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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it's something that must have been painful, all around.

Boards really don't like doing things like this, as it signals instability, and shareholders hate instability. That's why so many boards leave clearly non-optimal CEOs in place, so often.

This is not something that has been a focus of my attention, except when it was shoved into my face. I'm really too old for that kind of agita.

I do run a couple of WP sites. I'm considering switching a couple to static sites, (via a generator, or maybe LLM-generated static sites), but I need one of them to remain WP (for now), as that hosts my blog.

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My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.

I don't know how it's "completely solved" unless you can point me to an existing, complete solution. Providing a nice backend with a WYSIWYG editor and access control as well as varying level of customization is not a trivial problem for anyone, technical or non technical, and you can easily mess it up.

You only need a WYSIWYG if you're the one doing the actual writing. /s

You don't need a backend. You don't even need a static site generator. Just sit a non-technical person in front of Claude Code and tell them to tell the computer what they want (including what the content should say). For something as simple as a static site (that the user can themselves look at and read) there's nothing to mess up -- if something looks out of place, a non-technical user can just tell the computer that and it will fix it. "Computer, add a page to the blog with this content: <pasted text>" -- "Computer, the banner looks weird on phones but not on desktop, please fix it."

My wife (no CS background, no programming experience, schooling in music and law) is about to submit her first several apps to the App Store. I don't think she has had to even look at a single line of code. Yes, they work.

You need to get out of your bubble. That's all I can say.

I ... need to get out of my evidence-based bubble in which I'm observing real non-technical users in the real world? This is not a discourse bubble. I'm not getting my talking points from other people. I'm drawing conclusions based on what capabilities I've observed the AI giving to non-technical users.

Just vibe code your own mini cms on top of your static site. Seriously though, I did this recently with mine and have had great results. It's not a Gutenberg WP experience, more like a decapCMS kind of thing.

There are quite a few CMSes that do static builds natively. If you hand one of those to Claude Code, you can get a more flexible and maintainable result more quickly. You can also point Claude Code to a CMS starter project in folder A And a vibe coded static site in folder B and pull them together.

That being said... if you're the sole author of your site, anything goes and yeah, you probably don't need a proper CMS. I certainly built my own share of 100-line Perl static site builders back in the day.

It's easier to generate a static site using a WP hidden behind a VPN than building a mini cms on top of a static site.

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