The Code is the Easy Part

At the beginning of this year, Matt Kane, a principal engineer at Cloudflare, found himself facing a question he'd been wondering about for some time: would it be possible to build a new WordPress? This time, though, he had a new tool that made taking on this rather herculean task less daunting, in the shape of newly capable AI coding agents. A few months later (thanks to an "unlimited token budget"), Matt had produced a working beta of the EmDash CMS. He also found that atproto was an ideal fit for the EmDash plugin registry. Links & Resources Matt Kane on Bluesky mk.gg Matt's Cirrus single-user PDS that runs in a Cloudflare Durable Object The Cirrus conformance checker Cumulus, an atproto blob proxy The EmDash CMS project Introducing EmDash blog post The EmDash plugin registry Everything Cloudflare launched during their birthday week, including EmDash The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-10-14-the-code-is-the-easy-part-matt-kane. Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com. Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala. Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.