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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

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.

rchaud 2y ago
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.
- IanCal 2y ago
  > 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.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    > 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.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      Those are not custom models, image input is standard in flagship models and searching is offered by multiple providers.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > 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.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    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.
    - omneity 2y ago
      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 https://herd.garden/trails 1: https://herd.garden https://herd.garden 2: https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations

rchaud 2y ago

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.

IanCal 2y ago
> 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.
- rchaud 2y ago
  > 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.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    Those are not custom models, image input is standard in flagship models and searching is offered by multiple providers.
fragmede 2y ago
> 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.
- rchaud 2y ago
  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.
  - omneity 2y ago
    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 https://herd.garden/trails 1: https://herd.garden https://herd.garden 2: https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations