve the documentation. I probably don't have deep enough understanding of the correct solution, but I will look into it.
Hi Tappio, read you loud and clear. We are actively looking into making it easier for all people to solve their planning problems. Our goal is to "free the world from wasteful scheduling" and we more than realize we can't do that alone. ;)
I scheduled large one-day events where attendees were recorded performing voiceover several times during the day. As many as 350 individual recordings throughout the day, each with an acting coach, studio engineer, studio room setup, custom sets of scripts, and a demographically optimized group of attendees that would go through the day together. Because each attendees journey through the day was (somewhat) customizable by them, each new attendee would change the schedule of some other attendees. So we would have to wait until ~80% of the tickets had been purchased to begin scheduling, each new attendee was progressively harder to schedule (making it hard to keep selling tickets), and we had to also be flexible with the support staff, engineers and coaches.
I've never heard that hearing. I've been living in multiple houses heated primarily with a heat pump in the winter during average temperature of minus 10 Celsius, ranging from 0 to -30.
My current garage has radiators installed but I've never used them as the heat pump is just fine.
I guess they must build the houses or heat pumps differently where you live!
I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not need it.
A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the future of platforms like WP.
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