An Engineer Who Helped Build Etch Says Page Builders “Make No Sense” When an Agent Writes the Code
EtchWP, a visual builder for WordPress, writes everything to its own custom blocks. A former EtchWP engineer, who still sells Etch add-ons, says your agent doesn’t need that layer.
“I think that’s LARPing control,” writes Woji Piskorz, a former EtchWP engineer, about demos of AI agents building websites inside visual editors while humans watch. LARPing is live-action role-playing, so he’s saying the humans are only playing at being in control.
“I know, because I helped build one of these tools.”
EtchWP is the Etch visual builder for WordPress, and when I say Etch below, that’s what I mean. It’s sold to you as the professional, code-oriented alternative to page builders. Someone who helped build it now puts it in the same argument as those page builders. He doesn’t say in the post which tool he helped build, but Etch’s 2024 pre-sale team slide lists him as a developer, and a customer review on his own pricing page thanks him for his Etch work “before and after leaving the team”.
Piskorz’s article on X is called “There’s no horse anymore”. It opens with this line: “Why page builders make no sense when an agent writes your code.”
He does split builders in two. Etch, Builderius and Phantom are on the developer-oriented side. Elementor, Divi, Bricks and Breakdance are on the other side, for people who want to build without writing code. Then he argues both kinds were made to make development easier for humans, by adding an abstraction layer.
On his argument, being on the developer side of that split doesn’t save Etch.
The whip holder
His analogy is early cars, some of which kept whip holders with no horse left to whip.
“The whip holder was never for the car,” he writes. It was for the horse. On his argument, the builder layer was for the human, and now an agent writes the code.
He argues even builders producing clean HTML and CSS store page structures in proprietary formats, often as JSON in a database. Etch’s docs say Etch authors everything to its own custom Gutenberg blocks, not core blocks, with your content stored in WordPress.
Picture your agent. It already writes HTML, CSS and JavaScript. On his argument, you’re making it understand and manipulate builder-specific structures when it could be working in your source files.
Builders are now adding MCP integrations. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is how an agent reaches those proprietary systems. For those integrations, Piskorz reaches for the film Weekend at Bernie’s:
“MCP is the guy moving the arm.”
In that film, Bernie is dead and two men move his body around so he looks alive. I read the builder as Bernie.
Piskorz has an alternative. For static sites, he points to Astro or plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, kept in files, in Git. Where you need a CMS, he wants WordPress with no third-party builder: native block themes, core blocks, and custom components in the theme’s codebase. Clients keep editing content in the WordPress editor.
He still sells to Etch users
Know this before you weigh his argument. Piskorz sells Oh My Etch, which offers components, faceted search and WooCommerce functionality for Etch, as etchwpstudio.com, an independent critical site not run by Etch, also says.
He also offers Oh My IDEtch, a toolkit with an MCP server and Etch AI connector. That’s the category of integration his article questions.
His customers are existing Etch users, and an integration can be useful even to someone who’d pick a different architecture.
His article has no benchmarks. Here’s what it says about the tools themselves: “Page builders were the right tools for their time,” he writes. “Many of them were brilliant. Especially the one I helped build. lol”
What are you paying for?
Cleaner output and more control are what EtchWP sells you. Piskorz isn’t knocking the output. He’s knocking the proprietary system behind it, and in my view cleaner code doesn’t fix that. If an agent writing native code gets you the same output, as he argues, the output stops being the reason to buy.
What’s left is content editing and design controls. In my view that’s a different pitch from code quality.
So if you’re paying for Etch with agents in mind, ask what the visual environment and its custom blocks give you that an agent working in files doesn’t. If you actually use the content editing and design controls, keep Etch.
If you’re paying for cleaner code, then on his argument, that’s the whip holder.
He concludes: “Throw out the whip holder. There’s no horse anymore.”