I hit an interesting inflection point recently. I had to build a fairly simple website that will be maintained by some people without technical software development skills. I reached for the traditional wisdom answer, and set up WordPress. I used an LLM to try to help me get some of the settings correct for what I wanted to do, and it was a pain. Different versions and incompatible plug-ins all merged together to make it a big challenge. I finally gave up, opened cursor, and asked it to build me a website that had a bespoke administrative interface to change the key parts of the website, and I was done with the bulk of the effort in a quarter of the time I had already wasted on WordPress. Not only is the site less constrained than it would've been on WordPress, but the interface that people have to update the important parts is simpler and easier to use. It makes me wonder what the future of that platform is if that doesn't adapt quickly to become more LLM friendly out of the box.
I hit an interesting inflection point recently. I had to build a fairly simple website that will be maintained by some people without technical software development skills. I reached for the traditional wisdom answer, and set up WordPress. I used an LLM to try to help me get some of the settings correct for what I wanted to do, and it was a pain. Different versions and incompatible plug-ins all merged together to make it a big challenge. I finally gave up, opened cursor, and asked it to build me a website that had a bespoke administrative interface to change the key parts of the website, and I was done with the bulk of the effort in a quarter of the time I had already wasted on WordPress. Not only is the site less constrained than it would’ve been on WordPress, but the interface that people have to update the important parts is simpler and easier to use. It makes me wonder what the future of that platform is if that doesn’t adapt quickly to become more LLM friendly out of the box.
Custom design, tailored interface, fewer constraints, and less time. and automated tests and all the other goodies that come from custom software that give confidence in building new areas of functionality in addition to marketing content. What does the future look like for platforms that are primarily driven by manual graphical interfaces? Is WordPress attempting to bridge the gap opened by AI tools?