Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707929

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

I can't evaluate the source code architecture. What I can say is that before this, I had ideas I couldn't execute without hiring a developer. Now I ship them myself. Not prototypes, not demos. Real products that people use and pay for.

The leaked internals are interesting to engineers. From where I sit, the interesting part is that it works well enough that someone without a CS degree can build production software with it. That's the actual story.

The real talent drain isn't about technology at all. It's the governance mess. The WP Engine lawsuit, Matt's behavior on community Slack, the constant drama. That's what's pushing people out.

But even with all of that, nobody's leaving for EmDash. They're leaving for freelance Webflow work or getting out of CMS entirely. Cloudflare would need to solve the "why should I rebuild my entire business on your platform" question before the talent pool argument matters.

But the reason I'm still on WordPress isn't loyalty. It's that my clients can maintain their own sites without me. A small business owner updates their own pages, adds blog posts, changes a phone number. No developer needed. That's not a feature of WordPress. That IS the product.

EmDash solves a developer problem (sandboxed plugins, TypeScript, Workers) by building a developer product. Nothing wrong with that. But calling it a WordPress successor misses why WordPress won in the first place. It wasn't the code quality. It was the guy who runs a bakery being able to edit his own website on a Sunday morning.