I finally updated to Divi 5. I ended up using AI to do most of the grunt work, and honestly, it turned out to be the best option because it had to patch over a lot of the things I didn’t want from Divi.

After the AI was done, I managed to dequeue or eliminate most of Divi’s annoying features. One of Divi’s biggest flaws is the theme it forces on you. It is horrible and looks like something straight out of the 2005 era.

Sure, you could build your entire site with Divi—that is the point—but I’m both someone who wants to craft certain pages with a theme builder and someone who does not want to go all-in on theme builders. There is a simplicity to Gutenberg that Divi 5 may now be able to provide as well.

All in all, the refresh was a success, minus a few hiccups here and there. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but my mental health has been crumbling over the past few months. Eventually, I told myself, “Hey, I don’t want to give up on this site, so it’s okay to step away for a bit.”

Yesterday, I finally started picking up the pace and working on the refresh again.

Interestingly, I ended up using DeepSeek V4 Pro, and it turned out to be great. But gosh, it is behind in a lot of areas. The prompt cache did not help much at all, and it used so many tokens, even for simple tasks.

Still, it was cheap.

I want to write about the experience because some of my findings are honestly a little depressing for web developers. I don’t know how long web developers have before companies begin offloading web development altogether to AI. That is not a statement I would like to throw around lightly, either.