I've been using ai coding tools in the last few months with static site generators. This is hugely empowering and completely obsoletes most CMS systems. Especially for more complex publication workflows.
I'm using hugo, not jekyll. But I don't think it matters which site generator you pick. The key point is using something that is code driven. And then have AI drive the code changes. Basically all routine site maintenance and updates is now controlled via agentic coding.
We use guard rails and skills to impose structure and process. This includes tone checks (and fixing), making sure audio transcriptions are in sync with articles, ensuring everything is tagged correctly, dealing with translations and approved lists of translations of key phrases, SEO checks and much more. I've been dialing in a lot of this in steps. You can start without most of this. But essentially a lot of manual work melts away when you get a bit structured on this. Like the article, we also use vector search embeddings. Our search actually uses the same model and runs it in the browser via web GPU. I also use it for related articles.
Also we've been experimenting with using reveal.js for presentations. Same principle. Forget things like Keynote, Canva, etc. Reveal.js is meant for programmers. But if you replace those with agents, non technical people can prompt together some really amazing decks. Replacing applications and UIs with code driven systems removes the need for those applications and UIs. And using AI to drive those code based systems removes the need for having developers in the loop. Our non programmer CEO who was a heavy Canva user is now doing decks and huge website updates this way now. Pretty scary actually. I don't think he'll use Canva again. I'm barely involved beyond setting up some basic plumbing. One party trick he likes is adapting decks to customers by integrating their house colors and visuals. Only takes pointing the AI at their website.
https://querylight.tryformation.com/ is a hugo demo site for the search capabilities. It hosts the documentation for the vector (and lexical) search library I use on our websites. The entire documentation site is managed as I describe above.
This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering myself how to put up a site with usual product stuff, blog and manual.
The blog is running already on hugo on full llm automation but I had though it would not work for documentation (this is for non-techies so want something more product-manual -like and less SDK-docs flavour) or landing page that well.
Wordpress is better because it's easy to setup these days, can be fast if you enable caching, and has a comment system, which is a big deal if you want people to interact with your content. Other things like contact forms can easily be added. The CMS is also amazing.
With SSGs, you have a few options for comments, like Disqus, but the ad-free version costs money, it's slower because it needs to load JS, and your comments are owned by a third party company. Contacts forms can be built by integrating an external API. And anything else that requires storing data will require an integration with a third party service of some sort.
SSGs are a great concept but they're mostly for nerds who get boners by seeing over-engineered systems. They're also great for companies like Cloudflare because they can sell you services that come for free with Wordpress (CMS, image uploads, databases, workers, etc). For serious blogging, I'd opt for Wordpress.
SSG are over engineered? If anything it feels the opposite. Everything in a text git repo, templated, and a llm can understand and extend. Git branch to test new builds, merge to main deploys globally on cloudflare. Super fast load times, zero security issues to worry about, zero dependencies. Version control. Zip it up and take it wherever you want.
No server side things to worry about. It's super clean. Jekyll, css, js, GitHub and cloudflare is such a clean and refreshing setup.
Counter-point: static sites are unhackable, require no maintenance and are free to host. Now that I've migrated the website for a local (volunteer) event, they will never have to worry about their site breaking on them again.
Multiply that by every nonprofit without tech knowledge and that's a lot of potential Jekyll fans.
The comment system bundled with Wordpress is not enough for "serious blogging", you'll need plugins to manage spam, allow users to use social accounts, etc. You'll also need plugins for caching. Oh, and you'll need plugins for SEO as well, because the core Wordpress doesn't handle the bare minimum of SEO and isn't flexible enough to allow you to do it yourself. And each plugin expands the attack surface to a system that's known for the persistent attacks, so you have to be constantly looking for updates and keeping everything update. Oh, but not everything, because there are breaking changes. And there are versions that introduce bugs or regressions.
But yeah, a bunch of html pages is over-engineering.
PS: you don't need to use Disqus if you don't want to, there are a myriad of free open-source alternatives you can self-host that will take a fraction of the maintenance work of self-hosting a Wordpress instance.
I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll a few years ago, and it's anything but an over-engineered system. I used WordPress for years, and it was overkill for a personal blog.
I did with mine too in 2021. Mine was 1000+ articles with even more comments. Luckily for me, I’ve already closed the comments. So, had to just throw them away. For the search, I tried Algolia but hit the limit. I’m with https://pagefind.app for now.
I love the idea and design it's just overwhelming for an idiot like me who isn't a web dev to spool one up on something like Amazon light sail. definitely going to Ai sledgehammer my websites over to this though, been way too long sitting on this project and I don't need to blog nonsense when my articles are markdown anyway.
I use a SSG for a conference. The git repository guides me in doing exactly the same changes every year. I have pre built blocks for the various stages of organization and go through the commits for the previous year to help me understand what to do next.
I didn't want to hassle with migrating my WordPress blog, so now just deploy it to Github > Cloudflare Pages so it's served statically (fast + secure). It's free too, wrote a blog post on it a couple years back: https://gmays.com/how-to-host-wordpress-sites-free/
But these days any new site I build is on NextJS since coding agents make it a breeze.
interesting, we went from classic CMS to Jekyll, then Hugo, then Astro and finally built our own CMS - for larger sets of content and sites. Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming - unthinkable my wife would ever touch it or write an article in there :)
I recently retired my Wordpress blog and replaced it with a static-site generator. My requirements were straight-forward and I ended up having Codex build it for me.
It was the last thing using MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress on my site. 3 big things to not have to keep up-to-date and secured. I can check in markdown to my repo, it builds the site, and Nginx serves it. So fast, and secure.
I have a legacy WP blog that I wanted to migrate to some static architecture for ages but IMHO users should be able to comment and maybe even post a pingback. I know, old MT days. But social media is always about getting (positive) comments and feedback, not just dropping statements and knowledge.
I also don't want to tie my site to disqus or other 3rd party cloud services and their implication on GDPR.
A buddy found Cusdis - a self-hostable Disqus alternative: https://cusdis.com . But this only does comments, no pingbacks - and via a separate product that you need to integrate using JavaScript.
And running this opens you up to security issues you were trying to avoid by going the SSG route. In a way you could just keep WP, then.
(Also, WP has this beautiful ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog a fediverse account that people can subscribe to and even comment on your posts from Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
I’m using Jekyll for includes and so I can use Ruby to render pages from yaml data. I’m sure Pandoc can do this too one way or another but it’s dead simple out of the box in Jekyll.
I feel this article is more about all the tools they built with AI than about moving to Jekyll. None of these tools required the move in first place, since they could have literally just dumped the DB.
I'm using hugo, not jekyll. But I don't think it matters which site generator you pick. The key point is using something that is code driven. And then have AI drive the code changes. Basically all routine site maintenance and updates is now controlled via agentic coding.
We use guard rails and skills to impose structure and process. This includes tone checks (and fixing), making sure audio transcriptions are in sync with articles, ensuring everything is tagged correctly, dealing with translations and approved lists of translations of key phrases, SEO checks and much more. I've been dialing in a lot of this in steps. You can start without most of this. But essentially a lot of manual work melts away when you get a bit structured on this. Like the article, we also use vector search embeddings. Our search actually uses the same model and runs it in the browser via web GPU. I also use it for related articles.
Also we've been experimenting with using reveal.js for presentations. Same principle. Forget things like Keynote, Canva, etc. Reveal.js is meant for programmers. But if you replace those with agents, non technical people can prompt together some really amazing decks. Replacing applications and UIs with code driven systems removes the need for those applications and UIs. And using AI to drive those code based systems removes the need for having developers in the loop. Our non programmer CEO who was a heavy Canva user is now doing decks and huge website updates this way now. Pretty scary actually. I don't think he'll use Canva again. I'm barely involved beyond setting up some basic plumbing. One party trick he likes is adapting decks to customers by integrating their house colors and visuals. Only takes pointing the AI at their website.
https://querylight.tryformation.com/ is a hugo demo site for the search capabilities. It hosts the documentation for the vector (and lexical) search library I use on our websites. The entire documentation site is managed as I describe above.
The blog is running already on hugo on full llm automation but I had though it would not work for documentation (this is for non-techies so want something more product-manual -like and less SDK-docs flavour) or landing page that well.
So this is you company’s site and it’s on Hugo? https://formationxyz.com/
With SSGs, you have a few options for comments, like Disqus, but the ad-free version costs money, it's slower because it needs to load JS, and your comments are owned by a third party company. Contacts forms can be built by integrating an external API. And anything else that requires storing data will require an integration with a third party service of some sort.
SSGs are a great concept but they're mostly for nerds who get boners by seeing over-engineered systems. They're also great for companies like Cloudflare because they can sell you services that come for free with Wordpress (CMS, image uploads, databases, workers, etc). For serious blogging, I'd opt for Wordpress.
No server side things to worry about. It's super clean. Jekyll, css, js, GitHub and cloudflare is such a clean and refreshing setup.
Multiply that by every nonprofit without tech knowledge and that's a lot of potential Jekyll fans.
But yeah, a bunch of html pages is over-engineering.
PS: you don't need to use Disqus if you don't want to, there are a myriad of free open-source alternatives you can self-host that will take a fraction of the maintenance work of self-hosting a Wordpress instance.
I wrote about my journey from WordPress to Jekyll at https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
I won’t argue with their reasons to move (which don’t stack up for me either but agree to disagree).
But these days any new site I build is on NextJS since coding agents make it a breeze.
Have a look at https://service.polymech.info/user/cgo/pages/poolypress-cms, agentic CMS, translates, creates and manages articles with a few prompts, widget aware.
It was the last thing using MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress on my site. 3 big things to not have to keep up-to-date and secured. I can check in markdown to my repo, it builds the site, and Nginx serves it. So fast, and secure.
I also don't want to tie my site to disqus or other 3rd party cloud services and their implication on GDPR.
And running this opens you up to security issues you were trying to avoid by going the SSG route. In a way you could just keep WP, then.
(Also, WP has this beautiful ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog a fediverse account that people can subscribe to and even comment on your posts from Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
I mean, it’s tempting though.