If anyone's interested in the prompts they're using here, they're viewable via devtools.

Full dump of what was showing on my end here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/furnivall/aa95e8d9dc330f3...

WordPress.com launches would be a better title. This builder is not available in WordPress (the open source software) but only WordPress.com (a hosting company owned by the creator of WordPress).

For a moment I thought they added AI integration to the open source Gutenberg plugin.

A very important distinction indeed. Wordpress.COM is not the same as the self-hosted version at WordPress.ORG

While they've made recent changes to .COM to bring it closer to .ORG mostly as a knee-jerk response to the Matt v WPE scrap, they are still very different experiences.

I rarely advise clients looking to DIY solution to go to WordPress.com

Since wordpress.com is displayed next to the title above, we can fix this by reverting the submission title to that of the article. I've done that now. (Well, I used the minimally baity substring.)

(Submitted title was "WordPress launches new free AI website builder")

It's funny that the whole lawsuit thing started because Mullenweg was claiming wpengine was confusing customers, when .com and .org is way more confusing.

I keep them straight usually. However, I don't have to. I just use Classic press.

Very true! Oh and I would hope not.

So they finally gave up on making "Full Site Editing" a thing, I take it. I maintain that trying to transition the product away from PHP into a React-ridden mess for the "Block Editor" in 2017 started us down this path of ruin.

Clearly they felt threatened by site builder plugins like Elementor Pro, Beaver Builder, Bricks and others that massively improved the WYSIWYG experience to the point where WP was relegated to the role of invisible scaffolding, a dumb pipe. Considering how badly they botched the redesign into the block editor era, and the madness about WpEngine, they are struggling to shake investor worries.

I run a WordPress agency and while I think the block editor was foisted on wordpress.org far too quickly, it's been a godsend in terms of allowing our clients much more control over their content. The prospect of going back to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor and templates makes me shudder.

I don't get the criticism either. Every time I try to post on a platform I miss the ability of just dragging a paragraph around to reorder it.

WordPress.com ≠ WordPress

Conflating the two is like mistaking GitHub for Git.

They are much more similar to each other than Git as they share the same plugin ecosystem, core developers and the base layer CMS is identical. I imagine there are many more feature differences between Git and Github.

Feel free to insert an analogy that pleases you. WordPress.com is a hosting company that has its own staff and contributes approx 40 hours per month to the WordPress open source project. WordPress core development is made up of contributors. The AI builder is not available for WordPress, it’s exclusively for the hosting company WordPress.com. WordPress.com on their basic plan restrict any plugin usage. There are no usage restrictions on the open source software. This is just a taste of the distinctions. The title of this post has now been updated, but regardless, WordPress.com is not WordPress.

Wordpress: create your own website in minutes!

Wordpress new AI: create your own website in minutes!

I deal with WordPress a lot, and at least for my set of clients they just don't even have time for this, even with AI. They just wants leads. AI currently is good I guess for a standard 3-5 page site just like some of the other standard builders, but clients with hundreds of pages and heavily reliant on getting leads through campaigns and SEO, I currently don't see any danger (or use) here. Great for SMBs that just need something up quick though.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem.

I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add.

Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Maybe I'm seeing this the wrong way, and I'm forgetting truly non-technical folks exist, and this is for the people who would otherwise be forcing their nephew to help them make a basic website, and that's the role the LLM is playing here, as a conversational interface. I think the marketing copy for this announcement is total bullshit, then (plastering "AI" all over the announcement is more for marketers than customers), but I can at least see that use case.

I signed up out of curiosity and it looks like it's supposed to complement the manual editing UI so you can get things done without digging through menus. After the initial prompt and wizard, it's a chat box that sits in the corner of a typical WP admin page.

But in its current state, it seemed pretty broken to me. I just wanted it to add text to the top of the front page, and it kept saying "I couldn’t find the block you mentioned. Describe where it is on the page or select it and try again." no matter how many different ways I attempted to describe it.

Going from a basic template to all the little changes you need to make to build the basic shell you need for a new site is still a lot of work. Think of all the best practices cruft required for the pages typically linked to from the footer. A sporting good site is different than a directory blog is different than a single serving social media aggregation site.

I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.

An AI website will look about as unique as a Facebook profile in 2004. Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer "make it look like this other website that I like". An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer.

> Even the most non-technical people can tell a designer

The vast majority of people who want to make a site don't have a designer, and if they could get one the comparison is something that's near instant and costs pennies.

> An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web, locate the site and analyze what makes it good in the eyes of the customer.

Perhaps ignoring the "what makes it good in the eyes of the customer", although I'd argue that point for many things, these systems often can surf the web, can locate sites, can take images as input and already know many major themes and major sites.

> An AI won't be able to understand that, because it can't surf the web

We've given the AI the ability to scrape websites, so I'm not sure that holds.

> I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now

I did this recently for a friend and 1000% no. It wasn't easy to find a good template or edit it, and things we tried (including various builders) were a massive pain in the arse.

I asked sonnet for a site and had it right in a few minutes. I asked for changes and they just worked. It wasn't a complex site but it was drastically easier, quicker and more fun than dealing with the nuts and bolts of it all.

> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Absolutely not.

Choosing customisation? Sure!

Making the customisations? Nope. I'm sure some do, but I and many others I think just want a thing.

Just asking for some changes and seeing them was great.

I have no idea about the quality of the sites this produces, but I think your comment about non-technical folks existing is on the money. There are many people who really don't understand how to properly structure even a simple website, and being walked through a conversation with a series of pertinent questions will be a much more satisfying process.

I am one of them. Without help from a capable and kind developer friend back in 2004 I never ever would have been able to create mine.

> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Even if that were true (which I heavily contest), people might like the idea of "I want the sidebar nav moved to the right side", not opening up template.css and template.html and figuring out which html/css they need to change.

The LLM is the thing that lets us do the fun part.

But let me disabuse you of the claim that technical people enjoy fiddling with html/css/design especially on their Wordpress website when they just want to make some changes, and somehow nontechnical people are the only ones who might have to circumvent all that fun-having by letting an LLM do it for them.

It's like saying that you don't see how LLMs could be useful to software developers because don't they enjoy writing code? Aside from the answer being no, most code isn't fun to write, you're forgetting the goal day to day is to get something done, not dick around with your Wordpress theme or software Jira tickets because it's fun.

Jira tickets: depends on what metrics your management is using?

It may well be your life goal.

This is a solved problem even in the sense that nearly all the Wordpress competitors already offer this.

another term for it is "investor driven development".

Speaking of WordPress, hows the entire WordPress debacle going with Matt Mullenweg?

They're still battling out in court, with a timeline that extends into 2027. Meanwhile: (very quick summary) Matt's pulled his developers off the project, and the release schedule has slowed. Some commercial vendors have increased their support, while others have pulled back. Meanwhile the ecosystem of devs and agencies basically shrugged it off. If we need to get rid of Matt we will (with big vendor support), no big deal.

I believe it is actually Pretty Big Deal™.

No big deal on splitting the community in half? Matt will not go and you will have half the people supporting him, half forking the project. Actually less than half on each side, when you count in the people that will completely leave the ecosystem...

Splitting the community in half? Nah. If Matt needs to go, the community who is more interested in just making money (we're not "post economic" like Matt) will move aggressively to cut him out like cancer.

Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models.

My tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™

We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.

Copium. Wordpress is dead. Argue all you want. 5 years from now the trajectory of installs/users/commercial opportunity will show that the last year was more than enough to incentivize/motivate the current and potential users to reach for something else. I say this as someone who makes my primary income managing a very large WP/WC shop.

Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Literally like a dead whale, still going to support an ecosystem for some period of time. Though, it's peak is behind us and the unwinding was accelerated immeasurably.

I love how you used the phrase "Wordpress is dead," and not the really trendy term everyone has been throwing around since January of last year.

WordPress is so dead. Vibecoding a page using next.js and using something like sanity so they can make their own changes gets clients so much more for less than WordPress ever did.

IMO in my experience wordpress, as a project regardless of hosting, is coasting but in audience acquisition and new feature production.

They aren't acquiring new customers faster than they are losing existing customers. Squarespace and similar products are to eating it's proverbial lunch among a large portion of their audience (small to medium businesses who just want a website that is easy to update).

If some of the biggest hosters forked wordpress and started adding features that their customers are asking for, that wordpress the organization were ignoring or slow to produce, I think it would be a good thing. Providing wordpress the org with some motivation to compete.

Development has dropped off a cliff over the last couple of months. The release cycle has moved from quarterly to yearly. He's basically taking his ball and going home. My guess is we'll see more internal initiatives like this AI builder instead of focusing on the core product.

This would be an okay strategy if his core product wasn't in such a state of disrepair. I've seen multiple issues on Github projects from Automattic developers saying "this would be easy to fix upstream but we're not allow to fix anything in WordPress right now." It's pathetic and actively harming his own business.

Disrepair is too right. 5k issues and 1.7k open PRs on the Gutenberg GitHub repository.

I wish this all had happened before Full Site Editing was put into .org.

They just laid off 16% of workers

https://www.theverge.com/news/642187/automattic-wordpress-la...

For 99.99% of the people, it doesn't matter. Even if Wordpress stopped getting updates today, the code already works and it's open source, thanks in part to Matt for maintaining it for 20 years.

It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.

After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?

I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.

Original title: "Just Say the Word—Try Our New AI Website Builder for Free"

Yes. I've replaced the submitted title now - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657916 for more details.