4 ms·
Convince me this isn’t vibeslop. If Cloudflare really have radically changed their software development philosophy lately, this would actually be an interestin
by solarkraft 7mo ago
Convince me this isn’t vibeslop.
If Cloudflare really have radically changed their software development philosophy lately, this would actually be an interesting project, being based on Astro and coming with some APIs for programmatic management.
Them being so happy about the „cost of software development“ and not going very deep into ecosystem, community or project management doesn’t convince me that this is going to be a worthwhile project, even if, unlike their previous vibe coding demos, this one actually works.
- flakiness 7mo agoIf you read the first few sentences... > But for the past two months our agents have been working on an even more ambitious project: rebuilding the WordPress open source project from the ground up. They have honed their AI OSS troll marketing chop and every step goes far and far. I'll take it more seriously once they start open sourcing vibe coded projects they actually use in their production.
- ascorbic 7mo agoI'm the main engineer on this. I've also been on the Astro core team for two years, so I do think I understand real open source software and community. As the post implies, I did use a lot of agent time on this, but this isn't a vibe-coded weekend project. I've been working full time on this since mid-January.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- i_have_an_idea 7mo agowill all my custom Wordpress themes and plugins run on EmDash?
- billyhoffman 7mo agoFor plugins, no. 1- EmDash plugins are written in TypeScript, not PHP 2- EmDash plugins have a specific permissions model, where they need to explicitly request access to certain things. 3- WordPress plugins just invoke things. EmDash plugins have a defined API you use to talk to different capabilitites 4- Those capabilities are totally different, and at a different abstraction, than what WordPress provides. Beyond the look of the admin interface and publishing flow, I don't see how this is a "Spirtual Successor" to WordPress at all. Its a CMS, designed from scratch, for a serverless world, using CF proprietary capabilities (D1 Databases, R2 for image/media storage, their workers for running things).
- bombcar 7mo ago[flagged]
- make_it_sure 7mo ago[flagged]
- spongebobstoes 7mo agohow long should it take to gain your confidence? how did you arrive at your number? the state of the art of software engineering is to use AI. it's just reality
- hexo 7mo agohow long? 10 years
- Bnjoroge 7mo agoThere's a big difference between the two. If you still think agent-guided development doesnt work well, you need to update your priors
- marsven_422 7mo ago[dead]
- Diti 7mo agoThe slow enshittification of every product touched by LLMs these last few years (ESPECIALLY by Microsoft, who goes all-in) kind of “disproves” your point. Reliable agent-coded development only seems to work for small codebases. (And it’s amazing in Ruby for some reasons.)
- andoando 7mo agoAgent coded != vibe coded. I don't write code manually anymore, but Im still getting the exact code output that I want.
- BoorishBears 7mo agoWhy would you gut the credibility of the project for that tagline then: why not skip mentioning agents? You even open the article by linking the toy project where you used agents to "recreate Next in a week" and released with critical vulnerabilities.
- zsoltkacsandi 7mo agoThis doesn't really address the concern. The question isn't whether this took longer than a weekend or whether you personally have open source experience, it's whether Emdash is actually being built as an open ecosystem or as a Cloudflare-bound platform. Bringing up your background reads like using prior credibility to justify the project's quality, instead of demonstrating it. If it only runs properly on Cloudflare's infrastructure, then invoking "understanding open source and community" feels misleading. Those values usually imply portability and independent ecosystem growth, not tight platform coupling. Also, "not vibeslop" here isn't about effort, it's about whether there's a clear, defensible reason this exists beyond being an AI-accelerated WordPress-like system tied to one vendor.
- odst 7mo agoI think one of the reasons people think this is slop is because of the name. How does the name EmDash relate to being a wordpress spiritual successor? It's clear the name was chosen as it relates to the use of em dashes in AI generated text, so why would you want to be associated with that? Why not choose a name like Astro Press given your experience on Astro?
- spongebobstoes 7mo ago> It's clear the name was chosen as it relates to the use of em dashes in AI generated text this is not clear to me, and is not discussed in the article you can like or dislike the name. but criticizing the quality of work based on your affinity for the name is foolishness
- cush 7mo agoIt doesn’t need to be said in the article, it’s obvious. EmDash is a term associated with slop.
- rovr138 7mo agoWell, an em dash is used in text to identify a pause or alternatives in the text. ..so like a fork in the way it's done, a new way of doing things. But you need to remove the dev/ai hat in order to go back to writing rules and the real use.
- cush 7mo agoNot sure why you’re being downvoted. The name is so bad. WordPress is a great name for normies. Something like Cloudflare Press would make more sense. EmDash is at best a temporary meme.
- lavela 7mo agoCould you say a few things on your plans to develop the community and ecosystem then as requested? That's the significant part of Wordpress after all, not the mediocre code.
- monkey_monkey 7mo agoWhat does "While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality" mean? Compatible how?
- fragmede 7mo agoPicking April First to launch is certainly a Decision.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- capitanazo77 7mo agoGreat job! I’ll move to this if it has: - good caching - GUI in spanish - a cli like wp-cli good cache control is essential for news sites with 100k + posts
- jijji 7mo agoI agree with you, if you're already a competent engineer, your productivity only is improved by orders of magnitude by using coding agents that are at this point producing very good code as long as you give it the right prompts and you test your code and remove any bugs... if the code tests and all the bugs are removed, what you've got is a working product that is hard to argue that it doesn't work especially if there's been a lot of QA done on it and there's no bugs....
- mkl 7mo agoDoes Cloudflare use EmDash in production? Showing that its design and implementation have been refined through real-world use would help instil confidence.
- TheTaytay 7mo agoCoded with AI != slop. AI in the hands of the right person can actually be good. That's gotten _especially_ true in the past few months.
- cataflutter 7mo agoMaybe what the parent commenter was referring to is that recently CloudFlare have published multiple vibe-code demo blog posts whilst trying to pass it off as production grade, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 where they implemented an open standard communication protocol on CloudFlare Workers. The blog post was chock full of factual errors, claimed to be based off project X but wasn't at all and even had the cheek to include that it was arguably the most secure way to deploy such a server, with their implementation apparently already being used by their team to serve real traffic. Meanwhile the repo was full of TODOs for all the security aspects of the protocol. Of course after the backlash a lot of this was covered up so look at the archives if you are curious. They have really done a disservice to themselves because their blog posts used to be excellent, but now I have to question whether it's another blogpost full of fakery like that one (and there was another since iirc). Given this blog post talks about reimplementing a popular project, it starts to give off the signs of being another one of these. Unfortunate if that's not the case
- QuantumGood 7mo agoCloudFlare announcements have caused them to lose credibility in this area.
- jijji 7mo agowhether people want to admit it or not, agent encoding is kind of the norm right now and I think the fear is the stories coming out of places like Block, Inc where they announced they fired 4,000 engineers a couple days ago because of what's the obvious truth today versus 6 months ago.... one expert software engineer can do the work of 20-40 people, so why do we need so many people? it's a hard pill to swallow, it's easier to claim that agentic coding doesn't work or that the code is sloppy and it doesn't work when in reality most companies are currently using it everyday, especially the large ones.
- hiccuphippo 7mo agoI mean the name is a nod to that.
- madrox 7mo agoI'm getting so exhausted of the "slop" accusation on new project launches. There are legit criticisms of EmDash in the parent comment that are overshadowed by the implication it was AI coded and, thus, unusable quality. The problem is there's no beating the slop allegation. There's no "proof of work" that can be demonstrated in this comment section that satisfies, which you can see if you just keep following the entire chain. I'd rather read slop comments than this. The main engineer of this project is in the comments and all he's being engaged with on is the definition of vibes.
- notahacker 7mo agoThey called the project EmDash and launched it on April 1st with a blog which brags about how little effort it took to write because of agents before even saying what it is. If the product launch involves dressing the engineering team up in duck suits and releasing to a soundtrack of quacking, it's really not surprising people are asking the guy they hid behind the Daffy mask on why he's dressed as a duck rather than what he learned about headless CMS architecture from being on the Astro core team...
- madrox 7mo agoThere's plenty of other comments saying this. It isn't that I don't understand, and need a clever metaphor. But to run with your metaphor, can we, maybe, just ignore the quacking since we all know that's just how you get attention these days and instead focus on that other stuff? Because it seems like asking about the duck mask will never produce a satisfactory answer and instead turn into a debate on the merits of ducks. Dare I suggest that this debate has become boring and beside the point. Unless someone on HN has been living under a rock they've already made up their mind about ducks.
- notahacker 7mo agoObtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for. :) But in this case it feels less like somebody has launched a revolutionary new product and HN is debating the MIT licence and landing page weight, and more like somebody has announced they've a plug-in replacement for a popular repository with a troll post and HN chooses not to spend enough time on Github to discover the all-star team and excellent architectural decisions the blog didn't bother mentioning. Plus Cloudflare deliberately signalling that at best they're not very invested in its success and it might well just be low-effort slop probably is more pertinent to whether a purported WordPress replacement actually gains any traction than its technical merit, and headless CMS with vendor lockin vs managing WordPress security isn't likely to be a more productive debate than one on "slop". The target audience for this product is much more 'HN crowd' than 'read about agentic solutions to workforce automation on Gartner crowd' too, so the quacking alienating HN is actually relevant.
- moffers 7mo agoI think Cloudflare has picked up that code velocity is only good if you can recruit users to a new open project, and have solid maintainers to keep the project going long term. Just from passive observance it feel like Cloudflare’s engineering team is chockful of seasoned maintainers. They then have a great social following already. So, code velocity, plus audience, plus maintainers, means you maybe can capture a lot of open projects under your umbrella while people are still trying to figure out how to fiddle with legacy software and AI. Meanwhile, “new is always better” puts pressure on legacy user bases. Finally, you allow these things to hook into your magnanimous global app development platform, and boom you have got it made in the shade.
- cluckindan 7mo agoIt’s definitely slop of some kind. capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"], Why mixed ”permission:scope” and ”scope:permission”?
- symisc_devel 7mo agoIt is 100% vibe coded.
- cush 7mo agoThis is such a valid concern. At this point I wouldn’t adopt new features unless they’ve been actively maintained and stable for 6 months. Too risky.