[rwhitman]

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