Our New AI Website Builder
wordpress.com
wordpress.com
Full dump of what was showing on my end here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/furnivall/aa95e8d9dc330f3...
For a moment I thought they added AI integration to the open source Gutenberg plugin.
While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.
I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com
(Submitted title was "WordPress launches new free AI website builder")
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 the role of invisible scaffolding, a dumb pipe. Considering how badly they botched the redesign into the block editor era, and the madness about WpEngine, they are struggling to shake investor worries.
Wordpress new AI: create your own website in minutes!
A car: Get to work in 30 minutes! (you still have to live and work in the right locations for that to be true, but you now also have deal with traffic)
I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add.
Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.
Maybe I'm seeing this the wrong way, and I'm forgetting truly non-technical folks exist, and this is for the people who would otherwise be forcing their nephew to help them make a basic website, and that's the role the LLM is playing here, as a conversational interface. I think the marketing copy for this announcement is total bullshit, then (plastering "AI" all over the announcement is more for marketers than customers), but I can at least see that use case.
I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.
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 the eyes of the customer", 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.
We've given the AI the ability to scrape websites, so I'm not sure that holds.
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..
But in its current state, it seemed pretty broken to me. I just wanted it to add text to the top of the front page, and it kept saying "I couldn’t find the block you mentioned. Describe where it is on the page or select it and try again." no matter how many different ways I attempted to describe it.
Even if that were true (which I heavily contest), people might like the idea of "I want the sidebar nav moved to the right side", not opening up template.css and template.html and figuring out which html/css they need to change.
The LLM is the thing that lets us do the fun part.
But let me disabuse you of the claim that technical people enjoy fiddling with html/css/design especially on their Wordpress website when they just want to make some changes, and somehow nontechnical people are the only ones who might have to circumvent all that fun-having by letting an LLM do it for them.
It's like saying that you don't see how LLMs could be useful to software developers because don't they enjoy writing code? Aside from the answer being no, most code isn't fun to write, you're forgetting the goal day to day is to get something done, not dick around with your Wordpress theme or software Jira tickets because it's fun.
It may well be your life goal.
I did this recently for a friend and 1000% no. It wasn't easy to find a good template or edit it, and things we tried (including various builders) were a massive pain in the arse.
I asked sonnet for a site and had it right in a few minutes. I asked for changes and they just worked. It wasn't a complex site but it was drastically easier, quicker and more fun than dealing with the nuts and bolts of it all.
> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.
Absolutely not.
Choosing customisation? Sure!
Making the customisations? Nope. I'm sure some do, but I and many others I think just want a thing.
Just asking for some changes and seeing them was great.
One of the drawbacks of all frontier models (with Sonnet being the most extreme) for web dev is their strong preference for React in any kind of situation, even for Wordpress-blog equivalents where it makes no sense.
Conflating the two is like mistaking GitHub for Git.
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 Automattic developers saying "this would be easy to fix upstream but we're not allow to fix anything in WordPress right now." It's pathetic and actively harming his own business.
I wish this all had happened before Full Site Editing was put into .org.
No big deal on splitting the community in half? Matt will not go and you will have half the people supporting him, half forking the project. Actually less than half on each side, when you count in the people that will completely leave the ecosystem...
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 tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™
We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.
Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Literally like a dead whale, still going to support an ecosystem for some period of time. Though, it's peak is behind us and the unwinding was accelerated immeasurably.
They aren't acquiring new customers faster than they are losing existing customers. Squarespace and similar products are to eating it's proverbial lunch among a large portion of their audience (small to medium businesses who just want a website that is easy to update).
If some of the biggest hosters forked wordpress and started adding features that their customers are asking for, that wordpress the organization were ignoring or slow to produce, I think it would be a good thing. Providing wordpress the org with some motivation to compete.
It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.
After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?
I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.
https://www.theverge.com/news/642187/automattic-wordpress-la...