How Is AI Going To Affect the WordPress Plugin Ecosystem In 2025
Discover how AI will transform the plugin ecosystem in 2025. Get ahead of the curve with our expert predictions and prepare your business for the coming changes.
In this insightful video, we explore the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the plugin ecosystem by 2025. Delve into how AI-driven tools will revolutionize plugin development, enhance user experience, and streamline integration processes. We’ll discuss emerging trends, potential challenges, and opportunities that lie ahead for developers and users alike. Don’t miss out on this essential analysis—watch the video now to stay ahead of the curve.
With Special Guests John Overal
The Founder And Joint Host of The Plugins A to Z Podcast & WP Pro A to Z Host
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 965. In this episode, we have a friend of the show, someone who is well-known in the WordPress community. We’ve got John Overall with us, the founder and joint host of Plugins to A to Z. It should be a great show. We’re going to be discussing the world of WordPress, where plugins are in the middle of 2025. It should be a great show. So, John, could you give us a quick 10- or 15-second intro, and then when we delve into the central part of the show, we can explore your background a bit more? Can you tell?
[00:01:01.340] – John Overal
I didn’t quite catch that. What do you mean by a 10-second? Tell me who I am?
[00:01:05.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, just a quick intro.
[00:01:07.100] – John Overal
Okay, a quick intro. John, overall from WP Plugins, A to Z. Com. I created this podcast just about 16 years ago now to share WordPress plugins with the world. It’s grown, changed, and morphed, and I used it to grow my own business, WP Pro A to Z.
[00:01:27.620] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my ever-patient co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:36.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, which focuses primarily on membership and learning websites.
[00:01:44.540] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s Fantastic. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks, like I said. But before we go into the central part of the interview, I also want to point out that we got a fantastic resource. We got some special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services that will help you, the freelancer or the WordPress professional. You can get all these free goodies and discounts by going over to Wp-tonic. Com Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. You find all the free goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get from that page.
[00:02:46.860] – John Overal
They ask for a lot.
[00:02:48.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, they ask for a lot, don’t they? So, John, as I mentioned in the introduction, could you provide some background on how you got into the world of WordPress? And especially in podcasting?
[00:03:02.760] – John Overal
Well, podcasting came naturally. I graduated from the local college with a degree in Applied Communication. And so I learned about radio, television, newspapers, and all the media. And I promptly went onto the Internet and developed it, but it wasn’t doing so well in the early 2000s. So I bought a computer store and ran that for a few years. And I sold that and came back to the Internet. When I came back, the Internet had undergone massive changes by 2009. And so I started to look things over, and I was comparing CMS systems, and I discovered WordPress. And I found WordPress at version 2. 5 before the implementation of our custom post types and all the cool stuff we have now. And I needed a way to grow my business. And I knew podcasting was starting to rise. And because I learned how to create my own MP3 file, put it on my website, create an RSS feed for it,and kick it out to Apple, iTunes, which was the dominant player in the podcast field at the time. That’s how I got started in it. But I needed an option. And there were all these little things popping up.
[00:04:13.120] – John Overal
And I think WP Tavern popped up just before me. And they were all doing news and everything. I thought, you know what? People want to know about plugins. Everyone wants to know about these plugins for WordPress. So I started creating a show and the title was WP Plugins A to Z. I was literally going to cover plugins from the letter A to Z. At the time, there were only 9,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, so I didn’t think it would be that bad. I got seven episodes in and realized what a crazy idea that was, and then it just morphed into reviewing plugins I use, ones people asked about, and it just kept going and going and going. And it’s just grown. There’s been times where the show has never gone off the air, but it’s taken long hiatuses of up to two months at a time, but it’s never gone completely off the air. So it’s just been a continuous. It is in all my checks, it is the longest continuing running WordPress podcast.
[00:05:11.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. On my, I think in iTunes, I say that the WP Tonic is one of the longest running continuous shows. And that’s because of you, John. I have to say that because of you. But there we go. But I I think it’s a fantastic thing to be able to say.
[00:05:33.680] – John Overal
It is. The WP Tavern show was the longest running ahead of me until it went completely off the air. What’s his name? I forgot his name now.
[00:05:45.440] – Jonathan Denwood
The names all merged. Yeah.
[00:05:47.300] – John Overal
The guy who created WP Tavern when he closed it all down and sold off the tavern to automatic. So.
[00:05:54.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. All things end.
[00:05:57.270] – John Overal
Eventually, eventually everything ends.
[00:06:00.610] – Jonathan Denwood
We end. Well, it depends on you. We have no choice. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:06:08.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
You guys are talking about all things come to an end, and one of my friends just bought the local newspaper.
[00:06:13.050] – John Overal
So nice.
[00:06:17.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Good luck to it. That’s what I’m going to say.
[00:06:20.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
So I guess I’m going to jump right in with, if we’re going to talk about plugins and the plugin ecosystem, obviously, you’re an expert. So what are the main trends that you’re seeing right now developing connected to plugins? We’re all going to jump to AI, obviously, and that’ll come up in our conversation. But what do you think are the main trends you see now for people that develop these plugins?
[00:06:45.620] – John Overal
The main trends, meaning aside from AI, what other main trends? You mean the types of plugins being created or the payments they’re starting to charge, the way they’re starting to charge for them?
[00:06:57.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, so I’m almost going to just say yes I guess to that question. I’ve noticed there’s been a big shift in pricing, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, people that have pulled their plugins from the repository and they’re self-distributing on GitHub and all of these There just seems to be this giant wave of change right now. And I thought if you could help guide the listeners and viewers on what they’re seeing and why it seems confusing now, that would be cool.
[00:07:28.460] – John Overal
Well, from my observations of it, what I’ve seen happen, and this picked up big time after the big kerfuffle last fall. And what happened was it was starting to change many developers. I’ll take one out of the air that pops into mind is a paid membership pro. They were already looking to move themselves off of the repo and self-host their own stuff before that kerfuffle kicked their timeline up by over a year and a half. And what’s the reason for that is it comes down to the way WordPress started and the way it continued, and that was free. Everybody got free plugins. And in the beginning, that was great. And many developers were like, Hey, give me a donation, buy me a coffee. Well, you can’t live off donations for plugins. It just wasn’t possible. So that created the freemium plugin, which I talked about in my early years of the show was I saw the freemium rise up. Well, Well, the freemium model is no longer working as well as it used to, and it still works to a certain point and gets people to buy plugins. But what has to happen now is people like, Well, how do I know those added things are actually going to work for me?
[00:08:45.900] – John Overal
So what I’m seeing that is starting is developers are starting to take their whole plugin and put it into a full-blown active dev site that people can go in, mess with, put in their own data, and it’s a dev site that gets wiped regularly and reset. So people can constantly see how it’s going to work. And that is what I see as a change in it. And what that will do is then direct the people to however they’re going to buy their plugins. One of the things I can’t remember the payment platform, Fremius, I think is the platform that a lot of developers are choosing for managing their licensing, which I hate Fremius myself, but other developers are doing it locally. They’re They’re running their own stores because it’s so much easier to set yourself up now with a Stripe payment or what. There’s dozens of payment processors to choose from them. So it’s really easy to set up your own store. The big problem comes is, how do you manage the licensing for it. And I have seen a few different options. I’m still shopping for options for myself because this last year, with the advent of AI, I’ve been able to live my dream of writing plugins because I could always deal with code, read code.
[00:10:02.210] – John Overal
I could even write code very, very slowly because I have typing skill problems. And with with AI, that cured my typing skill problem. Nice.
[00:10:13.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
So one of the One of the things that’s always occurred to me is it used to be you wanted your plugin in the repository. You wanted your plugin where people could go through their site, click add a plugin, search it and go, I’ll try this. But now, and I might be speaking out of pocket here, but it seems like, and I’ve heard Jonathan and other people on the show call it the giant flea market, right? But it’s like this uncurated, giant sandbox of a mess. And it’s almost like there’s value to not being in the repository. But then how do you search distribution if you’re new?
[00:10:53.680] – John Overal
Well, see, this is where you got an interesting grab there was the repository, it used to be being uncurated, but in the very beginning, it had the most magnificent search function. You search for something, you got exactly what you were looking for. You search for it now in a repo, you get the first page or half a page of stuff that’s almost unrelated to it. It’s like they broke the search function. I have my own personal viewpoints about the search function being manipulated, but that’s my own personal viewpoint on it. But now, with the advent of what was announced last week, I believe that’ll take six months, a year or so to go, which is the distributed network, the fair program. I’m trying to remember the distributed network of repos that are federated. You won’t have to get into the WordPress repo anymore.
[00:11:54.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I interrupt, John? Yeah. Is that from the great leader and from the… I call Matt the great leader.
[00:12:07.640] – John Overal
I understood the term.
[00:12:10.010] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re a puzzel. You’re followed by humor. A lot of people have that look, actually, John. But is it coming from him, this whole… Or is this- No, this caught him flat-footed. I knew it was coming- In other words, John, it’s a hope which Which will go nowhere, John. Oh, no.
[00:12:33.510] – John Overal
This is going to go.
[00:12:34.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Why, John?
[00:12:35.780] – John Overal
Because there are hundreds of people throughout the WordPress community pushing it. They don’t need Matt’s blessing to create this. It’s not needed his blessing to create this federated network because they can still tap into the thing. Now, the one thing will happen is that people will have to download a plugin to put on their site to tap into the federated network. But what’s going to happen is many hosting providers, such as myself, I’m going to include that plugin into anybody who quick installs the WordPress through my system. So it’s going to be there. I looked into it. I haven’t gone down deep into it. But what it means is anyone can set up a federated repo. You got to get approvals and everything else. You get certain keys. I I’ve read briefly on it, but the federated repo is going to change this. It’s not going to be accepted right away. I don’t accept it. People are going to fight it. They’re going to claw back against it. But many of the big players, because of what happened and the lawsuits that are occurring, it has caused everyone to question the fact that our one repository of major WordPress plugins is owned, operated, and controlled by one person.
[00:13:58.360] – John Overal
That’s a private website. You know, wordpress. Org is a private website owned and operated by Matt. That’s right in the lawsuit material. It’s all in the lawsuit material. And he actually said that.
[00:14:12.600] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally agree with you. It was never really spelt out. I think a lot of people presumed that the- I was one. That it was owned by the foundation and anybody. I have to be very careful how I work this. It was very disappointing to hear and witness the reality of the situation.
[00:14:45.110] – John Overal
I was stunned. I didn’t realize it. I was stunned. It caught me off guard. I went, Oh, really? Okay, that changes everything. That means we have a single point of failure that we didn’t realize we had.
[00:15:00.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m extremely critical of Matt to even think that this situation is acceptable, but that’s my own personal opinion. Shall we go on to the next really interesting question? You’ve just laid out that you’re very pro-AI around… I’m going to put a disclaimer here. Don’t worry, John. You’ve been using AI tools, and it’s helped you in coding plugins, and that’s fantastic. I’ve got the same feelings. I have not been using AI to assist me in building plugins, but I use a lot of AI in general to run my business, John, and it’s been very useful. But we’ve also, I think, and there are enormous up gains in making WordPress more viable and attractive to a new host of power users, but there are also obvious problems that might occur, and one of those came up, that the present excluding these new organizations and methods of distributing plugins, just with the traditional model, the team that need to rarify the quality and the security, they’ve been inundated with plugins. I think it’s only highlighted some of the problems with the existing system where there was no ongoing… Apart from the initial application process, which in some ways to me, John, seem to be less intense than the theme side, which I always found very contradictory and a little bit hilarious.
[00:17:28.420] – Jonathan Denwood
What are What are your own views about where… Because I see great opportunities, but I also see great problems. What do you think, John?
[00:17:38.660] – John Overal
Well, I want to address one minor thing. You mentioned the theme side of things. I’ve always viewed the themes as mostly irrelevant to WordPress over time. And nowadays, they’re absolutely irrelevant to me. So unto the plugins themselves and using AI on them, they You’re right. There is a massive influx of plugins being created by people. Whether they’re useful or not remains to be seen. It might just be people, like in the beginning of WordPress, there were plugins being tossed left, right, and center. During the first four years of my podcast, we went from 9,000 plugins to 60,000 plugins. And that’s how much people were producing. But what happens over time is I think it capped out at 90,000 plugins in the repo, and now it’s back down to 50,000. Because over time to the developers, they’re young, they’re interested, they’re playing, they’re having fun, and then they get a job, move on, life changes, and the stuff they created in college is no longer relevant. As far as the AI goes for power users, such as, well, I guess I could be considered that. I’m not really, but I am. Here’s a perfect example of how AI has changed things.
[00:18:58.540] – John Overal
Yesterday, I was finishing out a website that we’re building for a client. We’re coming up on launch time, and I had to build out one last component. I was using a plugin that I really like for doing a front-end submission from visitors to the site. The problem was the component I needed was in their premium part of it. I was like, Okay, no problem. We can build the cost of this plugin into the website in the long term maintenance. It’s not a problem. I went to pay for it and their checkout process was so arduous and made it nearly impossible. I just abandoned the checkout process and went, okay, I got to find another way. What I did was I tried to go on another route, didn’t work, and I went, wait a minute. I did some research. Somebody had done something similar with some sample code online. I grabbed that sample code, jumped into my AI, and over the course of three hours, me and the AI built a plugin to solve my problem. And that solved all of my problems for what I was trying to accomplish. And that’s what it was. But the AI couldn’t have done it just by me saying, I need it to do this.
[00:20:08.580] – John Overal
I had to go back and forth and test everything and then double check everything and say, no, okay, this is where we’re going to go back to the AI and say, it’s not doing this. Let’s try this. And finally get it to produce nice, clean, secure code for me. So this is what AI is doing for those that are building. For those that are I want to point out to you, John, the obvious that, as you said, you’re a pal user.
[00:20:37.720] – Jonathan Denwood
You got many years of experience, specifically looking at plugins. So you can make some judgment call on the quality of the code, and especially, as you mentioned, around security. But a lot of the people, and I’m not being disparaging to them, because it’s one of the attractions of WordPress, and a lot of people got their introduction to web development through being part of the WordPress community. But a lot of these people are producing plugins, and they wouldn’t even know the concept of being able to make a judgment call about the security of that plugin. One of the factors used against WordPress in the medium to maybe slightly larger company sector is that WordPress is insecure. I think it’s a red heron myself. But I see this as reversing the situation that’s taken a lot of time to improve. How would you respond, John?
[00:21:49.140] – John Overal
Well, WordPress core is secure. And you’re right. Many of those people that will say, Hey, I can build this in AI. They just let the AI build it. If you just let the AI create you something, it’ll create the simplest, most insecure code possible, which is the most efficient and fastest running code. That’s the unfortunate thing. As you add security, you add layers of complexity to it, and you have to have the checks in it. And that is going to happen. And probably a good portion of the plugins being submitted to the repo will be kicked before they get approved. But that’s the way it always works when people are learning. And some of these people may decide to work a little harder and go, Hey, maybe I can improve this. Or they could end up with the plugin I built yesterday is the first stepping stone for something I’ve been trying to accomplish for years. I didn’t even realize until I was thinking about it this morning and said, wait a minute, I can use what I did yesterday to build out this own personal pet project. All I have to do is expand upon what I’ve done.
[00:22:57.940] – John Overal
So this is how it can help. It’s not for everyone. A really good coder who has massive typing skills can outperform AI and code every time. They just can’t generate the text as fast as AI can generate it.
[00:23:16.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, exactly. I totally agree with your outlook. But I think this is only my opinion, John. I just want to put this to you before we go to our halfway break. Is that, I think it’s just highlighted a problem that’s been consistently growing in my own opinion, is that I always felt that offering a free plugin that might be part of a premium setup. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s free. But if it’s linked to a premium service, I always thought that the I think they should be offered a different discovery process where the team, where a security audit had to be done annually, and you got a checkmark in the directory that you’re up to date with security and the plugin, and you would get premier search discovery in that premier directory around that you had a necessary validation. And then there could be some voluntary that the plugin author or company had to pay for. But this was never accepted. This was just when I interviewed Matt, my day is, I’m sorry, Maren Weg, he wouldn’t have it. It would be ungovernable. It would be too enormous undertaking. I personally thought these were very not real reasons maybe to go down this route?
[00:25:18.500] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you think, John?
[00:25:20.140] – John Overal
I hadn’t actually thought about that. It’s a great idea. What you’re saying, if I heard this correctly, is when someone’s listing their freemium plugin up WordPress, the premium version of it should be available to the plugin repo check people to check the premium version to make sure it is just as secure as the freemium version.
[00:25:45.140] – Jonathan Denwood
And they need to be charged an annual fee to have an annual checkover.
[00:25:51.080] – John Overal
I think Matt missed a way of making some extra money there. And then they could also put in, as you said, in the back end of WordPress, put another tab in there just for freemium plugins. Versus once upon a time, there used to be three tabs in there when you check them. It used to be the the recommended ones, the new ones, and then the tab for checking general. Then they did away with the tab for the new ones. All right.
[00:26:21.840] – Jonathan Denwood
So thank you for that, John. I thought you were the right person to ask that question to. We’re going to go for our middle break, folks. It’s It’s been a fantastic discussion with one of the leading members of the WordPress podcast community, and it’s been a great discussion. We’re going to go for our middle break. When we come back, we’ve got some more excellent questions to ask John. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the excellent second half, just want to point out, if you’re looking for a true WordPress partner, more than just hosting, if you’re taking on a large membership or community-focused project, and you would like a support team to help you with the build out because it’s a bigger project for you, why don’t you look at what WP Tonic has to offer? To find out more, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, WP at marvandtonik. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:27:38.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I want to… You guys were talking about it, but we didn’t really just come out and call it vibe coding, right? And so we’ve got these people that are influencers. Some are friends of the show, right? So again, we don’t want to disparage people. And it is exciting. It is exciting that you can say, Oh, hey, I’m going to build this thing in half an hour. Hey, follow along with me while I make this really cool thing. And that part is cool. I still have, as an agency owner, I still have a ton of yellow flags, John, a ton of yellow flags. I have customers that are like, I asked ChatGPT to make me this plugin. Chatgpt says, all you need to do is stick it in the website and it should work. It says it’ll be easy. And that phrase also implies, you as my web agent Can you install this for me for free? Because AI said it’s easy and I’m giving it to you. So there’s this weird thing happening right now with agencies, clients, and let’s just be real, vibe coders and people offering these plugins, because on the back end, I can’t help but wonder, when WordPress does its annual big update now, all these vibe coded plugins, what if they don’t comply?
[00:28:58.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
What if they’re not compatible? Compatible? What if? I’m just wondering, because you’ve covered this for a long time. So what are your thoughts on, you made the plugin, but now who updates it? Who’s responsible for it? If you’re the agency and you put this vibe coded plugin in somebody’s website. Are you responsible for it? Is the customer responsible for it? You can’t sue ChatGPT, I don’t think.
[00:29:23.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Definitely. They’re going to make sure that there’s no possibility of that.
[00:29:28.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
So what do you think this circle I call it a circle of nonsense, but I’m going to let you have your own opinion. Where do you think this is leading?
[00:29:36.300] – John Overal
Well, real briefly, before I give you my viewpoint on where I think it’s leading and who has to manage the things, the vibe coding thing, I watched it there on the Twitter sphere for the first couple of months that it went crazy. And there was one guy who built out this, I got this great app. It’s like, okay, yeah. Day later, it’s like, oh, my God, my API key leaked, and I’ve got this massive $20,000 bill for usage. Is that because you didn’t do the security? You let the AI build it for you and it didn’t protect your API key. And this is the things that are happening in the vibe code. And they’re just like, Yeah, I’ll just talk to it and tell it what I need, and I’ll sit here, space out, have my beer while chatting. We’ll get some really cool something. Yeah, it’ll work. It’ll work great. It’ll work It’ll have security holes you can drive a semi through. But that’s not the only problem. As you said, even if one is working and has to secure, who’s responsible for keeping it up to date? Well, if you’re running the agency and the customer gives you the plug in, well, it’s not your responsibility unless they’re going to pay you to keep it up to date because that work ain’t free.
[00:30:54.000] – John Overal
So the other one is wherever they got it from, if they had AI built it, well, they go back to the AI and have the AI upgrade it, but will the AI be able to upgrade it and still keep its function going? Good question. Don’t know. But as far as the ones I build, all my plugins, as I build them, I throw them up on my GitHub repo. So people can go in there. If they want them, they can download them, fork them, have whatever fun they want. But I keep them up to date. And as I put them in the client sites, I keep them up to date or I make the changes necessary to secure them. And so you have to, as you build plugins, especially once that get moved into live functioning sites, you do have to be aware of. When WordPress comes along and they go, you know what? We don’t want this little function anymore. We’re going to depreciate it. And that functions now. It’s like going from, I don’t know what grief you had going from PHP7 to PHP8. I had a ton of grief. I had to go through and rebuild half my clients’ websites because they were built back in the mid 2000s or mid they’re teens or so.
[00:32:01.200] – John Overal
So they had a lot of code that was depreciated moving to PHP 8. So we had to go in and fix all of that depreciated code. And we even had to go and fix a few plugins that we’d used that were no longer in the repo But now there are responsibility if we want to keep using them. So of course, that money, that hours, those hours get passed on to our clients because they need their websites. So you would need it. This is what it takes. This is how many hours it’s going to take to fix this problem. So that’s what boils down to is those responsible for it are either the person who builds it or the person who supplies it to you. That’s my viewpoint. If they want you to take over it and you’re not fully responsible, you say, yeah, we’ll take over at this fee, my hourly rate, whatever your hourly rate happens to be.
[00:32:54.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I had a conversation with a client, and they were they were pretty determined, right? They’re like, no, I want you to do this. I want you to… I said, okay, well, then here’s what I’m proposing we do. We, A, run it through our tech team, have them look at the code, have them look for any glaring holes or things that they can see, and there’ll be a fee for that. And then we’re going to install it on a staging site first to make sure it doesn’t break or blow things up. And then once we verify that we think the code is relatively safe and that we can put it on a staging site without blowing things up, we’ll put it on production. So that’s going to run you about $900. And then instantly, they didn’t want to do it anymore.
[00:33:41.500] – John Overal
It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It goes back to the WordPress is free mindset.
[00:33:48.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
When people said social media is free, and then social media management jobs kept popping up for 45 grand a year, you’re like, well, that’s so much for free. It’s If you spend 20 plus years in an industry, in a field, in a vertical, and then something like AI comes along and tries to give it the easy button, like an Office Depot commercial, not only is it insulting, but it’s horribly broken to the people that think that easy button is real.
[00:34:19.400] – John Overal
Yeah.
[00:34:20.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I just want to ask you this, John. It follows through with Kirk’s question. I’ve noticed a trend, and it’s broader than WordPress, but it’s mostly around web development, web marketing, web design. And is this… We got a friend of the show, Spencer Forum, And I give Spencer more credibility than most because he has a history of trying to educate new developers, new freelancers, that are trying to build a career and living in WordPress. And he has a track record offering services and memberships that have consistently had that focus. And he’s gone big into vibe. But I think it’s also his personality type is that he’s always very engrossed in the new, right? So I give him more slack, more credibility. I still have a little go at him, but I give more credibility because he’s got a track history. But I’ve noticed there’s a new spawn of YouTube influencers, TikTok influencers, and Instagram influencers. They’re all about using AI bolts and AI optimization. You will be able to build all this functionality out, aimed at small to slightly medium clientele, and you will be able to make 10,000, 20,000 income per month. And there seems to be a whole breed of these influencers, mushrooms, all over YouTube.
[00:36:18.160] – Jonathan Denwood
And basically, they drive people to the school membership platform, and then they upsell these people on a paid school membership to pay out $500, $500 a month. And that’s how these influencers are making 20,000 or 30,000 a month because they’re driving people to their school membership platform. And I just find it really irritating, but it’s just the reality. Do you think there’s anything to what I’ve just laid out and what’s your own views about this?
[00:37:06.080] – John Overal
Well, I think it’s a beautiful fad right now, and the people who do that have done that for every new thing that has come along the internet. If you track those people back, go through the event, you’ll probably see them flip each time the newest thing came out. They just found a new way to fleece people, to grift it, in my opinion. Because as I said, There is no easy button. Those people have got the easy button because they’re pushing that. But soon as the shiny wears off and it’s no longer shiny and people realize, I’m not going to get rich making these AI bots. Oh, my God, making one of these AI bots takes me 35 hours to accomplish. People think, oh, I just go in there, type a couple of keys, boom, 10 minutes later. No, it never works like that. As much as people like to, well, they hear all the influencers say, Yeah, it’s this easy. You just type it in. They give you the short screens, but they don’t give you all the in between stuff that was done. I just see that as the usual stuff that’s on the internet.
[00:38:18.550] – John Overal
It comes and goes, and it grabs the people who are desperate or looking for an easy way out and not willing to sit down and put in the work is required to get where you’re going, because there is no easy way. I tried that back when I was in my early 20s. I tried the easy ways thinking I could do it and realized real quickly, no, it doesn’t work like this.
[00:38:43.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Before we go I’ll throw it over to Kurt. I don’t know, I don’t want to come across as being negative, because I think as you have expressed in your own learning around vibe, I think it’s… Let’s be frank, There’s always been assisted coding environments that enable you to complete functions, help you keep your syntax formatted in a readable professional context, help you with removing bugs. I just see AI, and a lot of coding, when I was doing it every day, a lot of it is repetitive to the extreme. As more function is demanded by clientele and more larger the projects get, the ability of a one A freelancer or a small agency to do that type of work gets limited. But I see these vibe and these new coding environments being a blessing in a way, and then being able… And also in a non-coding environment around enabling me to market WP tonic effectively and for me to be more productive. It’s been some of the tools I now use every day, and I would really miss them. So I don’t want to come across, how do you find the right balance in your own mind?
[00:40:50.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I just don’t want to come across this totally negative. How How do you balance it out, John?
[00:41:02.400] – John Overal
Oh, okay. You’re after me. I thought you were talking to Kurt. How do I balance that?
[00:41:06.200] – Jonathan Denwood
I would never do that, John.
[00:41:08.760] – John Overal
Sorry. Well, just real briefly, you mentioned there all the good environments for coding, they weren’t always there. I learned how to code back in basic, and that was a challenging time. But as far as balancing it all out with the vibe coding and everything else, I don’t really have a direct answer for that one because my life is a constant balance as to whether I’m working on a website, whether I’m working on my marketing for my business. And you’re right, agency Do as you grow, you’ll need more and more people. I’m starting to get to the point where I have to add another person. I’ve got three employees now, and I may have to bring on another by the end of this year to start managing some of the other things I’m doing. But the idea is as you hit a certain point, you bring in more power to help you get through it. Ai is helping a lot of people. Ai has helped us bring a lot of things under control in our business. Such as dealing with our marketing, helping us write our copy that took forever in a day to write our copy.
[00:42:22.320] – John Overal
So now we can use AI to help clean it up and refine it down into something that is more manageable. It’s helped me build out websites that were being challenging to me because I needed to get copy and I couldn’t get the copy from the client. So I used AI to do the research on the company to help me produce the copy. I present the copy to the client, and the client goes, Yeah, that works great. Boom, I’m done. This way I can get through a project way faster than it has because anyone who’s taken on a client project knows your biggest slowdown is waiting for the client to get you the material you need to fill out the website. But AI is changing that. In the fact, you just go, Hey, let’s go research this company for me. And it has found some amazing things on companies that I didn’t think it would find. I probably could have found it if I’d had 35 hours ability to search the web, but the AI pulls it up in minutes. So that’s where part of the balance is coming from is AI has helped me balance all of that out.
[00:43:25.060] – John Overal
My biggest problem now is dealing with the The projects I have for my business projects on the side. We’re in the process of building a SAS plugin right now, and it’s going to be both SAS and standalone. But we’ve been working on that one for a year, But since AI, we’ve started advancing it pretty decently, regularly for the last few months, we might actually hit our target of October with a alpha version for testing.
[00:43:55.840] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:43:58.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think we’re I’m going to stay on the AI theme a bit because now we’ve all admitted our hypocrisy. We’ve consulted people that use vibe coding, and then we said we all use AI.
[00:44:08.120] – John Overal
Well, that’s not the same as vibe coding, though. Vibe coding is where you just wander through and let it do what it wants. Using AI and directing it, different thing.
[00:44:18.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. So I agree. The part of this question then would be, give us the secrets, right? So what are the AI tools that you personally prefer to use or anything that you could with our audience to be like, oh, I might check that out?
[00:44:33.080] – John Overal
Well, I have no secret. I get hooked on a tool and I continue using it. I don’t jump from tool to tool. I use Grok. I’ve been using Grok since it was first introduced, and mainly because I paid the premium at X and it came to me free. And because I’m still pay in a premium, I get the the groc. Com version of it, which is even more powerful than the version you use inside X. So I use X for it. I know a couple of people use ChatGPT. My daughter, who is going to become my co-owner of my business, she uses ChatGPT from time to time. The big secret for using AI is learning how to prompt it. If you don’t prompt it correctly, it goes back to the original days of when I was in the Applied Communication program, garbage in, garbage out. If you put garbage into an article, you get a garbage article out. The same thing with AI. If you put a garbage prompt in, you get a garbage result out. You have to be more direct. One of the things when I’m searching for doing stuff for marketing, the first thing I do is tell AI to act as a Marketing Manager in this specific role and then tell it what I want, because then it puts the AI into a certain…
[00:45:57.490] – John Overal
You can tell it if you need your office manager or your HR person or whatever role you need AI to be, you tell it to take on that role before you tell it to do anything else.
[00:46:08.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. I use a tool now that is… It’s a combination of tools It allows me different platforms, but I like it because it keeps all of my chats, all of my prompts on one screen. So I can say, okay, where were my chats in? And I, too, I’m a big fan of Grok. I started using Grok for the same reason you did, and now it’s in my phone. I use it separately from X. And I think I really enjoy the quality of the answers I get from it. I feel it’s less leading, but everyone’s got their own judgment, I suppose. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:46:46.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, let’s go for our ending question. So if you had your own time machine, like H. E. Wells, or if you’re into Doctor Who and the TARDIS, you had your own TARDIS, and you could go go back to the beginning of your winding journey in WordPress and podcasting. Is there any little tip, insight that you would love to share with yourself? And the one thing, the one restriction, John, is you can’t tell yourself that you shouldn’t come on this podcast.
[00:47:18.940] – John Overal
No, I’ve rather enjoyed this show. I really don’t know if anything else, if anything I would have told myself is to spend more time learning PHP. I’ve had to go back. I started last year. I bought a Code Academy thing for my daughter to learn to code, and she used it for a little while, but I continued paying for it. And I went, you know what? I’m going to go in there and get her some certifications. And I used it to go back and relearn my PHP and JavaScript coding to get it clearer in my head. Because if you’re going to When you use AI for coding, you’re going to need to understand what it’s outputting to you. Because otherwise, how are you going to be able to say, okay, you’re doing something that’s not right here. You’re creating a function that’s not going to work in the right way or whatever it’s going to do. And also to understand the syntax of it. I go back and tell myself, Just put a little more time into coding, even though you’re slow in typing.
[00:48:28.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it isn’t easy if you’re a freelancer and you’re doing projects, plus you’re trying to improve your coding skills because it’s very easy just to keep on piling the clientele and you want to get the work done as quickly as possible. And that is a little bit contradictory in actually spending time and learning to improve your skills, isn’t it, John?
[00:48:56.620] – John Overal
Well, it is. But the funny thing is, you can do it with as little as an hour or two a week.
[00:49:01.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. You need discipline, don’t you?
[00:49:03.020] – John Overal
You need the discipline to say, ‘Okay, instead of sitting down to watch TV, I’ll sit in front of the computer, and even if I don’t do anything, I’ll just poke through a couple of things.’ But surprisingly, say, do it for five minutes. Next thing you know, you’ve been there for an hour. It’s that thing of only giving it five minutes. And then once you get through the little bits, it’s like cleaning a dirty bedroom. You’ve got to start in one small corner.
[00:49:29.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Matt, you said something horrible. I’m going to share that. What’s the problem with him? I’ve always been nice to you, Matt. I don’t need a time machine to walk myself not coming on this show. What a cheek, Matt. I bet you. I don’t believe you. I don’t think you’re that cheeky, Matt. I hope he doesn’t. That’s worse than me, John. So, John. So, John, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:50:08.050] – John Overal
Okay, there are two great places to find me. One is WP Plugin, zetaz. Com. That’s where you can catch our weekly show. Every other week, I interview someone from the WordPress community. And on the opposite weeks, my daughter joins me as the co-host on a show where we review plugins. Another way to find us is to visit WPPro, A to Z.com.
[00:50:30.760] – Jonathan Denwood
You will have to come back later this year or at the beginning of next year. And we have another check because I’ve enjoyed it. And Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you have to offer?
[00:50:44.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
For a personal connection, LinkedIn is the way to go. I’m the only one having fun in there. So once you got me there, you got me. And then for business, it’s Manana Nomas. Anything Manana Nomas, social or the website, goes to me, manananomas.com.
[00:50:59.060] – Jonathan Denwood
I didn’t expect that for Matt. I expected it for Matt, the other Matt, the great leader, because he told me and Kirk were quite… We were quite vigorous in our questioning of him.
[00:51:12.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
He thought, but I thought it was a good show. I thought we did an excellent job with Matt when he came on.
[00:51:16.940] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we were pussy cats compared to some of the interviews he had to face. It’s been a great show, folks. If you want to support the show, go to the WP Tonic YouTube channel. I think I reached over 10,000 subscribers yesterday. It’s growing. If you want to support the show, also subscribe to that YouTube channel. It would be appreciated. And we produce a ton of content every week on that particular channel. We will be back next week with another fantastic interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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