The world's most popular CMS has been remade with the help of AI. Cloudflare has released EmDash version 0.1, described as a rebuild of the WordPress CMS (content management system) but using TypeScript rather than PHP. In contrast to the one week claimed for recreating Next.js using agentic AI, Cloudflare's product manager Matt Taylor and software engineer Matt Kane said that it took all of two months to create EmDash. Further, the code for EmDash is based on Astro, an open source JavaScript framework acquired by Cloudflare in January this year, so is not altogether newly generated by AI. Technically EmDash is an Astro integration.
"I'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," said Kane on Hacker News.According to the introductory post, "while EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash." The new project is open source on GitHub under the MIT license."The effort needed to be certain it was safe to MIT license EmDash really drove home why it was important to MIT license it. For a lot of enterprises, GPL software is free only if your lawyers are free," said Kane.
