Hey just a quick note, I’m not the only one working on Blocs, I’m good, but not that good. 
However, we do have a small team, we are not Adobe.
You can export from Blocs and edit the site code directly in most code tools, so it’s not much of a lock-in.
Also worth noting, Pinegrow is run by a small team also.
Worth to mention Isaiah also now teamed up with his son 
As someone who speaks at this summit regularly, I want to push back on a couple of things here.
First, the single-developer doom loop. I get the caution, but this argument proves too much. Every tool in our world, Pinegrow included, is a small team you’re trusting to stick around. The people building Stacks and Blocs have been here for a decade and supported their work the whole way. That track record is the guarantee, not the risk. Jumping ship to “AI plus my own plugins” trades a known, supported product for a maintenance burden you now own alone. That’s not more resilient. It’s just quieter until it isn’t.
On the Stacks App, development has been moving forward the whole time. There was a dry spell on communication for a while, no argument there, but the work never stopped, and the updates have picked up recently. The newer private betas are testing some major fundamentals before the next public beta drops. So declaring it dead based on the public channel alone isn’t a fair read of where things actually stand.
@Jake11, the “shameless infomercial” line is off the mark. I’ve prepped and delivered these talks. They are not sales pitches. They’re about making attendees’ websites genuinely better, sharper builds, better performance, smarter client workflows. That’s the entire point. Calling it a cash grab dismisses the work a lot of speakers put into it, and the years of recordings that come with the ticket back that up.
And let’s not take this for granted. There are major sites being built in Stacks right now for some seriously large organizations. Writing all that off is a strange move. There isn’t another community like this one, full of people genuinely trying to help each other build better sites. For anyone building in Stacks, the summit is the single best place to push your work further. Write it off and you’re only shortchanging yourself.
I’ve jumped ship to AI and neutralising as many other dependencies as possible. But yeah, depends on who you are. And you are correct on Joe’s summit. However the Stacks 6 thing is way out of control, four to five years later it will basically be Stacks 5 from four to five years ago. That’s the issue. I’m glad if it serves a purpose for others and I hope it works out for Isaiah, but at this stage it feels somewhat DOA (if/when etc.)
My additional three cents. I wonder how much of the long build process for Stacks 6 is due to the fact that Stacks 6 is trying to have backward compatibility with the old RW product. When I look at updated software, due to OS changes, many products leave the old behind and venture forward, including Elements and one of the oldest Apple software Provue Panorama. Secondly, even major companies leave the playing field, more often than one might guess, with no support provided for those still using their product, so the fear of a small company disappearing can be applied to big corporations. Finally, it seems to me the landscape has changed dramatically to “subscription” based, while Joe and Isaiah seem to be content in “buy it and it is yours”. As I stated earlier, Joe should be congratulated for “staying the course”, updating, selling at a discount, helping keep Stacks alive.
8.9.6? Did I read that correctly, and if so where from Pete?