6 ms·
I'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
by ascorbic 6mo ago
I'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 6mo ago[deleted]
- i_have_an_idea 6mo agowill all my custom Wordpress themes and plugins run on EmDash?
- billyhoffman 6mo 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 6mo ago[flagged]
- make_it_sure 6mo ago[flagged]
- spongebobstoes 6mo 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 6mo agohow long? 10 years
- Bnjoroge 6mo 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 6mo ago[dead]
- Diti 6mo 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 6mo agoAgent coded != vibe coded. I don't write code manually anymore, but Im still getting the exact code output that I want.
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoIt's a tough pill for some HNers to swallow, but with a good process, you can vibe-code really good software, and software far more tested, edge-cased, and thoughtful than you would have come up with, especially for software that isn't that one hobby passion project that you love thinking about.
- ehutch79 6mo agovibe coding implies a complete lack of process. The definition is basically YOLO.... https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoMy process is just getting claude code to generate a plan file and then rinsing it through codex until it has no more advice left. I'd consider it vibe-coding if you never read the code/plan. For example, you could package this up in a bash alias `vibecode "my prompt"` instead of `claude -p "my prompt"` and it surely is still vibe-coding so long as you remain arms length from the plan/code itself.
- thejazzman 6mo agoShhhhh stop telling them! We don’t need more competition :)
- hatmanstack 6mo agoThis, but I think everybody that's awake knows this. I still not a fan of this project regardless, it's polishing a turd.
- deleted 6mo ago
- teekert 6mo agoI started calling it LLM assisted coding. If you know what you’re doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff and educate yourself on the unfamiliar bits you can move quite fast. The term vibe coding does not do that process justice imho.
- throwaway613746 6mo ago[dead]
- Dylan16807 6mo ago> The term vibe coding does not do that process justice imho. Well that's because actual vibe coding is a completely separate thing from "LLM assisted coding, know what you’re doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff". I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "started calling it", but vibe coding doesn't need a new name, it needs people to be clear about what they mean.
- teekert 6mo agoI think the jury is still out on this one, meaning people have different meanings when using the term "vibe coding". OP says "vibe-coded months long project", imho that is not vibe coding? I'd say it's vibe coding if op does not know the programming language and just let the LLM write everything. This does not sound like it.
- _puk 6mo agoVybrid coding :)
- teekert 6mo agoWell, it's a spectrum indeed, as everything is. As soon as we drawn lines the discussion start on where to draw them exactly. So it's, left to right: One shotting --- vibe coding --- vybrid coding --- stack overflow assisted programming --- programming Do we need any extra dimensions perhaps? ;)
- AbraKdabra 6mo agoThis crap thinking has to stop, not everything is "hey agent do this" then sit, wait and publish as is. Also this is a Cloudflare official software, do you REALLY think this is 100% vibe coded without human intervention? Come on...
- well_ackshually 6mo agoConsidering Cloudflare shat out slop in the form of a "complete rewrite of NextJS in one weekend" and proudly put out a blog post (https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/) despite how absolutely dogshit it is: yeah.
- eis 6mo agoAfter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 ? Yes, one can unfortunately put that into the realm of reality.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoWhile I agree with your first sentence, I haven't been impressed with cloudflare's AI track record. I think my expectations for "cloudflare software on the HN front page that was significantly AI coded" are lower than "random guy's software on the HN front page that was significantly AI coded".
- QuantumGood 6mo agoWhat are some other candidates in the "most meaningless new term" awards category? "Vibe coding" seems like the best in a generation. Even with a lot of clarifying qualifications, it often still seems fundamentally meaningless / open to interpretation / triggers commenters based on their priors.
- sillywabbit 6mo agoUsing the word priors in the way you (and others) do.
- penglish1 6mo agoExactly. It might be fine. It might even be great! But no matter how much code, including tests that AI can generate there was only one human thinking about those prompts, for a few months. Any defects in that single human's thought process for overall architecture, security architecture, test architecture and coverage were not reviewed by any other human who might think differently and catch things that were missed. Ideally they were all at least reviewed by AI, but how differently operate from itself? It isn't particularly good at detecting its own errors without a human telling it to, which means the human needs to detect it in the first place. Perhaps my most important point here is simply everyone here on HN is aware of all of these things, and as excited as some of us are about AI coded endeavors, the top response here will likely be the top response for many years - how do I know it isn't garbage? AI might be able to generate code fast, but informed users will definitely develop trust in it on a more human time scale. I think the core idea of addressing a core architecture security defect in Wordpress has a legs. I'd make the case that the security architecture demonstrated here is table stakes for new software projects in 2026 when it clearly wasn't really conceivable in 2003. Though I'd also argue that many of the top Wordpress plugins should be shipped as "batteries included" in any successor, spiritual or otherwise - it would remain important to be extensible beyond those, securely. A spiritual successor to Wordpress designed to run modern cloud infrastructure is a neat thing no doubt. But after handling a bunch of horrible Wordpress and PHP stuff in my life lately, I'm tacking a bit of begging onto my hopefully useful response. Someone, anyone, AI coded or not, please work on a COMPLETE successor to Wordpress. And PHP really - though I do think taking care of Wordpress would entirely deal with the PHP problem. What do I mean? All the modern table stakes stuff: * API first * fast bits in Rust (or Zig whatever IDK) * WASM * modern security architecture * batteries included - it is extremely dumb to have to add a plugin for calendars/dates/events and have about 100+ options for those. * designed to be deployed into modern clouds.. but also self-hostable on a single server, or colocated by small (cheap!) providers - ie: addressing ALL of the user base of Wordpress * one-click migration from Wordpress. Wordpress does this "with itself" to allow admins to move from one provider to another. Without this feature, might as well not bother There is a business opportunity here I believe, though I'm not proposing a business model per se. A lot of people, myself included pay for Wordpress hosting while also hating it and being ready to leap at an alternative - even if it cost more.
- dang 6mo ago"Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- BoorishBears 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo agoIt doesn’t need to be said in the article, it’s obvious. EmDash is a term associated with slop.
- rovr138 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo agoWhat does "While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality" mean? Compatible how?
- fragmede 6mo agoPicking April First to launch is certainly a Decision.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- capitanazo77 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo agoDoes Cloudflare use EmDash in production? Showing that its design and implementation have been refined through real-world use would help instil confidence.