Sites in ChatGPT
chatgpt.com
chatgpt.com
For example, here's a game where you are a mouse hunting for cheese in higher dimensional mazes: https://manifold-six-axis-escape.nathan338932.chatgpt.site/
Idea came to me while at a concert, was ready to play that same night.
Maybe I'll do that and post to HN later, didn't expect this much response!
Otherwise I'd have to introduce some kind of dimension picker. Maybe a fun hardmode.
Did the LLM explain its reasoning for how it is showing the higher dimensions? Or perhaps this is a standard way of attempting to display higher dimensional space?
The fact is, most people aren't builders and never will be. Building software is about formalizing and automating processes, and 95% of folks aren't interested in putting even the most basic effort into improving their business by approching it at a strategic level. Too focused on keeping the lights on and/or more interested in field operations.
For another example look at the many businesses using @gmail addresses to run their business while Google Workplace has streamlined custom domains for a while.
So in practice, ChatGPT Sites will mainly enable software agencies to build websites and offload maintenance to the customer : just manage it from your ChatGPT account. The equivalent of Bring your own cloud for Mom and Pop businesses, and other small companies. Not even sure ChatGPT Sites will create meaningful downward pressure on agency rates.
Lesson learned the hard way.
Lots.
I’m a pretty sophisticated user (both a designer and software engineer) and I’ve ragequit several of these tools before.
I’m convinced that’s the only reason Wordpress is still popular. The administrative experience was atrocious. Actually, that is an understatement.
Whats going to happen is a) easier to shop around for agencies b) expectations of agencies to go up c) deflation etc etc.
The issue with the Wordpress and Wix is that the site stay polished for approximately 1 second after it has been initially published. In 6mo~1yr it's unmaintainable pile of dogshit that is easier to redo from scratch.
But no.. lol. This place has limited deep thinker's who understand why humans prefer what they do.
Is it possible to export site to own domain?
https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/sites?surface=web#connect-a-c...
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001339-creating-and-us...
if i need something with personal data, i let the build process encrypt it and js to decrypt it.
If i need save/load/state i use local storage + json import/export.
Slightly ignorant how frugile i'm doing this tbh $4 is not a lot.
Soon it will connect to Ads and it will runs for it as well.
Honestly since Opus 5.5, Opus is my interface for 95% off my work. I don’t open emails anymore i let it summarize draft and handle most of the work and I only talk to Claude and not read/write the emails myself.
I also barely go in analytics dashboards anymore, Most I do is creating artifacts to explain if text is not enough for me to understand.
I’m going to bed. I have analytics running for every cancellation on my software to see what goes on. I have a/b tests running that are getting interpreted automatically. My bugs are getting fixed automatically.
I can monitor my competitors and copy every feature a/b test resolution they’ve done instantly for (3$ of my budget)
I’m an early adaptor of the latest models. The labs will have better tools already, but it really feels like a breaking point. What’s normal for me today is normal for more tomorrow and the friction has never been lower...
Interesting..
Unless you use a zero data retention inferencer?
And also, what’s your story here? That they don’t delete the data they agree to delete, and stash it secretly somewhere? And that they have programs that are mire secretive tan NSA’s inside that secretly finetunes algorithms on such data?
They would expose themselves to lawsuits that would crush their companies, even with such absurd valuations? And possibly risking jail time of the top people? GDPR offences in certain countries are punishable by up to two years in prison. And with a such blatant violation at least in EU the maximum sentences would most likely be given.
AI is this strange double-threat for folks in software development: attacking both the demand and supply at the same time.
Me, I don't think they are super eager to be a hosting platform even though this is a very logical extension for them. I think they're hoping this is a catalyst to make login with OpenAI as ubiquitous as login with Google.
Why would Walmart want to let Amazon hold their business hostage, tell them all their secrets - literally pay to hand it over to them - and generate profits that would surely be re-invested in competing against them in retail? Even if AWS handled Walmart's account in 100% good faith and helped Walmart tremendously, they would still ultimately be paying to make themselves less competitive in a world where their single competitive edge (low-margin retail) would be eroded.
Would the consumer - or really anybody that likes having cheap, widely available products they don't personally make for themselves - ultimately benefit in a world where Walmart's only choice is AWS (startup-branding) and AWS(ea-branding) and AWS(IBM branding) and AWS(Microsoft-branding, if they were also evil chinese communists who maybe trained on the traces they paid for)?
better hope you're not walmart
Sorry if I'm reading your comment the wrong way but it seems like this is the interpretation that many people would have (ha!), if you meant it more ambiguously then I apologize. I'd agree in the case where this is a neutral outcome where some will use it to delude themselves, many will use it in a way that doesn't stray too far from the norm and others will use it to great effect to improve their understanding.
1. Software is fast and UI is instant, things happen instantly
2. UI is instant and software is slow - UI will lag
3. UI is animated with transitions and sofware is slow - people are initially happy, but it wears off in weeks
4. Software gets optimized, now UI animations take longer than getting the underlying data
5. The logical endpoint. Software is fast. UI needs to be instant Remove all animation and let UI render instantly; This is what most users actually prefer.
The parallel with LLM websites is direct imo. We're now getting these fancy websites, but once the magic wears off, everyone will go back to the 'text and links on page' style.
I don’t think this is the case in general, well done animations are nice.
What if you could just hover a link and all the important data would just appear?
What if you started typing a command in console, and the execution results would appear speculatively as soon as you hit the key?
Some programs do this to some limited degree, but besides the humble textbox and outside videogames, instant interactivity is seldom seen.
SUBSTANCE.
That's all that matters.
It'll be something else - 'agents' paradigm will evolve and look nothing like it does today. After OAI etc crash and burn that is.
I’m trying to do the same. Could you give me some tips on what works for you?
Also, just inside Google Ads itself they stuck Gemini which tries to get you to spend your life savings on ramping up your campaigns. If you use Gemini externally it tells you Google is trying to scam you :p
Agree on many other points, but personally, I find receiving completely AI-written emails somewhat offensive. (Personal emails, at least; for advertising slop or adjacent things I find them about equal to baseline, which is a low bar though.)
Have you received any feedback (positive or negative) on this?
I suppose once the majority of recipients also start sending every received email through an agent summarizer, it's a moot point anyway...
It’s definitely better than me in writing support emails!
>> I can monitor my competitors and copy every feature a/b test resolution they’ve done instantly for (3$ of my budget)
yeah, everyone can.
>> I’m an early adaptor of the latest models.
latest models become default one as soon as they are released. so everyone is an early adopter now.
Or is it because he uses Claude that something changes?
Notice that commodification didn't eliminate the demand for custom made or designer clothing. It stayed a luxury and demand and variety even increased. Commodification opens up a range of markets as well besides just the cheapest market you get a whole spectrum of quality, cost and niche markets that weren't possible when supply was constrained. The same thing will happen with software. If you want to make artisanal, hand made to order apps and websites then there will be plenty of people that want that but now everyone will be able to afford their own good enough app or website without investing a huge amount of time or money to build it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302450
You are a bot that just says whatever is convenient for you to get upvotes in a thread.
> I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval.
> I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night.
Have it watch the latest Netflix/HBO, summarize so you know what happened! It will tell you which ones you enjoyed, and which streaming to pay for.
From experience my pendulum might overswing sometimes. Thank you for the reminder.
I feel sorry for the people receiving correspondence from you who aren't even granted the privilege of a human thinking about the response they give.
I pity the people on the other side.
What they might not realise is that stuff/services like these (ChatGPT Sites) are probably not much of a moat either in a world where majority of population has access to increasingly better models capable of building competitors in days if not hours. Even if they restrict usage of their models when it comes to creating competitor services there will always be other models that you can use to build competitor.
What is happening is that their products are putting people out of work but at the same time they are also enabling anyone to easily build competitors to their own products and are thus putting their own services “out of work”. They are essentially eating their own tail. Ouroboros. Is noone seeing that?
The only truly lasting moat might be hardware/compute. At least for now.
If you ask something like "please make a little website for me and my friends to plan our shopping lists on", I would expect the result to be:
"Here you go: https://shopping-lister.chatgpt.com/"
Unfortunately right now most AI models get into the weeds of asking the user to sign up to netlify or firebase or buying a domain etc - none of which most users are interested in doing.
Disclaimer: I work on Sites
Vibe coding full circle
And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
It is likely better in some ways and worse in others...and few of hte people involved will have the understanding to tell the difference.
I think it’ll just raise the automation bar that much higher. In other words, it will be good enough for 90% of yesterday’s use-cases. But tomorrow’s? I’m bearish.
I imagine the amount of onerous bureaucracy when interacting with any entity is going to explode if they expect you to do it in an automated fashion, for both private companies and the government. Especially as roles are cut because they can be “automated”. Except only 80% of the workload can be reliably automated, the other 20% requires a long tail of effort.
Once the app gets a bit more complex, it won't be that much different to any more traditionally vibe coded application (code, git/pr, test, deploy, ops). It only removes the barrier to get started, but doesn't solve any of the real problems. Problems like AI slop, code rot, bad architecture, security issues, data loss/breach because of bad code, and so on.
An average customer of mine hasn't got the slightest interest in dealing with this stuff.
Sure, they show me llm generated prototypes these days of how they envision a certain feature, ui and ux wise.
But that's great, because even with AI I save time iterating with them.
But for the actual programming and maintenance they still come to me.
Why? Because THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN IT!
I'm not saying an agent couldn't make sure it's good and it works, but there are a lot of aspects to that: It's compliant, it's secure, the right data is stored, the right compromises are made for sometimes mutually exclusive business priorities, UX is decent, it's responsive, it scales, hosting is economical, it has the right tests, monitoring for the right risks, and so on and so forth. A lot of devil in the details, and the context required to know what to focus on is rather vast.
If anything, I see this work getting harder, since the discipline around minimal scope is getting weaker, leading to a complexity explosion affecting all of these aspects.
It usually comes down to how successful a business is. Just starting out with little to no funding? They'll want to dabble themselves. But if there's money, it can and will be exchanged for time. Easier prototypes and MVPs means faster business model validation, which means higher willingness to invest. I do see this happening.
Will we always need to know programming languages for doing this? Maybe not, but it doesn't matter. If you make a machine do stuff for a living, you're a programmer. How exactly you do it doesn't affect that in my mind.
That and you need to be able to even ask the right questions.
These are people that have NO IDEA about how computers or their software works.
Sure they can let it be explained by an LLM but unless they thoroughly study these things, they simply can't know which questions to ask.
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
* Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly.
Also I dont get the inhouse argument, you dont really save anything. So instead of paying X to SaaS, you now propose to pay X to anthropic instead AND maintain said SaaS... what? how is that better, that just shifted the cost to another company and you got the burden of maintenance and responsibility.
The SaaS to inhouse argument is just something I've heard that came to mind when reading this thread.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and the legal requirements and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy (something like 150+ government forms/applications). For most simple to medium corporate development work it’s basically over.
I just don't see how we keep going like this without layoffs. The company cannot responsibly continue paying for this many engineers, when half, or less, could do the same job.
I have been the lone developer on a project for quite some time and was already feeling that way. Yet, recently found out that a second is being added to the team and a third is to come. I guess I'll enjoy what is effectively a paid vacation before it all comes crumbling down.
Like, why is it all still so buggy? Why does no website seem to consider 96 PPI displays in its design? Why don't we have ostensibly useful features like undo trees everywhere? Why is everything still a RAM hog? Why does the proportion of websites that pay no heed to accessibility seem to be going up rather than down?
I'm told we're living in the future, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Lack of information. When you are on the building side you become blind to its faults. Consumers almost never tell you what isn't good about it.
> why is it all still so buggy?
Also lack of information. I haven't seen any bugs in years in the things I've worked on. LLMs have closed every last obvious testing gap, squashing any outstanding bugs there. That's not to say it is all bug-free now, but what bugs users may be experiencing aren't being reported.
AI is good at building software, but it is still not good at consuming software like actual consumers do.
Flawless software isn't the goal, ever. Feature development is almost always the primary goal, and fixing bugs and performance issues is only done if the bug is bad enough.
Like the old quip that a cup of coffee lets you do stupid things faster.
I live in the future when it comes to my hobby of music making. I make my own little software tools that I did not have the ability to make 2 years ago. Little tools that are too specialized and specific for my obscure taste to have much wider economic value as tools in themselves.
Claude is also the greatest obscure book recommendation engine I have ever found so I have a lot more interesting books to read than in the past.
Outside of this, I basically live in 2019 but everything is more expensive.
I worry this is the future. It doesn't really feel much different other than things getting more and more expensive.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
Software engineering on one end is going to be more like finance or medicine where the cost of poor performance is actually higher than the risk that they wont be worth what you pay them (ie there isn’t any amount of pay where it’s worth it to hire them). Then on the other it’ll be like knowing how to use PowerPoint. All the new tech categories have too many bottlenecks and challenges beyond just producing code to consolidate like that.
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
We aren't, but the AI Labs no doubt are. They just can't release it right now because their bread and butter is still developers burning tokens, so there is still a business problem to solve.
That said, getting a frontier model self-improvement harness to work correctly end-to-end isn't trivial.
- People in other industries actually have specialist knowledge (this is something IT people forget)
- AI is coming for those jobs too
- and so are lots of other people, not just displaced techies but from any number of other industries.
Thinking about it in advance should include training yourself up for other sectors.
If AI is successful, it will be a very different world of jobhunting. If it’s unsuccessful there will still be job losses for a while because of overspending, and because of the wider economic issues.
Sorry, I switched senses in the middle of this.
Should have written either:
"because you should not assume you’re going to walk into another career (I am not suggesting that you are)"
or something like
"because you should assume you’re not going to walk into another career (I am not suggesting that you think you might)"
Need to write my posts less hurriedly.
It's also not clear to me that the level of success in the tech industry is truly being repeated anywhere else. There are industries where generative AI is actually a liability (the law, finance) and where it is increasingly viewed as repugnant (design, the arts, to some extent photography where deep learning noise reduction tools are OK but the culture is swinging hard against other generative uses).
I am also not convinced it is "objectively" successful in the tech industry, considering the extent to which most token pricing is subsidised and people's reluctance to demonstrate ROI even on subsidised/bundled tokens.
I'm not claiming it is unsuccessful. Just that I don't think the job apocalypse is here yet. Though this product (ChatGPT Sites) is very indicative of a coming tech job apocalypse in pure software services.
It's certainly at a level of success where people should start thinking about a "Go bag" on an employment level. Keep your CV up to date, work on gaps in non-tech skills, consider other qualifications.
Hopefully you've been living below your means and saving.
If I can't work as a computer scientist anymore (I am my own business since many years), I'll simply do something else.
I have many interests and "talents".
Maybe I can work as a gardener, or I help the farmers around, or I do some social work, or I work as a garbage man, or I ...
I am not worried in the slightest on a personal level.
Society might crumble though.
But then again, was it ever more than barbarism in disguise?
On the other hand, death of a livelihood in a social structure that doesn’t care about you.
We’ve always had pump-and-dump trash. The terrible stuff loses and the good stuff wins. I don’t see why that would change.
The companies that ditch the management structures of yore and successfully build better software faster with the new tools will come out on top. I don’t think these companies will replace ALL saas subscriptions with in-house solutions, because one huge benefit of paying someone else to hold that bag is liability and regulatory overhead.
Domains, auth, and databases are probably the stickiest software products of all time. I suspect it’s a combo of security concerns and the risk of eroding goodwill among developers (their most important customer base rn) if they move up the stack too quickly. Once you know that the goal is to become cloud vendors, train on/compete with their own customers, and own the entire software stack e2e it’s hard to really feel grateful that they’re dragging it out but planning on doing it anyway.
For those of us working in infra/SaaS outside these companies it’s pretty clear that the only viable path that doesn’t involve getting cannibalized is training your own agents/models. The new coding agent-infra-data business model is a path towards full commoditization and undifferentiated prompting in 3-4 vertically integrated walled gardens. If you ever start making real money on pure software infra they’ll just be able to eat you alive by implementing something similar, training on their own tools rather than yours, and integrating it into their stack (which all of your customers are on already).
Also, you should only ever use $20-200/mo subscriptions on work you want them to train against or you don’t mind automate yourself out of. Think a little bit about what you’re teaching them to do when you use their products, especially if they’re the primary interface you’re working in. People are going to start caring about this a lot when the AI companies feel safe enough to begin the “extinguish” phase of AI coding. Train your own models!
I do not see enough people discussing this and trying to position their businesses in a way to avoid destruction at the hands of the labs.
There’s a good chance that the next step after open weight models is something that makes it easier to post-train existing models on new workloads without running an entire pipeline just for yourself. Somebody has to actually build it though.
What can most even really do about it? Assuming they pull off what they're saying they will: it won't matter what you do, what vertical, what moat you think you have. It will be a concentration of capital and power we've never seen before, and frankly that's terrible for the world.
Currently what makes this too difficult for anybody but frontier labs is the lack of access to the full distribution of workloads/data they use to RL multiple separate envs/evals without regressing more than they advance in general capabilities. Because they are the primary buyers/builders of that stuff, they have no incentive or reason to allow anybody to replay or resample it but themselves. And it's all so very expensive to do in aggregate so there's not really demand for other product shapes except more openly available, collaborative/bundled RL that you could plug your specific workloads into (who the frontier labs would obviously not want to support with their business).
However, if someone were to build a collaborative rollout platform that you could use to train private workloads (ie create useful IP that doesn't just become profit for other labs/come from what they already can do), the upfront investment would be amortized over the very large number of potential buyers once it gets into the 5-8 figure range, who essentially have no other choice if they want to remain competitive in the technology industry.
Until openai/anthropic ipo the concentration of capital/spending and ndas/loss of employability is too concentrated for the best researchers to really do this without rocking the boat. And a lot of also-ran ai/saas have the same risk due to the lack of capitalized acquisition opportunities or AI vendors to partner with.
If the plan is ultimately to drive you out of business if you ever build anything profitable with their products, and monetize your knowledge without fairly rewarding or explaining their intent to do so, you might as well defect early and build what you inevitably would need anyway.
you could try to help build that!
Pessimistically, companies will ignore that and pick the cheapest solution and accept an unknown failure-rate that they assume will be tiny.
Optimistically, they will demand "the AI you just demo'ed, except fix whatever bug so that it never screws up." In that case, SaaS will not be about "training your own LLM model", but about investing in harnesses and rule-engines and GOFAI that constrain the actions of a not-necessarily-custom LLM which is acting as the consumer's UI or concierge. In other words.
Yesterday my dot made a web app to view 3D microscopy files
https://mucus-atlas-viewer.pazimzadeh.chatgpt.site/?sample=k...
I didn't even know about the sites feature
On top of it we added bacteria (green) and bacteria sized beads (red). On the bottom are colon lining cells (blue).
The inner mucus layer of the colon was generally thought to be impenetrable to bacteria, serving as a way to protect you from the trillions of bacteria in the gut.
It turns out that actually, it’s really easy for bacteria to swim through mucus by using flagella. We found some bacterial mutants that swim through mucus (the green ones). The red beads serve as a control marking the top of the mucus since they can’t get through the mucus.
Find this and other images in my paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11784811/
The real question is then - if they can get through the mucus at any time, why don’t they? And there are various theories about this - which I’m happy to elaborate on this you want. The basic idea is there is a risk whenever you cross the mucus (you get closer to the immune system) and mucus actually feeds and tames bacteria over time by providing them with various sugars and things like that. But if they get desperate/starve, then they will cross.
Mucus is still a mystery - there are substructures within mucus, take a look at this image for example:
https://mucus-atlas-viewer.pazimzadeh.chatgpt.site/?sample=f...
And here is a good paper too from my collaborator (who actually took these images) who discovered a sub-type of mucus and mucus-producing cells:
People curate their brands on socials. Having a website is not really the badge it once was, and the ability to generate them like this further reduces the social proof they used to provide.
This is the top of the funnel for most people building a tech product or marketing their business, so it’s very helpful if you intend to sell other services they might want to use down the line. (Cf Cloudflare except imagine if they also integrated ads into one of the most popular websites in the world)
While there are many enthusiasts out there, lots and lots of people couldn't care less about ChatGPT allows them to "buuld their own website". It's simply irrelevant to their life.
It's seriously mind-blowing that this is allowed and most people seem okay with it
Then the app economy gets going within ChatGPT
I don’t think it’s all bad though. The labs aren’t going to release anything that makes sense if you’re trying to be vendor independent. So, gateways, vendor agnostic sandboxes, harnesses, etc. That’s where business opportunities may be.
We have internal service like this at $day_job which has become the default “information” authoring and sharing platform for almost all staff.
Information is more likely to be shared on this tool than through Confluence or an MS Word/PP artifact because HTML docs are so expressive and all friction in writimg HTML documents has disappeared.
Current AI is NOT going to replace web devs or coders because it cannot tabula rasa make human sense. I suspect the reverse with a Jevons thingy happening
I'm increasingly finding my job is just making sure they don't go off the rails, and if they do it's a small effort of getting them back on track
But currently they can't manage a vending machine as good as human, so I doubt they have our centuries long planning ability
Also, planning over long scales is not something you should do if you do lean/agile. Premature optimization is a root of all evil ;)
Software is mostly in the last 5% of work
Wonder what domain they're going to pick next. I feel like many LLM-dependent businesses are going to get sherlocked by OpenAI and Anthropic.
hard out here hard for startups too
For whatever reason most of the sites are Arabic-language prototypes for things like plumbing companies. I'm not sure why - if those are solving a real problem, or whether someone is running a scam, or what.
I got tired of spinning up repos for basic pages, so made my own host last year - https://pageplane.app.
I think the SEO/AEO agencies are using them to seed content for clients.
Very clean site design though.
However, I change the models too often, so I didn't want to be locked in a specific platform.
That is why I built getonup. It is a way to quickly deploy static pages using Cloudflare Workers on your own domain.
Just point your agent to the getonup repository and ask it to setup on your Cloudflare account on a certain domain (like pages.vitorbaptista.com). It will configure it and setup Cloudflare Zero Trust to secure your site. Then you'll have a date-ordered index (so you can see every artifact you deployed), and you can deploy static sites.
It is still very simple, but it has already been extremely useful for myself my team. We often publish multiple pages per day.
Here are a couple examples:
* https://pages.vitorbaptista.com/s/your-model-your-domain/
* https://pages.vitorbaptista.com/s/fmqpbix8/
Free and open source. Available at https://github.com/vitorbaptista/getonup.
I’ve been using exe.dev to throw up micro sites. It has a built in web agent and first party mobile app agent. And any coding agent that can use “ssh” (all of them) can easily figure out how to drive it.
It also has a lot more developer and PaaS tools like GitHub integration.
RIP Heroku for imploding before the wave of vibe coding. We had the ability to “spin up a free app on the internet” before it was cool.
Sites has been one of the most valuable ships for us internally outside of general model releases imo. A few things that I think are incredibly underrated:
1. Plugin usage. I can build a site with some data vis and when someone else in the company logs in, it uses their access to evaluate those queries. The access model/BYO connection is really powerful.
2. Ephemeral sites. Setting up a site is so easy they can be ephemeral. I can set up a whole site for a presentation, or a complex form, or just a meme, and then never touch it again because it cost me basically none of my time.
3. Sites as plugins. Sites directly integrate with the plugin ecosystem in that a site itself can provide/be a plugin. Combine that with Sign in with Chat (byo subscription) and you can build some really cool experiences really easily. I've been working on a deck grader for Magic the Gathering the last few months for my own uses and now I could pretty trivially publish it as a site for others to use.
I don't see sites being abandoned any time soon :)
I then asked the next question. How can I automatically update the embedded JSON data. It gave two answers which I thought was weird. First, it said I could using a plugin to an MCP server. Second, it said I could use an API and when I asked for which API... it said there was an API available in ChatGPT Sites but no details. So I assume it can be done.
What I am thinking of is to use ChatGPT sites as a replacement for SharePoint. I can create self contained HTML charts and let employees view it within our enterprise instance of ChatGPT. The piece I am working on is how to automatically update the embedded data from our database.
We have a platform that enables building both and I still find UIs to be quite relevant. Especially if it's so easy to build like in this case because you can always throw together a visualization for something quickly and then never look at it again.
This looks really cool and because I'm in a tangential space I know how fun and useful it's been to build and host stuff on the web quickly.
We're geared towards fully-fledged (serverless) apps and agents for internal use only though, in case it's of interest to anyone: https://railcode.dev/
https://tidal-house-retreat.openai.chatgpt.site/
> Quiet cabins. A view of your own.
If models are commoditized and apps is where the grab is - I actually wouldn't mind a new email provider - GMail has not practically changed in the last 10 years I feel.
What if email existed on your laptop? Like was common before we moved to using web based applications? What if your local email client had a local database with a proper search API. That sounds a lot like what Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. did a quarter century ago. And still do if you still use those. Digging through a local database is a lot faster than dealing with relatively slow API access. LLMs are really good at doing stuff like that.
I run a small company, I've taken a sledge hammer to many of the SAAS tools we use in our business in the last years. We got rid of Hubspot, Slack, and many other tools we use for financial planning, etc. These got replaced with self hosted open source things or simple file based repositories in some cases. This has several huge advantages: 1) it's stupidly easy to get to the data for LLMs now 2) LLMs can administer these things for us 3) we saved quite a bit in licensing fees. 4) removing obstacles means LLMs can do complex things we used to do manually in dreadful SAAS tools.
I saw they're rolling out the done-to-death personal finance Mint-competitor and it's the exact same issue. At first it was interesting.. then when it comes to actually using it it's just not a fluid UX
Most websites are basically pointless, more like pretty “brochures”.
In the near future, useful structured information will be dumped to websites that are funded through micropayments using x402 protocol. Agents will be the ones making these purchase decisions, replacing revenue historically brought by ads. Will be interesting to see the death of programmatic advertising on the web.
My question ("Do you know what <details> and <summary> tags are?") doesn't appear to be here; but given the page functionality the answer seems to be no.
I get that this can be considered a "minor inconvenience", but I think it's pretty embarrassing on a page that's supposed to be marketing a website builder that's supposed to take care of knowing these things for you.
A year ago I spent maybe 12 hours on making a specific website with tons of functionality. It was a process, to say it mildly.
Tried Sites now, where I fed the design specs in a MD file, and it one-shotted the entire website in 30 mins. Adding functionality has been a breeze.
Only once, so far, has any update broken functionality - but it was promptly fixed.
I actually recently shared my own version of this concept, but self hosted. I'm optimistic that there can't be much lock-in from the big providers, but I think there's a large market to capture
Then I fed it to sites, and out came a working product.
Lo and behold the homepage bundle size is almost 10mb… Seems to mostly be caused by all of those images. I suggest you guys compress those ASAP.
>You can rename your ChatGPT-hosted URL or connect a custom domain you own. If you rename the hosted URL, the old address redirects to the new one.
This means that, even though it an early access, you are not locked in. Good on them.
Still, I suspect a lot of independent Web developers are sweating. It was already getting tough, but this is a coffin nail.
i make it for anything, i made one as a food guide for the UW chow down https://uw-chow-down-2026.corruptbytes.chatgpt.site/
I know that Vercel or something similar is quite close to that, but it's not that well integrated into MCP/Skills.
I mean, fair opinion to hold. I don't think AI solves most of the things that were preventing Samsung and HP from doing this so far. Which ones do you believe it solves?
Let alone network effects..
Disclaimer: I’m one of the people behind ShipStatic.
We have been working on a website builder https://dollarpage.club
We have worked really hard to let users create beautifully designed bespoke websites
Examples https://tuningdragons.com, https://numbermuseum.com
I haven't used ChatGPT in over a month. I bounce between Grok, Gemini & Claude. Is ChatGPT even worth it.
Grok can do things the other two can't, like read and fetch websites sometimes where Claude and Gemini cannot.
Gemini is just someone to feed javascript to when you want to save on Claude tokens.
I'm genuinely sad that what we learned with hard work and sweat, our craft, our identity, our soul; is now something you can buy. I've been in this profession for a long time and now I see people who have absolutely no fucking clue, but lots of money, and they buy all these agents and make things that work (way more broken, with absolutely shit quality), but they work and so they brag about their creations to me all day long, and man that makes me feel like a total loser.
I spent decades trying to master media theory, language design, computer graphics, compiler design, rewriting systems, mathematics, logic, build systems, graphs, data-flow systems, making GUI kits, layout systems, ... all to make a better system for thinking, and now the whole idea of thinking is outsourced (as altman says "sold as utility by the meter"). I need to become an addict or something and be wasted. This is not a life.
Are we looking at the same website? My eyes immediately go to the font and typeface styling and it registers immediately as AI generated. There’s a very distinct “AI” website aura that Claude and ChatGPT make that requires you to change a ton of the styling to make go away.
And I wish there was a SponsorBlock type, crowdsourced slop filter for Youtube.
I agree the second site is nice looking though.
That limitation doesn't exist with ChatGPT
They know the API price wars are a race to the bottom with little/no profit margins.
I hope you support UBI.
If they merely acted as APIs, even if that meant they would be “relegated” to the status of a utility then individuals and businesses would have faith and confidence that their use of AI wouldn’t be the very thing that puts them out of business. I think that would result in more innovation, faster adoption and deployment, and broader distribution of economic benefits.
As OpenAI and anthropic march towards an everything app they are smothering infant industries in the cradle and undermining their own users confidence that it’s safe to use their models.
I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
It's like trying to stop adoption of computers by cobbling together a union of human calculators. It's an economically nonsensical position that simply comes across as denialism. It's not even desirable.
You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?
Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.
The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?
The ultimate rug pull is one we should all look forward to - the polity saying, thank you for your hard work Mr. Altman, Mr. Musk, Mr Whoever but this technology belongs to everyone now. It would only be right given we all know they are trained on a corpus that really should be considered a public good.
If LLMs become the "everything app" they will have to either be nationalized by the state (UBI), or the billionaires are going to kill us all with their robot soldiers. The battle is not over technology, it's about ownership. The owners you represent are less desirable because their continued existence is further behind the most desirable end state, and they themselves are only desirable if you assume only the worst possible futures will come to pass. I believe if UBI is progressively scaled enough over the years enough billionaires will be satisfied to refrain from mass homicide, as has happened before when wealth generating technologies essentially became state utilities.
Good luck in your efforts. It's always possible my model of the world is incorrect. A meaningfully informative rejoinder in that respect would be welcome.
I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.
Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.
For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.
I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.
Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.
Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?
Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.
I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.
Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.
There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.
I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.
I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.
Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.
You say:
> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.
But also say:
> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?
I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.
Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.
I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.
This is rather just another mechanism to control people - by creating a dependency from entity which is providing this kind of support.
Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?
UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.
I'm surprised there's not a bigger push into better and useful memory, since that would result in actual lock-in.
They have dots, they had Sora, so many other things that take away attention from just having the best model. There are already a bazillion ways to do this. Sure, the integration's nice, but it's just not needed.
Returned to Claude as my main driver after many months of Codex and my frustration index is in much, much better place. I can't recommend Codex/GPT to anyone, not just normies. It does make for a really nice reviewer though.
Which means non-technical ChatGPT users are a bit bewildered as to how to pick.
This makes that easy; I suspect normies will fucking love it. My boss will.
I think programmers make the mistake of thinking generative AI is for us, when it is much more ominously about us.
Newsflash: a company that plans to be the most valuable business on earth and has a desperate need for revenue is not going to stay out of anyone’s lane if there is money to be found in it. If you can make an AI wrapper, so can they.
This actually looks like it has meaningful potential, and given how easily they could train it to connect to a whole bunch of off-the-shelf APIs running in data centres they control, looks like a little glimpse of the future, and of the kind of power the industry has gleefully handed to the crypto-for-your-eyeball-scans guy.
Cloud AI has been the face-eating leopard of the tech industry for the last three years. This is them just starting to chew. How long before they tweak it to generate intranet apps, mini stores, specific AI wrappers? Why wouldn’t a firm that has so much influence over data centre rollout, RAM and processor prices simply directly start using their code generation tools and data centres to build and run the work product?
Maybe some of the big firms who have been helping train ChatGPT to eat their lunch will now wake up to the need for open weights.
The frontier companies are scrutinized heavily for their trillion dollar valuations all without a clear mass-consumer use-case. They're trying stuff.
They are trying to build an ecosystem that can capture the value of AI, whereas LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity.
Where is the moat? How can they convert users?
If you were sitting on a rocket burning cash to not crash you would do that too.
Anthropic is just trying to get to ASI and relying on the blind faith of investors that there will be a return at the end.
What matters is which strategy is more effective for attracting investor capital, because neither can survive without it.
Especially this. OpenAI will host it. OpenAI will throw "Sign in with ChatGPT" there. "Apps" will be built that depend on end users ChatGPT "connections". The app will fundamentally not work without an end-user having a ChatGPT account/subscription and "connected apps".
Having "the best model" will absolutely not support a $1T+ valuation. Owning the activity of 25-50% of internet users (assuming a split between OAI/Anthropic/Google/maybe-Meta), is.