Webflow Is About To Change in a BIG Way

Web flow admitted that they are playing catchup. We are seeing the community falling apart and even one of the biggest creators in the community using other tools and starting to educate us on other tools and a lot is going on. So, command AI. Have you seen this video? have like do you remember you you don't this video is so iconic like this person trying to get through the door and the door is broken the hand is broken like the images are missing things are glitching this was web flow I'm mocking WordPress like the plugins break you touch something and things fall apart like like exactly this table cool and that there It's a really good video, but it's really sad. Like, this is where you meet Web Flow and where things don't break, things, you know, work as they supposed to, and you have a visual builder. You see everything on the canvas, you change them, you immediately see the change. Because this video is true today about Web Flow, the parts where things break, which is sad. If you use the MCP, you might have really good experience with it. You had good experience with it. But in my experience, things can break very fast. And I noticed that things are not really like fast enough when I do them manually. And if I use like AI, I'm just super fast. But when the moment I'm using web flow, things fall apart and things are really slow. Time has changed and the community is seeing this. I've been Web Flow's biggest fanboy for the past seven years. To me, this year's Web Flow Conf is either going to make or break Web Flow. I hope to see a new vision for the future. As I'm taking courses and building client sites on Astro, it it's become painfully obvious to me that current web flow is a dinosaur. I'm not going to be in the camp that uh fiercely defends an inferior solution. As a creator who has built my whole career around web flow, it's painful to see there are so many wonderful things about web flow that no other platform has. Which is why I hope so much that Web Flow can take a new direction. This came out right before that article. Not to mention that our video on Instatic also came out around the same time uh maybe a few days before this. And this this was a post by Timothy after he showed what you can do with sanity. Like this is like to us no code people this is a whole new world and Web Flow has recognized that and they have admitted that they've been playing or they are playing catchup. So, is this whole post just us talking about catching up? Partially yes. Every serious tool in this category is racing toward the same conclusion for the same reason. Agents read and write code. So, code has to has to become the real thing that gets everyone uh uh to the same starting line. It's not where we intend to stop. The whole thing is about one simple thing is the fact that what you see in web flow is not the actual code. There is a intermediate layer that is breaking this whole thing. That that is the reason why we have issues with the MCP. This is why AI cannot work with web flow m um like precisely and has so many issues. This is very interesting because web flow has always been very close to the HTML CSS. Like the left panel is literally your HTML representation. Left is CSS, but there are representations. They are not the actual layers. Like when you deal with a web flow slider, there are like other div blocks. when you deal with the CMS, there are like backend um backend code being run like my cat wants to get out. So I have to What do you want? He wants to go chunky boy. Yeah, chunky. He called you chunky. Yeah, he's he's a chunky boy. He wants to go out. Okay, I'll I'll let you out. What is the issue with this? The issue is that some something gets lost in translation. That's issue. Uh literally there is a compiler doing the translating. How are they going to solve this? Any system with two representations of the truth joined by a translation layer will drift. So they they know the issue. The issue is like when you do this translation that the final result is not the same like you're not touching the actual code. Sweet code as uh the canonical artifact uh the thing the canvas renders the thing agents manipulate the thing you own that's the direction web flow is going so they are rebuilding web flow around your code being the the actual code like the thing that you create in web flow being the final code and they would just show it to you so they wouldn't put a representation layer when you add a div block you would be adding an actual div block and that that's it um so what this means we will get to it uh or like how I think it will look like what you make in web flow becomes yours in the fullest sense readable portable real what portable this creates so many questions around like what will be the value of web flow We will talk about this but before you get a panic what will happen to my website they have an answer to that. So hear this part clear clearly your site isn't going anywhere and neither uh is the way you work today. I don't know what that why what is that neither is the way you work today it is changing like what do you mean anyway but your site is not going anywhere we are building the bridge before we ask anyone to cross it that I don't know like if they intentionally like picked these specific words but this to me sounds like web flow 2.0 too. That's why I mentioned it like I feel like this is a new web flow. There will be the old web flow and they maybe build a translation layer to to migrate the old site to the to the new layer to the new tool. Maybe that that's my understanding uh after reading this and I hope that's the truth. I I hope they won't keep the same architecture that they have. I guess they won't be able to do that for the most part, but I hope they won't keep the same CMS. The CMS that used to be amazing in 2019, today as Timothy said, does feel like a dinosaur. Just touch any other CMS and you will notice that. Anyway, so they are playing catchup as I read. This is this is where I started. They are admitting that they are playing catchup. um the they understand that the developer wants to extend a component without fighting the canvas. That's the truth today. Like if you want to extend Webflow, good luck. It's really difficult. The agent doesn't want an interface at all. It wants an API and a boundary uh it isn't allowed to cross. So they want to create this in a way this sound to me like instatic what instatic already doing. So yeah I I I have so much hope for instap creators um web flow recognizes that creators need an immediate connection to what they create for the web. What you create is code. So they are going as we said already they're going back to code. They are not giving us any timelines. They are not giving us any designs. We don't know how it will look like. We don't know what is the architecture anything. We don't know anything. They just announced this as a big announcement but like a direction that they are going back to the truth which is code. um and they will tell us more in uh September in web at at at the web flow conf. Web flow was always a tool that made it easy to create websites, right? That was its goal regardless of that was its north star, right? Regardless of how it does it, that was its goal. And that is drag and drop. That was drag and drop user interface or whatever. It was really clear anyone can do it. And um that was why it blew up and that's why it gained a lot of traction over something like WordPress. Now there is an even easier way to create websites which is through agents. Web flow obviously serves many other purposes than just for the creation of a website. As we were saying before the show, many many website many many people that create websites literally design and build their website one and done and don't touch it for years, including myself. My own personal website, I don't continually update it. This is not necessarily the correct or the best way to treat a website. It's an ongoing beast. It should be maintained. It should be uh I don't mean maintained as in security or anything like that. I mean it needs to evolve with the current climate. It needs to res um respond to user behavior. It needs to respond to data and things like that. And then the design and the and the functionality of the website needs to change ongoing. That's that. But that's an ideal scenario. And you know, unless you're a big enterprise with loads of money, you're not really going to be doing that. So there is a place that Web Flow is still really really good for um that does not need to change whatsoever and that is well I say it doesn't need to change obviously you said yourself the CMS there's some improvements that need to be made from the CMS but from a UIUX standpoint you create your collections you add your fields correct me if I'm wrong but that's a pretty nice system it's just the limitations on what you can do with those collections and the fields that it can you want complete flexibility. You want to be able to have a component fields as an example and then just drag that in and that can just feed into whatever point is the the the if you break web flow up into two three/3 um is the actual build of the creation of the website. It's the visual manipulation of the website and it's the content of the website from marketers from marketing teams or whatever. twothirds of those are still pretty strong. I think Web Flow has it's just the creation that needs to be rethought and um I don't want them to put too much or I don't want us thinking Web Flow is this hole tool just because one of the twoirds is falling behind. It's still a really useful and powerful tool. Again, I said this before the the show. We get so autistic in our own minds that we don't we can't we don't think about other people. We only think about how we interact with our website. Whereas, in actual fact, we're just one/ird. As builders, we're just one/3. We might be two if we're maintaining the design and we like the drag and drop and this and that. We might be two/3s. But there are and their business method, their business uh shows that the that's that third third which is the marketers, the the marketing teams that maintain the content and whatever are a massive part because they've just driven so hard into all of that in the last few years and and kind of left the creator community in the dust because we're just such a small part of it. So I do have hope. I think they can remedy it. Um and they and web there is still a time and a place for something like web flow for many many businesses and organizations. It's just they need to rethink this creation aspect and in part the maintenance of the design aspect because people might still choose to use agents to be able to manipulate and update the website from that perspective. Um that's Oh, and just to finish on, but all that to be said, my money is still on in static. Yeah, me too. I want you know for many many people and static is there. 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.