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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

by tappio 6mo ago

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.

jeromegv 6mo ago
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.
- bryanhogan 6mo ago
  Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown files, or your own database + CMS?
  - jeromegv 6mo ago
    I want to avoid a database, so it would be file storage on git for content.
- tappio 5mo ago
  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.
allpratik 6mo ago
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.
zrn900 6mo ago
> 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.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
    Those orgs choose WordPress today. Source: that’s our bread and butter doing enterprise WP.
    - ceejayoz 6mo ago
      > 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.
gbro3n 6mo ago
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 https://www.asnotes.io)
weitendorf 6mo ago
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
jasomill 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  Static website use headless CMS to give a more pleasant and mobile-friendly UI. I always deploy with SveltiaCMS.
jqbd 6mo ago
Free plans on GitHub don't technically allow commercial use

by tappio 6mo ago

jeromegv 6mo ago

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.

bryanhogan 6mo ago
Are you planning on having just simple content as markdown files, or your own database + CMS?
- jeromegv 6mo ago
  I want to avoid a database, so it would be file storage on git for content.
tappio 5mo ago
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.

allpratik 6mo ago

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.

zrn900 6mo ago

> 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.

ceejayoz 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  Those orgs choose WordPress today. Source: that’s our bread and butter doing enterprise WP.
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    > 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.

gbro3n 6mo ago

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 https://www.asnotes.io)

weitendorf 6mo ago

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

jasomill 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
Static website use headless CMS to give a more pleasant and mobile-friendly UI. I always deploy with SveltiaCMS.

jqbd 6mo ago

Free plans on GitHub don't technically allow commercial use