Timothy Ricks Just Ended Webflow?

It seems like the universe is telling us to leave web flow and framer here. This week we are coming with another tool that is such a strong like it looks so good and it really makes me want to leave webflow command ai stacky made by Timote. So this is his tool. It's in beta. I've downloaded it and made a whole like actually two websites with it made well let I let Fable make two instances and I will I will show you what it can do. So the whole idea is that you can use Astro uh the framework Astro which by the way web flow also uses underneath to build your website and then you have this visual editor that is very much web flow- like to to edit things deterministically and visually literally touching the code without touching the code and I will just show you that. So here we have my agency website. I know it has bugs and whatnot because this is pretty much a one-time run. Yes, it can show all the different break points next to one another. And you have like this UI that is very much like web flow. Even here your layers, we have the pages. You can go to the blog page. You see it did make some mistakes creating it. But yeah, as I said, this is pretty much a one-time run and it has nothing to do with the tool exactly. This is more like Fable getting a Figma design and creating an Astro site. And now I can edit this Astro site visually. That's the point. The panel just like the web flow panel. And you can literally interact with it just like you would do with Webflow. And you have these components, you have the CSS classes, you have variables, and it all looks really good. And it's all code. It's literally touching the exact uh the the main source code that we have. And I will show you the the other uh example can and just to be clear, this is a Mac app that runs on your Mac. You download it and this just this you open your Astro projects inside of this Mac app. Exactly. Which I will show you with this one. This is another test project. Uh I want to show it to you using this one. Uh because I already have it open in cursor. So here we have the code inside of cursor and here we have the the UI editor. So in the UI we have this button and we can change the size like from six to seven 67. Uh no no uh and and you have like the text that says press me and if I go here and say press me now and come here you see it has changed. So this UI is literally reading the code and displaying the code. So this is a true window into the code and the way it is set up. And as you mentioned here we have this style um as you mentioned prior to the video we have this style for this button that I have just added and here we can go to our global CSS. I can look at the button. You see it's 7.4 rims. I can say 7.9. And if I save this and come here, I notice it takes a second, but yeah, it loads in. And now the style has changed. So, pretty much everything is code and you have a visual editor. It has a CMS. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it completely because it's not exactly a onetoone to web flow. And then we So here we basically have MD files as you mentioned, but we can add uh fields to the collections, but now I can't. I know I thought we I thought we couldn't we didn't figure that one out cuz that needs to be done through code. Well, I No, we there there is a UI for it, but it doesn't show up for whatever reason. Let me open the other project. I don't know how to also switch between projects. So I close it and then open it again and now I can switch. Probably something they need to um they need to figure out how you able to do that. See see there is the setting there is a setting um and if I go to so in the collections oh I can't do it in the collections but in here in general I can add fields. So I can add a repeater item. So it h it is very early. I think this is if I'm not mistaken this is just a few weeks old and I think it has really good concepts behind it. And let me show you one other thing. It has a vertical like adjustment slider. something that Web Flow has been failing at giving us for ages. Like we we had this with Finsswuite extensions before that got depreciated. So it's really sad to think about the like today's um tools for like visual editing how how slow they are moving. And I really hope that web flow comes up with something maybe like this that is opinionated but not too much and it allows me to do things with my agent. So not necessarily through web flow and I hope not even through an MCP because that would be another abstraction layer in a way but like directly maybe like how it is now with Astro. This can be any Astro project. And yeah, just for the ones who want to add things uh manually. Yes, you can add components or like elements. You have all the HTML elements that you want. You can add them manually and edit them and do all the manual work. You can do a lot of the annoying things that Web Flow doesn't let you do. You can do them here. You can add media queries. You have your variables and all of this. I let Claude set it up. I gave it um a Figma design. I gave it the tools and the links and said set up this project with this design with Stacky and with Astro and with Lumos. That's it. And it did this all in pretty much half an hour. Um um and then the the only final thing to mention is that this obviously doesn't it's not well we the flaw is that it's not really a multi-user um experience this this thing. So, not yet. Each of your each of your team will have to download their own version of Strappy. And to publish this, you you push it up to Git and you'll have to have some uh integration with your GitHub and uh let's say a Versel account or something like that. And that that will need to be set up by you. So, and to get changes in you have to pull down each other's code, whatever. This to me is 90% of what I think Web Flow will release. This free tool, remember what I said? I've got my prediction of there's a free tool um you can publish to Web Flow right now. This allows you to publish a GitHub, but I think they will their their software will push it to get uh to Web Flow's servers, which is just Cloud Cloud Front, Cloudflare. Um and so that'll be the change here. And I mean the CMS is obviously something that lives locally on you know in the code or whatever. It's not like some sort of remote thing. So again clients need a way to be able to to edit the CMS which they can't through all of this. So again, I think they will remove the localized CMS aspect and it will be tuned to a remote CMS uh feature from Web Flow, which I predict will be a a paid for bolt-on. Otherwise, you'll have to plug and play your own CMS or or whatever from it. So, I think this is I think and it's using Astro under the hood, which is well, it's using Astro, which Web Flow have been a strong proponent of Astro for a little while. So, I I genuinely think this is this is what we're going to likely see. Yeah. Or I agree. I just hope that the agentic part um that they won't close it. So it's like I can use my own agent to build and then use the web flow UI and whatever environment that they set up to interact with the build and then I can bring in my own CMS or I don't mind using the web flow CMS and pay for it if it's not limited like right now seeing what other CMSs can do. Web flow CMS to me is very limited. Yeah, it it's something from 2019 at best, if not 16. Uh that like I I want to be able to to define components, feed those components with data dynamically and also be able to repeat them as many times as I want and drag and drop them in a page wherever I want. That's not what Web Flow templates allow us. So I want that. Yeah, I hope that they'll they'll improve on that and I guess the most people will. And you mentioned the the agent thing. I think again, yeah, that'll be another panel here to aentically work with Web Flow's AI and which you pay a $30 a month subscription for if you want to use Web Flow and it will be all integrated into the app. However, you can still bring your own agent. You can still work with the raw Astro project under the hood. Um, yeah. of web. I call it web flow build but like yeah if not I I hate to say this actually uh but but I think it will be really hard to make a point for web flow for many many clients including even the the enterprise because these tools will get better in static this and probably like many more tools that I haven't covered or even scene. They will get better at all that infrastructure side of things. They that's how they are starting but they will get eventually good at letting you have users and permissions. I mean instatic has all of that right. Yeah. So yeah, and then just just to again help people compartmentalize this tool and how it differs, in static is a good one because in static you can ho you host remotely and everyone can log in and change the same website at the same time whereas this one again it it works through git. So you're you're bound by the git push, git pull um uh branches and and that whole workflow. So, it's slightly more disjointed in that respect. It's a slightly more Yeah. And it's less opiniated. I I believe even though it's based on Astro, it's still less opinated than static. I believe in static. Like I don't know what's instatic based on, but I feel like with Instatic, you have um Well, I don't aated build. Yeah. I don't think I have to look into it, but I don't think you're building like a React project under the hood. I think in static is still having its own translation layer like web flow. It's just easier to work with. I don't know. I don't know. Um but yeah, this yeah, you just got to I think people dive into these tools and they don't they they might not know all of the use cases. So, I'm just trying to paint a picture that this is a very uh strappy or whatever it's called is a very solo effort. it it this becomes difficult to work with teams if you don't know Git because you can see the publish button at the top right is is publish to Git or create a merge request or something with your changes. So you need all of that set up for this to be a team effort or even a solo effort to be fair. But yeah, I feel like this is getting close. I can I feel like I can build my site maybe here and push it over the weekend. I don't have time. I think you'd be better off. I think you're bit better off using in static. I don't think this is the tool for you, especially if you've got team members. I don't know. It's funny because he did write that post and say like he wants to use web flow and this and that. This doesn't look like he would use Web Flow. This looks like he would just go straight to using this. You know, he built the tool that he was sick to death, so he built his own tool. So, I doubt we would be seeing much of him from a Web Flow standpoint. Go try it out. It's open source. It's free. It's on uh beta. Just download it and then tell Claude, "Hey, in this folder, create whatever site that you want. Play with it. Give uh Timothy feedback, share it on social, we want to push this type of work. We same with Instatic. We really want to push this type of work so people see it. uh and you support the creators and with that these tools will get better and we will benefit from them. So this is part of a larger conversation on my show command AI which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter. Command AI.