Is AI Dethroning WordPress?

Join me today for a live chat with Matt Medeiros (The WP Minute) all about- you guessed it- AI and WordPress. If there’s a reason I’ve been so over-indexed on AI recently, this is it.

To start, watch Matt’s short video “I built an app with AI, now I’m scared for WordPress…” to get a sense of what we’re seeing out there.

Is AI really making software engineering irrelevant? Or is it making the types of low-code prototyping and building that were once the domain of WordPress irrelevant? CEOs are making huge proclamations and laying off staff, and yet many engineers working in the trenches aren’t seeing the massive productivity gains where it’s needed most: maintaining existing, mission-critical software.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is massively changing the way I work, including the way I code, but what do these changes mean for professionals? I’ve seen a lot of “look at this cool thing I can build,” but that’s not the same thing as building something that meets a spec or grows a user base, critical infrastructure that powers a real business. Building your own version of a to-do list or word processor is very cool, but I tend to agree with Justin Jackson that “AI isn’t going to build your startup.” At least not yet, though it should be saving you a lot of time.

If AI is not saving you time, checkout this walkthrough from Nick Diego on setting up Cursor for WordPress. The power move, in my opinion, is combining AI with an automation-first mindset. For example, I used AI to help me iterate on this simple WordPress script: Pull WordPress from Prod to Local with WP-CLI Bash Script. Now I can update my local dev environments with one simple command.

So join us today at 10AM PST. Matt and I are going to share our thoughts about all of this, and I’m hoping you’ll join us in the live chat. Join the stream.

In other news

🎙️ Last week, I chatted with Ian Svoboda over at GenerateBlocks. Their team is busy making fantastic (and popular) tools that sit on top of the block editor, and Ian is a bit of a WordPress mad scientist. We talk about some of the features they’re building and what it’s like extending the Gutenberg editor.

If you haven’t subscribed to Webmasters.FM, what are you waiting for? There’ll be a new episode this week with accessibility expert Gen Herres, with some practical explanations of the new EU regulations coming into effect this year.

And one last piece of shameless self-promotion, I promise. I posted this on Bluesky and X and was overwhelmed with the response and the amount of shares:

“I don’t talk about this much, but recently I’ve been doing a lot of consulting to help devs/agencies/product teams transition to the block editor. We can go over tooling, workflows, shortcode migrations, anything really.”
HMU if you’re interested👇 Consulting – Brian Coords

Links from around the web

So much going on as January nears it’s end and the business world is back in full swing.

  • WordPress.com is finally reverting a lot of their custom UI (codenamed Calypso) and showing customers the true WordPress user interface in places like the Posts and Pages screens. The comments on this blog post are just so fascinating to me, because change inevitably causes a backlash. My thoughts: It’s great that they’ve ripped the band-aid off, knowing that any change will earn a rush of negative comments. This is the real UI most WordPress users see, so it’s only a good thing that we’ll see more A8c customers interacting with it and hopefully informing future development. WordPress.com’s Core Interface Style
  • Stratechery (one of my favorite blogs) got a minor redesign and finally switched over to the block editor, and some custom blocks. Ben Thompson made some offhand comments about writing Gutenberg on a recent podcast and it sounded like he’s enjoying it. Stratechery by Ben Thompson (I also highly recommend his talk from WC Asia last year)
  • My personal sites all run on the Ollie WordPress theme. This interesting rundown from Mike explains how the color system works in the Ollie theme, showing how much thought goes into all of it. Design like a pro with Ollie’s smart color palette – YouTube
  • Sometimes I need something extra in the block editor. Here’s two simple code snippets I use that solve 80% of my responsive design needs. Code Snippets
  • Recommended reading: “WordPress showcasing the hidden sunset of web and digital”. There’s a lot to think about here. WordPress showcasing the hidden sunset of web and digital – Mario Peshev

That’s all. Hope to see you on the livestream.

Brian Coords
Modern WordPress Development

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