Evolving Webflow for the Agentic Web | Hacker News Reader

Evolving Webflow for the Agentic Web

webflow.com

50 pointsrocketpastsix28 comments

What a ghoulish title for a layoff announcement.

I've known Webflow for a while as a business, and even pitched it to large companies like Maersk and Nielsen as a Wordpress alternative. I was on the sales side so it always seemed like a great cloud option that was in the territory of Squarespace but far more control for enterprise development. However...

I recently put my old frontend hat on and opted for Framer to build a new website, seeing if I could sketch it out in GPT + Claude then had it give me instructions to translate to a modern cloud CMS.

While I find Framer, Webflow, etc, significantly more aligned to my brain than say Squarespace or Wix, overall, they are incredibly frustrating and full of tedious little proprietary quirks that drive me goddam insane. You need to learn the interface but still also need an understanding of how breakpoints and CSS positioning work among other things.

The preview website artifact that Claude Design spat out was pretty dang good and was written in simple vanilla semantic HTML/CSS with no dependency overhead. Its a little rough around the edges and clumsy on details but an appropriate starting point for both beginners and enterprise.

A company like webflow has to be looking at this and sweating bullets. Wish the initial reaction to AI-driven threats these days wasn't to gut the company in favor of agents. Yes Claude Code + Claude Design are awesome but none of these products are perfect and they all still have a place to coexist within the market

Wix is also doing layoffs:

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8881760/wix-plans-major-layof...

Never used either, but these are similar “no code” platforms, right?

Yes, but webflow is far more featured and robust than Wix.

Misleading headline. This is layoffs, not a redesign.

Well, to be fair, they didn't say "redesign" anywhere, and Webflow is the name of the company, so I don't find it too strange that the "evolution" of a company involves layoffs. Maybe I'm just too jaded to these "An update on ..." announcements, but this really didn't strike me as bad. At the very least, they announced the layoffs in the very first paragraph, rather than beating around the bush.

>> We’re at an inflection point, both as a company and as an industry. The way businesses build for the web is changing fast. AI is rewriting the rules for how marketing teams create, test, and optimize digital experiences. And the companies that move decisively through moments like this are the ones that come out ahead.

I work in exactly this field and I make relevant revenue. I absolutely do not think this is in any way true nor proven by actual needs. In fact this is not even happening as described. Companies like webflow are following blindly an empty promise with the hope at some point it becomes self-fulfilling, disregarding their people and sacrificing any morals on the altar of growth for growth’s sake and investors pressure. All this to say, more concisely: fuck Webflow as well.

> "...we made the difficult decision to restructure Webflow’s team and operating model. As a result, many of our Webflow teammates are leaving the company today."

Leaving implies agency. You've fired these people. Using a euphemism that implies they had a choice in this matter is disingenuous and not "owning this decision"

"Some of our employees are taking a forced voluntary separation"

Maybe it's just me, but I hate the word "agentic" so much.

> As a result, many of our Webflow teammates are leaving the company today

What a disgusting way to phrase that.

Why? How would you as a leader would announce this in a way that better reduces bad feelings?

Alternatively, can you explain why you believe this statement reduces bad feelings? Put yourself in the shoes of those who have been laid off.

Defend your position, I’m tired of, and will not play defense.

Well, first of all, stop lying. These people aren't leaving the company. They were fired. They were removed. Leaving sounds voluntary.

Then, this might be a cultural thing, but I don't want niceties and flowery language. Give it to me straight. It's not "we're rebuilding". We're not rebuilding anything. We're broke. If you're broke just say that.

> How would you as a leader would announce this in a way that better reduces bad feelings?

Step 1, stop using AI as an excuse?

Step 2, don't use "leaving the company" as a euphemism for "getting laid off", as the former implies employee agency and choice they don't actually have.

The entire post is a green-beige sludge of corpspeak, euphemisms, and AI slop. Who fucking talks like this anyway?

Direct and to the point. This is the opposite of that.

That's on me; I set the bar too low. When I asked "How", I was hoping for someone to literally write up an alternative and better way of phrasing this, which would still work as part of a corporate press release.

I couldnt get through the corpo-speak and AI slop

But I am a webflow customer looking at ripping it out of our stack and just having it maintained by our team with alternative tools, powered by Claude/Codex.

I planned to follow some flavor of this -https://x.com/anitakirkovska/status/2053941736049967285?s=20

We currently pay almost $5k/year for hosting/licenses and its just not feeling worth it.

(disclaimer - still believe Webflow is 10x Wordpress!)

Wordpress + AI tho?

Wordpress is an incredible dumpster fire with Matt at the helm, no way

It is open source. Just clone and ignore drama.

I'd love the various fired people this year to form a new huge company.

the amount of "restructuring" Webflow has gone through is wild

> We’re going to lead by example. Our own marketing team will be among the first proof points for what a modern marketing organization can look like when it is paired with AI agents in its day-to-day work.

Interesting that it's not the development team that gets to start with using AI agents (unless they are already?), but instead the marketing team. I guess long-term quality matters less there, you just want something OK fast, then LLMs actually makes a lot of sense, it is basically what we've ended up calling "slop" anyways, and marketing seems like a natural fit.

Interesting contrast compared to "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit" from the other HN submission right now, as that one claims mostly software engineers are using agents, meanwhile Webflow starts with the marketing team, I'm guessing they see it as obvious somehow.

> As a result, many of our Webflow teammates are leaving the company today.

Translation: Webflow has achieved AGI internally.

One more iteration, I swear.

tl;dr

We've raised a lot of money and VC's are pushing for exit. It's now or never. Rebrand, slap on agentic AI and pray to google gods for a quick buyout.

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