Stacks 6 and AI

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The Stacks Beta just updated to version 66, and I managed to find some release notes on Joe’s site. What interested me most was Feature 1: Add an MCP plugin so users can use AI agents like Claude, Codex and GPT with Stacks. My first port of call, to discuss this with Chatty. Which was very excited, if a language model can be said to get excited. ‘So what can we do with this?’ ‘Lots! And I get to drive your computer…’ ‘No, wait!’ (actually that wasn’t quite its response, but it catches the gist of it).

I was excited by Dan’s announcement of AI integration with Elements a while back. But while I’ve forgotten now what the row with Realmac was all about, I’m not going to start over building a library of Elements. OTOH, my wife just built a site with ChatGPT, which blew me away (not least because she didn’t land me with months of frustration trying to make something with stacks). It is really good. And blisteringly fast. With some very clever functionality. It took me a while to work out what Chatty had even done: it’s a serverless web application built using Vinext and deployed using Cloudflare Workers. What? “Vinext is an open-source Vite plugin by Cloudflare that completely reimplements the Next.js API surface on top of the Vite build tool.” My brain aches just looking at that sentence, let alone trying to work out what it means. Somehow web development ran away from me while my attention was elsewhere.

But I don’t like the idea of putting my sites entirely in the hands of a language model either. Especially when I don’t even know where they are. (Everywhere and nowhere, apparently.)

So, actually, the idea of Stacks having agentic LLM integration (I do know what that means) is very good news. Almost worth waiting all this time for. What will it be able to do? I managed to retrieve the appropriate README.md file from the guts of the new Stacks.app and share its contents with ChatGPT. Which tells me it will likely be able to:

MCP capability What the agent can presumably do
Open projects Inspect projects currently open in Stacks
Source-list items Inspect Pages, Partials, Layouts and Images
Page stack trees See what stacks are actually placed on a page
Selections Know what the user has selected
Placed-stack properties Inspect the properties of a stack on the page
Add pages Create a new page
Add installed stacks Put a stack into the project
Select source-list items Change what’s selected
Select placed stacks Change what’s selected on a page
Set item properties Modify Pages/Partials/Layouts/Images
Set stack properties Modify properties of an actual placed stack

Sounds ideal to me. “Chatty, just make all the page margins wider, will you?” But, also, “Let me go in and tweak this stack that I’m not happy with”. Best of both worlds. Maybe.

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I’ve had the chance to give it a try inside Claude Desktop, and I’m really impressed with what’s already possible in the first version!

With just a single sentence prompt, it can create a fully functional landing page. It even asked me which framework I had installed and took only a few minutes to build the stacks page.

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If this is true, this will be the best web creator app ever created. I basically move completely from Rapidweaver to Antigravity with Claude Fable, and I can assure you that it is fast, usable, and editable. There are no limits. You ask and you get. Plus, you can customize the looks however you want, either manually or through prompts. I am a loyal Stacks user, and this post makes me so happy. I’m assuming you’ll use your own API, like LM Studio Bionic or OpenRouter. I won’t buy if a subscription is forced—obviously. If I can have the same experience plus Stacks, this will be insane! I don’t care how much Stacks Pro will cost. I will buy it out of the box. Seriously.

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I‘ve now had a chance to experiment with the new Stacks beta in Codex. It took a moment to figure out how to set it up (the ChatGPT plugin must be installed, from the AI tab of the Stacks application‘s Settings — it offers both ChatGPT and Claude) and it must be accessed from the Codex window of the ChatGPT desktop aplication (not the normal ChatGPT window). Choose ‘Plugins‘ from the Codex sidebar, and ‘Personal’ from the ’Installed‘ section of the window that comes up, and you should see ‘ YourHead Software‘ with a Stacks button underneath it. Click it, and you‘re away (you‘re also going to have to give a lot of permissions in Codex — be alert for the requests). You also have to have Stacks beta running at the time, and a project (can be a new one) open.

What can I say? This is seriously impressive. It gives you complete control over all the settings on the stacks you have on the page. I tested it on my LockUp stack — because if it works on that, it will work on everything. I could control every setting from a chat window in Codex — change this, change that, it figured out what was required and did it. Well, that‘s what it‘s supposed to do. It just seems incredible that it actually does! :smiley:

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Game changer, Isaiah! Total game changer. Well done! :champagne: :clinking_glasses:

And I never thought I would say this, but Stacks.app beta 66 is now the smartest app on my desktop. It has catapulted from the steam-powered web-building age into the future. And it has given a new lease of life to my carefully hoarded collection of stacks.

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