BTW Simon, I was super happy when I heard on Theo's podcast that he will be encouraging you to monetise your work more. I'm super appreciative of your work and I'm pretty convinced that the more you profit from it, the better the universe will be!!!
AI will get you a lot of the way with this. Claude Code allowed me to bring my almost dead open source real estate website builder back to life - and it was much easier than I had expected.
I always wondered why rails didn't produce a competitor to WordPress. It just hasn't excelled in content management.
I have an open source real estate website builder called propertywebbuilder which I am working on reviving and even with the help of Claude code the content management part of it is proving to be the most painful.
There were a bunch. Radiant CMS, Refinery, Locomotive, and others.
Three problems (1) PHP is deployed all over cheap shared hosting providers (2) no one who uses a CMS cares about the backend (3) Wordpress has massive ecosystem
My personal theory on why rails never beat out Wordpress (beyond that it has different goals), is that any attempts to make a Wordpress competitor never addressed end-user plugins.
Ruby has package management called Gems. And while these are easy and powerful for a programmer to call on; they aren’t loaded using a visual interface and be able to be dynamically loaded by the end user as is the experience with Wordpress.
To make a real Wordpress competitor; a system of user-self-installable plugins needs to also be created. Now that’s harder than just making a CMS but it’s fuctionality that makes many so called Wordpress competitors non-starters.
It's so hard to get traction on HN though - I only found this by chance because I was coincidentally searching HN for stories about the recent react hack!!
I would like to try controlling my browser with this model. Any ideas how to do this.
Ideally I would like something like openAI's atlas or perplexity's comet but powered by gemini 3.
I created this recently but have let it fallow in the last month. Planning to update it over the next few days / weeks. There are a crazy number of directions I could take it.
https://container-use.com/quickstart
BTW Simon, I was super happy when I heard on Theo's podcast that he will be encouraging you to monetise your work more. I'm super appreciative of your work and I'm pretty convinced that the more you profit from it, the better the universe will be!!!
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