I’ve never been shy about it: I don’t like website builders. I spent years sharpening my engineering skills to build “the real thing,” and most builders fall apart the moment I want to do anything beyond dragging UI blocks around—backend, databases, npm packages, custom CSS, proper IDE workflows… usually you just can’t. In this video, Wix reached out and asked me to try Wix Studio and see if it could change my mind, so I approached it with heavy skepticism and treated the whole thing like a behind-the-scenes dev review. What surprised me is how developer-centric Wix Studio actually feels once you enable dev mode: a VS Code-based IDE in the browser, proper global CSS, backend code support, npm packages, GitHub integration, and even a Secrets Manager for API keys. I walk through targeting elements with IDs/classes, changing UI programmatically using Wix’s $w selector, styling with CSS, and then building a tiny end-to-end project that calls an external API from the backend and renders the result on the frontend. I also tested the Wix AI assistant for code generation and fixing errors—and honestly, it worked better than I expected. Final verdict: I’m impressed, and I rate Wix Studio an 8.5/10. Yeah… it kind of changed my mind.