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.

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mickael-kerjean 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This is hugely empowering and completely obsoletes most CMS systems.

I went the other direction: instead of replacing the CMS, I open sourced a FUSE like layer [1] that mounts any backoffice system as a filesystem while the source of truth is in WordPress, Mysql, Postgres, .... Most backoffice systems map naturally to a file tree, so you mount them locally and let your agent read and write through that.

In the POC I ran, I mapped a whole wordpress site as a fs which was versioned controlled via git so when you did a git checkout of something, the whole db would get updated on the fly

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

	▲	yoz-y 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Literally yesterday I was thinking of writing a FUSE layer to expose email as a folder structure, in Go. From a glance at you documentation I take it that I could just write a plugin for filestash ?

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fsloth 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

So this is you company’s site and it’s on Hugo? https://formationxyz.com/

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jillesvangurp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, we just launched FORMATION XYZ a few days ago. Thanks! Fully running on hugo and I used the search library as well because it seems to work really well.

Interesting facts:

- the domain was registered a few weeks ago

- most of the heavy lifting was done by our non technical CEO by prompting codex; not by me.

- he got a bit carried away with some features and he was able to pull off a little robot (powered by vector search and embeddings), audio transcriptions, and a few other nice features. He has a product/ux background and a good eye for detail but no coding skills whatsoever.

- we use a lot of skills and guard rails to guide content generation, SEO optimization, etc. Our SEO agent does competitive analysis on a schedule, figures out optimal SEO phrases and maintains a list of approved SEO language.

- our content generation skills guard against typical AI slop smells, weaves in SEO language where possible, and uses a sub agent to act as harsh critic on content. AI slop only happens if you let it happen. You can see on the querylight documentation site that I have a bit more of that there. I need to improve the skills for that one.

If you want to get your feet wet with this, I would just recommend doing it and start with simple changes. Use Claude Code, Codex, or whatever you prefer.

One of the first successes I had with another website was "add the logo for company x to the logo wall". It went off and figured out the website, got the logo svg, figured out where to put it and hooked it up in the right place. For me that was a oh "it can do that now" kind of moment. A lot of content changes are like that.

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ribice an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Could you use an open source CMS for non technical folks, i.e. Decap?

	▲	jillesvangurp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Probably; if it has an API you can probably get coding tools to use it. But the point of using agentic coding tools is that they are really good at working with code and files. And it tends to be a lot faster and easier. And you can build tests and browser tests around that as well. In my view, a CMS is intended for people doing stuff. If you transition that stuff to AI Agents, why keep the CMS around? And if AI does all/most of the coding, it's not such a big leap for non technical people to get their hands dirty anymore.