write.as is pretty convenient in that it does the bare minimum fairly well. I don’t ever have to think about my personal site, it just hums along.
But I think with AI, both writefreely and write.as could improve. It would be easy to clean up issues that have existed for some time. An probably the most obvious benefit: AI can create goodlooking themes!
Anyway, just sharing. BTW, you don’t need to wait for anyone to use AI to create a theme for you. Just fire up your favorite agent and you’ll have something in an hour max.
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Please don’t use AI for Write.as, at all. Let’s not make AI contaminate every single corner of this world. I hope Write.as stays one of the few pristine Silent Running style greenhouses not contaminated by generative AI.
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Nah, it’s just the economics of it all. @matt is a talented developer. I have no doubt he can leverage AI to help make his software tighter. Heck, even running an audit across the entire codebase could go a long way. He’s one guy, and likes to keep it that way (he doesn’t have a team, which is quite obvious).
Now, he can remain lean and mean, fix bugs that he hasn’t had time to get to without having to pay another FTE, and even implement support by training AI deeply on his product(s) so that people aren’t left posting in a ghost town of a forum.
I prefer the human frailty of Matt and fewer Write.as features to a faustian bargain, a technology founded on looting millennia of human creation that normalizes the plausible manipulation of reality, irreversibly contaminates the space of human creation, destroys truth, dehumanises, and dumps the costs on all of us. No matter how much said technology can improve the economics of a project.
Generative AI is one of the rare technologies whose costs to society vastly exceed the benefits: asbestos, thalidomide, greenhouse gases, lead as a construction material, and so on. “Progress” can be and has been stopped.
AI coding tools can fork WriteFreely and butcher that.