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Our New AI Website Builder

(wordpress.com)
93 points bookofjoe | 8 comments | 11 Apr 25 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.775s | source | bottom
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LordDragonfang ◴[11 Apr 25 17:13 UTC] No.43656147[source]▶
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.

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1. browningstreet ◴[11 Apr 25 17:27 UTC] No.43656282[source]▶
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.

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2. rchaud ◴[11 Apr 25 18:53 UTC] No.43657172[source]▶
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.
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3. IanCal ◴[11 Apr 25 19:49 UTC] No.43657765[source]▶
> 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.

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4. fragmede ◴[11 Apr 25 20:31 UTC] No.43658197[source]▶
> 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.

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5. rchaud ◴[11 Apr 25 23:34 UTC] No.43659857{3}[source]▶
> 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.

But that's not what's being offered here, and my bet is it won't be. It's more lucrative for businesses to put out LLM freemium shovelware and claim it replaces people than do the enormous work of developing the custom models that actually can.

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6. rchaud ◴[11 Apr 25 23:38 UTC] No.43659887{3}[source]▶
Scrapes are cached, it is too expensive and too long to do them on-demand based on a live query. Lots of sites change designs frequently and don't output semantic code in the html source either. And good luck getting the customer to prompt correctly for things like background images, gradients, carousels, animations and page transitions.
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7. omneity ◴[12 Apr 25 14:05 UTC] No.43664495{4}[source]▶
We are actually solving this problem by building the Huggingface Hub[0] for browser automations -automatically tested and updated around the clock, and a homegrown distributed automation framework [1] that can leverage your own browser, your community’s or your team’s up to millions of orchestrated browsers.

It’s not just for AI, we created a custom package format[2] for automations that can run in CLI as a one-off, a REST API server, an MCP server with a single command..

0: https://herd.garden/trails

1: https://herd.garden

2: https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations

8. IanCal ◴[14 Apr 25 06:05 UTC] No.43678494{4}[source]▶
Those are not custom models, image input is standard in flagship models and searching is offered by multiple providers.