I've been building WordPress sites as my primary profession for nearly 12 years now. While I think EmDash offers some nice polish on a well-tread architecture, I think it drastically misses the mark on where traditional web development is heading. Stablemount is an open-source prototype of the path I think the industry will take.
Stablemount is AI-first, and CMS second. The dashboard is primarily a browsing and prompting environment, allowing you to talk to AI directly inside the architecture, and audit/edit the results. The AI is built into the product — not an external coding tool you connect. A marketer uses it the same way a developer does.
This is not vibe coding. Tools like Cursor and Copilot are powerful, but they're AI baked into the IDE — they help developers write code faster. Stablemount is AI baked into the product architecture. The person building your about page doesn't need to know what HTML is. They describe what they want inside the dashboard, the system builds it within the site's existing design system, and they edit their own words on the rendered page. The constraints — design tokens, instruction rules, reusable components — live in the architecture itself and get denser with every page built, not in a developer's repo context or cursor rules file.
There is no separation between content and editing. No TinyMCE, no Portable Text. Instead, Stablemount converts live HTML components to contenteditable, allowing you to edit, update, and alter site content directly on your front-end. There is no traditional visual builder system — there is no need for one. The AI is the visual builder.
There are no dependencies aside from the Anthropic SDK. The architecture allows the AI to write flat HTML/CSS/JS files. Individual partials in your components library are all single HTML files. Want to copy a component between projects? Copy and paste the single file. Everything is git-diffable, portable flat files on disk. MIT licensed.
I think people are still viewing AI as something that "will integrate into their current workflow." In my opinion, the truth is that AI will redefine an AI-first workflow from step 0 to release. Every CMS is going to be AI-first within 18 months. The question is whether they rebuild the architecture or bolt AI onto what exists.
I've been building WordPress sites as my primary profession for nearly 12 years now. While I think EmDash offers some nice polish on a well-tread architecture, I think it drastically misses the mark on where traditional web development is heading. Stablemount is an open-source prototype of the path I think the industry will take.
Stablemount is AI-first, and CMS second. The dashboard is primarily a browsing and prompting environment, allowing you to talk to AI directly inside the architecture, and audit/edit the results. The AI is built into the product — not an external coding tool you connect. A marketer uses it the same way a developer does.
This is not vibe coding. Tools like Cursor and Copilot are powerful, but they're AI baked into the IDE — they help developers write code faster. Stablemount is AI baked into the product architecture. The person building your about page doesn't need to know what HTML is. They describe what they want inside the dashboard, the system builds it within the site's existing design system, and they edit their own words on the rendered page. The constraints — design tokens, instruction rules, reusable components — live in the architecture itself and get denser with every page built, not in a developer's repo context or cursor rules file.
There is no separation between content and editing. No TinyMCE, no Portable Text. Instead, Stablemount converts live HTML components to contenteditable, allowing you to edit, update, and alter site content directly on your front-end. There is no traditional visual builder system — there is no need for one. The AI is the visual builder.
There are no dependencies aside from the Anthropic SDK. The architecture allows the AI to write flat HTML/CSS/JS files. Individual partials in your components library are all single HTML files. Want to copy a component between projects? Copy and paste the single file. Everything is git-diffable, portable flat files on disk. MIT licensed.
I think people are still viewing AI as something that "will integrate into their current workflow." In my opinion, the truth is that AI will redefine an AI-first workflow from step 0 to release. Every CMS is going to be AI-first within 18 months. The question is whether they rebuild the architecture or bolt AI onto what exists.