[tappio]

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.

[jasomill]

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?

[ymolodtsov]

Static website use headless CMS to give a more pleasant and mobile-friendly UI. I always deploy with SveltiaCMS.

[jeromegv]

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.

[tappio]

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.

[bryanhogan]

Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown files, or your own database + CMS?

[jeromegv]

I want to avoid a database, so it would be file storage on git for content.

[weitendorf]

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

[zrn900]

> But 95% of web does not need it.

Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that.

> static site

There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides.

There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.

[tappio]

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.

[weitendorf]

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.

[nchmy]

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)

[_heimdall]

Caching is rarely that simple though.

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).

[JodieBenitez]

> people talk as if caching isn't a thing

Maybe you'd be surprised by how little some "engineers" know about http cache headers.

[ceejayoz]

> There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that.

They're asserting you can do that stuff yourself now.

> There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.

First, those are large orgs. Most WP sites are not that large or complicated.

Second, would those orgs use WP if they started fresh today? Or something like OP's setup?

[skeeter2020]

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.

[dawnerd]

Those orgs choose WordPress today. Source: that’s our bread and butter doing enterprise WP.

[ceejayoz]

> Those orgs choose WordPress today.

The organizations cited chose WordPress years ago.

Choosing to stay on it is, at least sometimes, going to be a matter of large institutional inertia.

Large enterprises are the last to move on things like this.

[snowwrestler]

The White House website is rebuilt by each administration. So in that case, it was quite a recent decision.

[ceejayoz]

> The White House website is rebuilt by each administration.

The Federal government is very large bureaucratic organization with more inertia than most. (And probably long-term contracts in this realm!)

[coldtea]

>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.

[gbro3n]

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)

[allpratik]

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.

[jqbd]

Free plans on GitHub don't technically allow commercial use