alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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Does Cloudflare use EmDash in production? Showing that its design and implementation have been refined through real-world use would help instil confidence.
I 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?
Great 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
Picking April First to launch is certainly a Decision.
What does "While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality" mean?
Compatible how?
I 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....
Why 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.
will all my custom Wordpress themes and plugins run on EmDash?
This 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.
Could 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.