We’re now three weeks into our AI-focused Dev Diary series, and this week’s video is possibly the most impressive yet…
In today’s Dev Diary, we ask the built-in Elements AI assistant to redesign the look of our sample page using a single prompt. Towards the end of the video, I also briefly touch on how we hope to offer both MCP support and the built-in AI assistant, allowing us to cater to beginners and power users.
Please remember that this is an in-development version of Elements, and nothing is set in stone or publicly shipping, yet!
With that out of the way, watch today’s video to see how Elements AI is shaping up!
This is an in-development version of Elements and is not yet available publicly.
We’d love to hear what you think of this week’s new AI feature. All feedback is greatly appreciated and helps shape the future of Elements
Will working though Claude Ai desktop Max subscription have access to the same abilities as the built-in? The reason I ask is the monthly subscription provides quite a bit of usage credits, whereas the built in as you say is token intensive and requires payment based on tokens used.
The short reply, is YES! But, there are a few caveats to be aware of here: Using the Elements MCP server will be slower and more expensive than using our built-in Assistant (this is just due to the nature of the way MCP’s work). We’re going to be looking at ways to heavily optimise (for cost and speed) the built-in Assistant as we have full control of how and where the requests go.
Having said all that, we’re still building out this feature so we won’t know the answers for sure until we’ve had time to test and optimise the system.
We’ll obviously keep everyone updated as we progress each week
This is the best news being able to plugin your existing tools. Quick question will there be the option to upload images for reference especially when you want a certain style to be referenced?
I have no technical knowledge - but couldn’t it be done like the CMS?
You pick your AI and your plan then the user pays?
Dont know if that is possible…
Institute a AI usage fee? Like the Studio CMS fee?
Again, don’t know if it’s possible (just suggesting)
Really interesting…
You have to be specific with your prompt… then I imagine - create a test page - then go through an entire 100+ page website??? That would be some serious token usage… then again maybe not with menu globals and footer globals etc…
Great to see how far you’ve come. It’s the way I do work with Wordpress and the MCP with Ollie Pro and Claude Desktop. Not only for designing, but also for troubleshooting issues within Wordpress.
Looking forward to more information about using it with Claude Desktop and what it will cost to work inside elements.
I’m wondering how to practically introduce the style and design component. That is, convey information so that design is consistent with parameters related to style and elegance, not just functionality.
This is one of the areas I’m working on the most, because I’d like to create information that also conveys this component. Currently, this is only found in projects created by skilled designers, not programmers.
In photography, I already use a plugin that, over time, has learned my habits and makes photo presets for me, which are now very accurate thanks to training. And those parameters also relate to the elegance of the composition, not just technical ones.
Furthermore, I’d love to see Elements on the forefront of SEO of AI search engines (currently being referred to as 'AI SEO’ or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). i.e., optimizing your site so AI chatbots and generative search engines can find, understand, and surface your content in their responses.
Looks cool, and in general I am impressed with the way you are looking to implement ai into Elements…but am a little nervous about what it is doing under the hood. For example, one of the powerful features of Elements (bless you guys) is in the efficiency of the Theme Studio settings, where you can easily make global changes to colour palettes, fonts, borders, corner radii etc, to keep consistency across a site. In your example, ai appears to be making changes to specific components, but is it doing any unexpected stuff in the Theme Studio settings? If you have a large site with numerous pages and decide to ask ai to do something like “change border styling on the site to give a bolder, modern feel”, is it going to change each component with a border or will it just change the Theme Studio setting, or (even worse) is the behaviour unpredictable? If it makes changes individually it becomes a major headache to tweak every item with a border versus changing it once in the Theme Studio. I can imagine you will need to be very specific with the ai prompting to avoid creating a total mess of the site-wide styling, which would result in becoming reliant on ai to change it again.
Amazing stuff, really impressive! Seeing Elements AI evolve in this direction is super interesting: for me, the idea of being able to redesign a site with a single prompt opens up huge possibilities, especially for speed, creativity, and experimentation. I also really like that Elements AI can help not only with design, but also with understanding the app better and guiding users through its features. I can’t wait to try it out.
I’m not sure how we’ll do the costing on the built-in AI, but we’ll figure it out!
