Most website frameworks assume you’ll learn their technical stack before you can shape your site. Xanthan takes a different approach: its architecture is designed to be legible—not just to you, but to AI assistants. This means you can describe what you want in plain language and get results that actually work, because the AI can read the same structure you’re working with.
This isn’t a gimmick. It changes what’s practical. Tasks that would normally require hours of learning CSS, HTML, or template syntax—redesigning your color palette, adding a new page with image carousels, building a ScrollStory section—become conversations. You describe what you want. The AI proposes changes. You look at the result and decide: yes, no, or try again. You stay in the editorial role; the AI handles the implementation.
Most websites are a tangle of files where changing one thing can break something else in an unpredictable way. Xanthan is structured differently:
--accent-primary and --spacing-md mean the AI can change your site’s color palette or spacing rhythm in one place and have it cascade consistently everywhereassets/css/, layouts in _layouts/, reusable pieces in _includes/ — means the AI knows where to make changes without guessingIn practice, this means prompts like “give my site a warmer, more earthy feel” or “add a before/after image slider comparing these two photos” produce working results—because the AI can see the design system and knows how to work within it.
If you’ve never used AI for anything technical, start with something small: Your First AI Edit walks through changing a color, swapping a font, and asking the AI to explain what it’s doing. These are genuinely useful tasks, and they’ll show you how the conversation works.
Once you’ve seen how it feels, the range opens up considerably:
See Building with AI for specific examples across all of these.
You’ll need a local development environment and an AI assistant:
AI assistants work better when they understand what they’re working with. The first time you use an AI assistant with your Xanthan site, give it some context:
“I’m working on a Jekyll site built with the Xanthan framework. The design system uses CSS custom properties defined in assets/css/base.css. Components are in _includes/ and are used with Liquid include tags. Navigation is configured in _data/nav-top.yml.”
You only need to do this once per conversation. After that, the AI will make suggestions that fit Xanthan’s patterns rather than generic web development advice.
For even better results, you can paste a section of the Component Library or Pages & Front Matter reference into the conversation when asking about those topics.
This is worth saying plainly: using AI to build your site doesn’t mean the AI is making decisions for you. You describe what you want. The AI translates that into code. You look at the result and judge whether it’s right. If it’s not, you say what’s wrong and the AI tries again.
This is the same relationship an author has with a typesetter, or a director has with a camera operator. The technical skill is real, but the vision is yours. The AI can write CSS; it can’t tell you whether your site should feel warm or clinical, whether your images should be large and dramatic or small and documentary. Those are your calls.
When using AI assistants, your code is sent to the AI service for processing. Don’t include sensitive information (passwords, API keys) in files where you’re using AI assistance. Most educational licenses and free tiers are appropriate for academic and personal sites.