“Websites are just the worst,” says Dan Tocchini. And his former profession? Surprise! Website designer.

Tocchini learned to loathe website work, oddly enough, after a stint selling European diamonds to small Bay Area jewelers. It was the mid-2000s, and he was lugging a backpack full of stones from retailer to retailer. Soon enough, he needed a website to manage his growing group of customers. When he saw what designers were charging for their work, he decided to learn how to code and develop a site himself. Soon enough he quit the diamond biz to work on developing full time. It quickly began to feel menial. Websites need constant updating, but “people don’t understand what goes into it, and they think they can do it themselves,” he says. “I was doing Wordpress for clients. I’d put a big tutorial in front, and they still couldn’t figure it out, and I just knew I wanted to solve that website problem.”

After its initial design, a website needs constant care. There’s always news: a firm’s new projects, a band’s updated tour schedule, a retailer’s latest press mention. Making those updates falls on the user, and have the potential to stir up design complications. It could be that a new image clashes with the color of some text, or that a new post botches the carefully composed white space created by the site’s original (and professional) designer. With The Grid, a new AI-powered publishing tool that launches today, Tocchini is looking to solve that problem by “automating out the mundane.”

Here’s how it works: sign up, get a domain name, then pick a purpose-built layout, created by Wordpress theme designer Nick Roach (he's also an investor in The Grid). This step is akin to picking a template on Squarespace, but because it’s more specifically oriented towards an action like making a sale or getting viewers for a video, it’s stocked with certain algorithms that will help organize content.

A River of Fresh Content

Here’s where the AI engine kicks in: when a user drops in that content it goes through what Tocchini calls a “hardcore analysis” of algorithms that can detect human (and animal) faces, color and contrast in a layout, and even emotional connotations in text. This means headshots will get treated with text that complements the subject’s skin tone, or that a header won’t be muddied against a colorful background. “The kind of algorithms we’re using are fairly similar to the ones where you solve crossword puzzles or sudokus, and often times there are many solutions to a sudoku board,” Tocchini says.

The easiest way to explain how The Grid works to someone who hasn’t used it is by comparing it to Apple’s live announcement of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. Underneath the live stream, spectators saw a waterfall of boxes with choice quotes, tweets, and photos. They slid into place to each address a particular moment in the event. Apple’s feed was obviously chronological, but the overall promise of The Grid is a context-aware flow of input that can lead to better, slicker, graphic design.

Tocchini is coming at this with software tools already in place. Last year he also led the Kickstarter campaign for NoFlo, a flow-based web programming framework based on forgotten software created by a Canadian bank in the 1970s. The software is based on visualized boxes, rather than strings of code made by isolated developers. “Because we expose all these APIs you can imagine an insane amount of things you can do, stuff we hadn’t even thought about,” Tocchini says. “There’s a lot of these crazy projects and algorithms and things that are open-sourced. We’ll really be pushing the limits so [The Grid] adapts to unique characteristics.”

By doing this, Tocchini is also proposing a more social kind of website. Besides the ability to integrate tweets or Instagrams, he wants to close the gap between Tumblr, Facebook, and regular websites by offering newsy sites that still sport custom layouts. This could give small business owners—many of whom use Facebook to announce upcoming events or recent projects—a sleeker way to promote their work.

The Grid will cost $8 a month for early subscribers.