WordPress Goes Totally Headless With Astro & Vibe Coding.
WordPress goes headless with Astro & Vibe Coding for blazing-fast sites. Discover modern web development that’s faster and more flexible.
With Special Guest Brian Coords | Developer Advocate, WooCommerce |
#1 – Brian, can you give the tribe more info on how you got into web development, especially WordPress?
#2 – I see quite a bit of online interest in WordPress headless solutions that work with Astro, Replit, and Lovable. What are your own thoughts on this, Brian?
#3 – Personally, I see many opportunities for WordPress in the developing world of AI, but I also see threats, especially related to security. What are your thoughts on this,s Brian?
#4 – Have you got any thoughts on what some of the biggest trends we’re going to see connected to AI and Vibe coding in the next 18 months?
#5 – What are a couple of individuals in the WordPress space that impress you most that you like to share with the WP-Tonic tribe?
#6 – If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career journey, what advice would you give to yourself?
This Week’s Sponsors
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 993. In this episode, we’re discussing headless WordPress, ASTRO, and AI, just some small subjects. We’ve got a real expert in the house. We’ve got Brian Calls, the developer advocate for WooCommerce and a member of the Automatic team. So it should be a great discussion. So Brian, would you like to give us a quick 10, 15 intro, and when we come back from our break, we can then go into more detail about your background.
[00:00:55.380] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I’m a developer advocate at WooCommerce, so I work to bridge the community with the internal team, learning what the community wants and making sure they’re educated on what’s going on at WooCommerce.
[00:01:12.200] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:19.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and we work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic as well.
[00:01:28.220] – Jonathan Denwood
I thought I would have Brian on the show because he could give us some real insight into AI, WordPress, and what might happen over the next year to 18 months. It should be a great discussion. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, 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. Also, I want to take the opportunity to tell you that we got some great special offers from the show’s sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins, services, and technology, all with special offers included. You can get all these goodies by visiting wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. You find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. I made a career of disappointing. Come on, Brian, that was quite a good one. He’s looking a bit stern. No, he didn’t think much. He’s smiling there.
[00:02:45.000] – Brian Coords
I’m waiting for it.
[00:02:46.420] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, there we go. I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Brian, maybe we can go into a little bit of your background. How did you get into web development? Then how did you get into WordPress? And what has led you to this role? Before that, how long have you been working for Automatic, actually, Brian?
[00:03:10.640] – Brian Coords
Ten months, maybe.
[00:03:12.520] – Jonathan Denwood
So, maybe at the end, how did you get into this semi-new role at Automatic?
[00:03:21.380] – Brian Coords
Yeah, my background. I came out of college and was actually an English teacher; I taught high school and college English for a little while. And then Things happened in life, and I was doing a lot of websites and ended up switching to that career. Worked at nonprofits, worked on website building, turned that into freelancing and building a lot of WordPress websites, and then that turned into working at an agency, which I spent maybe just under 10 years in the agency space and building classic big WordPress sites, multi-sites, that stuff. Did that for a long time, and then along the way, I just started writing, making videos, that thing, and wanting to get more involved in the WordPress community, contributing, all that stuff. And eventually decided that I wanted a job where I could do that more full-time, more writing, teaching, community stuff, going to events, that thing. And so that’s basically what a developer advocate does. So I set my sights on that job and looked around for where they were, and WooCommerce was the place. And of all the places in WordPress to be, I think WooCommerce is a good one because it’s big, it’s popular, it knows who it is.
[00:04:33.300] – Brian Coords
It has a huge community, a huge ecosystem. And it’s not interesting being at WooCommerce and Automatic. It’s never a dull day. So that’s a long-winded way of saying how I got here. And as I said, it’s been about 10 or 11 months. So I’m still probably learning a lot about WooCommerce and the ecosystem. But it’s been fun so far.
[00:05:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:05:03.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
I find the whole WooCommerce thing incredibly interesting, Brian, because it seems like there are other carts that try to compete, and they just seem to put out a cart and people use it. And then when you get into a Wu, there’s the cart, and it’s a full cart on its own, but then it’s just got so many different extensions. And then, for other providers in that extension space, it just seems infinitely customizable to whatever an e-commerce person would need. That’s the way I see it from the outside looking in. Is that the attraction for you as well?
[00:05:41.360] – Brian Coords
Yeah. I mean, before I started here, I didn’t do much e-commerce. That just wasn’t the niche that I was in, the sites that I was building. So I didn’t have a full grasp of its scope. And then since I’ve been here, I’ve seen… I mean, e-commerce is a whole separate industry. WooCommerce is almost like a whole separate community. And there are a lot of other WordPress competitors, and I think it’s normal, and people can come in later. But WooCommerce has been around so long, so it has the double-edged sword of a huge history and a huge user base, but also, like, backwards compatibility with a bunch of extensions built 10 years ago. So it is big and crazy. And I think the thing that I’ve learned the most is that no two WooCommerce stores look the same. They all have 50 see different extensions on them. They all have a specific, weird thing that they want to do with their products at this exact moment when this thing hits the car, and this needs to go this way. And everybody wants it to be very unique. That’s why they go to WooCommerce.
[00:06:45.120] – Brian Coords
I think if you want a simple car, there are probably some pretty good plugins. But yeah, WooCommerce is the elephant in the room because it’s just been battle-tested for so long, and people have literally done anything with it. I mean, I sometimes see the weirdest store. It’s huge.
[00:07:03.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And it’s to your point, it’s super stable, right? So people really seem to rely on it. Back over to the reason for the show. One of our questions was, if we see a lot of people in the online space interested in headless stuff, headless solutions, what are your thoughts on the three major tools that we see are our ASTRO, and lovable? And I hear a lot of great things about lovable. People really seem to love lovable. But what are your personal thoughts on this headless space and where people are going with these types of tools?
[00:07:42.260] – Brian Coords
Yeah, do you mean specifically the more AI-driven builders, or just headless in general?
[00:07:49.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we don’t seem to make a show lately that doesn’t mention AI, so I would imagine we do focus on AI. But it’s It’s just interesting to see where headless is going, how people are using it, and then are people really over-leveraging AI or we’re trying to do crazy things in the space?
[00:08:13.100] – Brian Coords
Yeah, it’s a WordPress issue, which is WordPress was the easiest way to get things up and running on the web for so long. And so it hit that natural saturation of the market. And it’s still growing. It’s just in terms of relative share of the Internet. It’s pretty big, and it’s going to be a lot harder to get any bigger. And these other tools now can come in. And what used to be really hard, which was putting stuff on the Internet, is now pretty easy, and there’s a million ways to do it. And so I think that’s just a normal maturity of just how important the Internet has become. Some of these tools are better at certain things. Wordpress has always been just generically good enough at anything that you could use it for. But I think a lot of the weird things that we used WordPress for in the past might not be the case anymore. And I also think if you want to put up a simple landing page, do you need a 40 megabyte CMS to download and throw on a PHP server with a MySQL database and all that? Do you really need all that for a basic marketing site or a basic five-pager?
[00:09:23.840] – Brian Coords
I mean, maybe not. That’s probably not the place to go. If you can do that with Astro and write a couple of markdowns files and throw it up on a super cheap Netlify plan or something. I can definitely see the value there. So I think WordPress is just going to continue being best at what it’s best at, which is people with a lot of content and usually a team of people that are managing that content and need to collaborate and do it. So I think you’re not going to see headless take over big news publications or big nonprofits or higher Ed or all that stuff. I think you’re still going to see WordPress win in those places. But I think for a lot of us who maybe came up making five-page brochure sites or something, yeah, I could easily see. I’d much rather probably jump on Lovable and have it spit me out the same marketing site that I’ve been building for the last 10 years in about 10 minutes. I can see the appeal there. So it’s hard to make predictions. It’s a weird era that we’re in right now, but I think it’s just about WordPress knowing who it’s good for, and maybe it’s just a different size of the market.
[00:10:28.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s super weird because I’m still in the agency space, right? And so I’ve got certain clients, and I really address two verticals with our agency. I’m really looking for those big enterprise eLearning people where I can convert their Scorm content into eLearning projects, big sites, lots of content, like you had mentioned. But then we just have this whole vertical column of startups. And I don’t mean to oversimplify things, especially for people that make their living like we do. But you can literally just say, okay, I’m going to throw in ASTRO or Cadence, right? And on a WordPress, write a paragraph. It comes up and says, these pictures make sense, these colors make sense, this format makes sense. And you can do it with the customer if you want. You can go help them pick it out. You work right through it, and then boom, you’ve got a first draft of a website done, and it’s up. And so when I see these other… In my town, we have a guy that makes like, SaaS AI websites people, and he advertises them that way, and people get excited because it seems new and cool. But at the end of the day, they’re just really simple sites that don’t have the ability to scale or structure or add function as their business scales, which I think is where WordPress is still strong.
[00:11:48.400] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I mean, if you have plans for a website to grow into something, or if you have really strong opinions on SEO and a really strong content strategy that you’re going to be executing, then you’re going to want that control. I think there’s a lot of people who build marketing sites for other people, and they manage the content. They don’t even really let the customer edit the content. The agency manages it. They control everything. At that point, it’s like you could do it in WordPress. You could do it with a simple code tool. Wordpress is really handy when you have a non-technical people that want to edit things. I think that’s still what makes it better. If you’re having non-technical people and they want to sign in and add the new course, and they want to sign in and add the new product, and they want to add the new blog content, you’re not going to want to give them any of these other tools, and you’re not going to want to give them, especially in AI, that’s going to give you a different response every time or rewrite your entire code because the AI just likes to rewrite things.
[00:12:50.040] – Brian Coords
Yeah, then I think that makes a lot of sense. But I do think people will have to change their business models a little bit right now.
[00:12:58.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:12:59.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:13:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I just want to point out I’ve got a choppy internet connection, so I’ve been following you, but hopefully it won’t cut out. The reason why I put this question in, Brian, is that I’m in two worlds. I’m in the world of WordPress and education, but I also follow a lot of people in the SEO space. Some of these people, they’ve really been pushing Ashto because it produces non-Java script code. Tools like Loverable, they can take what Loverable, put it through Ashto, and they It’s blazingly fast, or they reckon it is. They want to build websites, but they also want to build what they classify as web apps. They want to build functionality that adds more value to pages. They’re not developer types, but they’re quite experienced in building websites. There’s about three or four of these influencers in the SEO space that I follow. They’re really pushing WordPress. We’ve had this before, haven’t we, Brian? This wave of enthusiasm about headless and It’s been around for about 10 years, hasn’t it? It comes and goes. But they’re pushing this concept that using WordPress as a content management system, but with Ashtra and these AI app website builders.
[00:14:48.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know if you’ve been following similar conversations. That’s number one. Number two, what you think about those ideas And maybe you can give us your thoughts about Asha, why you think it’s an open source project, isn’t it? But it seems to be very popular at the present moment. So I’ve given you three areas there. Choose your poison, Brian.
[00:15:18.880] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s always going to be a market for influencers in the digital marketing space to pitch the next new thing and the latest and greatest. And I think that’s just a normal situation. And there’s… Wordpress, we’ve seen, we’ve lived through all the different versions of that. Two years ago or a year ago, it was Webflow. Everybody needed to get on Webflow. And I’m sure Webflow is still doing great, and it has a big audience. And there’s always some new thing. I think it just really depends on… I don’t ever look at the technology as the leading decision maker. So I don’t say, I’m out here looking for WordPress sites, and I want to do WordPress work, and I want WordPress. It’s what’s the project, and then what’s the best tool for that project? Who’s going to be editing it? What are the stakeholders? What is their budget? What are their goals with it? And all that stuff. And sometimes it’s going to be WordPress, sometimes it’s not. But obviously, influencers, that’s not how they’re going to work. They’re going to try to sell something fast and easy. And that’s just normal.
[00:16:21.220] – Brian Coords
I think we’re used to that set of it. Astro has gotten really popular. Every tool has its pros and cons. And so So in some people- Can you give us a quick outline what it is, actually, in your opinion? Yeah, I’m not a huge user of it. I’ve been so deep in the e-commerce space where you’re not seeing a lot of that stuff. I think what people like about it is you really separate the front-end code from the content, whereas WordPress has really gone the opposite with page builders and stuff, which is my content is really tied into the code. And if I want to go, I want to visually edit and all that stuff. These headless things, they go back to separating it, which is I’m going to maybe fill out a bunch of fields or mark down files or something over here, and I’m going to let a designer just turn that into a nice landing page. And I think there’s pros and cons to it, but I do ultimately think that the visual building that you get with something like a WordPress or Webflow, I think that’s going to win out in the end.
[00:17:25.400] – Brian Coords
I think at the end of the day, it sounds really cool to separate that stuff and give everybody, here’s all your content, just go manage that in one place, and we’ll handle the design, and we’ll have total flexible freedom on it. I think ultimately people want to log in, and they want to see what their content is going to look like when it’s published, and that’s just going to never go away as a way people want to build.
[00:17:47.080] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m getting the vibe that… Let’s talk about Lovable. What Lovable is… Because I’ve got a friend, and she’s a chief technology officer, and she just loves Lovable. She’s just been singing the praises of it. But I’m getting the impression that you’re not buying in the Kool-Aid so much. Is that about what you’re buying in the coolie?
[00:18:16.590] – Brian Coords
Is that on? No, I think there’s definitely places where there’s value in these sorts of things, and especially with Lovable and Replit, that really are more AI-first. So So the code is an output of the AI, whereas like, Astro, I’m sure most developers are using AI to generate it, but the code is the primary thing. Replet, Lovable, these ones, it’s really the selling point is the fact that you’re using AI pretty much exclusively to manage it. I think there’s value in that. I think that if you are selling a product that can be replaced by an AI, then you should probably start pivoting your business. If you’re selling If you’re offering something that somebody can go to Lovable and generate something of similar quality, then that’s not a good thing for you. But if you’re offering something that’s a little bit above that, then I don’t think you need to worry about it. But I love these things. I just think that the real money is in more complicated stuff. At the end of the day, there’s certain things that you’re just not going to trust to an AI without wanting a human that you can say, I gave you money, now do exactly what I said and figure it out, versus an AI which will take your money but not always get you what you want.
[00:19:35.750] – Brian Coords
You can yell at it as much as you want, but sometimes you just need that human that you can ultimately will be responsible for it.
[00:19:43.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I agree with you. I see where you’re going because some of these SEO influencers, they tend to dismiss their own experience. They’ve been building websites, building for a number of years. I think they tend to underestimate their own knowledge base, even though they’re not a developer. I think the other thing is, and I like to get your thoughts before we go for the break, is that there seems to be a lot of, I don’t know how to quite put it fairly anti-wordpress, Iology, where they It’s slow, but I think a lot of people, it’s about the quality of the hosting, it’s about the quality of the plugins you’re using. Having this freedom, as you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, but not abusing that freedom. And what I mean by that is installing 100 plus plugins on the site and be on very cheap hosting and really expecting that it should be blazing fast. Do you think that’s some of the things that’s given, like WordPress, it’s slow, this mythology that it’s slow. Well, it’s slow if you do all the things I’ve just outlined. What’s your response to that?
[00:21:25.900] – Brian Coords
I think hosting is absolutely number one, the most important thing. And I think it feels like we should be able to have cheaper WordPress hosting. But I think at the end of the day, if you’re not paying a certain amount of money, you’re just going to get slow sites. And I understand the desire for a $3 to $5 a month host. And if you’re okay with the slow performance, that might not be an issue. And there’s a market for that and stuff. But knowing that that’s not the way WordPress is supposed to be, and you really do need a good $20 to $30 a month managed host if you really want a good performance site. We see that a lot with Woocommerce, especially because a good amount of the performance problems are, I mean, hosting number one, then plugins number two. Hosting number one, absolutely the first thing you can invest in to speed a performance easily. Plugins number two. But I think we’re going to see a shift as people are… We’re already seeing this, which is, oh, well, I edited the plugins. I let ChatGPT rewrite the plugin, and I let it add some functionality, and now I can’t I update the plugin, or now I broke this other thing.
[00:22:32.940] – Brian Coords
It’s going to be… I think it’s going to get pretty good at that stuff, and I think we’re going to see some ways to improve it. But yeah, WordPress is 20-year-old software, so it’s just going to be built a little bit differently. But yeah, hosting and plugins, these are the things that… And I think also people that just don’t build good sites. That’s what I love about WordPress is anybody can get started and anybody with no technical knowledge can start building websites. And I think that’s great. And I started that way. But a lot of those people, and I was probably like this when I started, are just going to build bad websites. That’s just the case. As you move up the agency chain, you start getting those clients that had the bad website person And then they come to you and their budget’s a little bigger and you give them the good website. And that’s the normal life cycle of the WordPress ecosystem, I think.
[00:23:23.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:23:28.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I feel like we touched on it, but I do want to explore the question deeper. You mentioned AI and security and stuff. Just today, I saw where Katie Keith had posted someone had had a problem with their plugin update, and it turned out that they had modified the code with AI. And then, of course, we’re going to her for support, right? So that’s one thing. I also saw last week or 10 days ago where Brad from WebDev Studios was hired to audit a plugin for one of their clients and found over 100 security problems with the plugin. I almost want to phrase it from an agency perspective. We have a customer that comes to us that has a pre-existing website, and you try to do a needs assessment, you try to do discovery. But if people are actually using AI to edit the code in the back end of a plugin, and then that rears its ugly head eight months into a contract, you’re dead in the water and out of luck, right? What are your thoughts on where this is going? And how do you think this might pan out for folks, especially on the agency side?
[00:24:42.760] – Brian Coords
I think AI right now is just what it was maybe eight years ago where we would get clients and they would come in and they would say, Well, we wanted to save money, so we hired this offshore developer in another country that was pennies to the dollar. And nothing against offshore. Obviously, in WordPress, there’s amazing developers around the whole world. That’s not the issue. The issue is just that they were trying to find the cheapest solution, and that person edited the plugin files. I mean, that was a thing that was happening eight years ago. So I don’t think it’s new with AI. It’s just now this is just an easier to access low budget developer.
[00:25:21.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
Just amplified.
[00:25:22.400] – Brian Coords
It’s just, yeah, now we all have access to it. I think on the flip side, every time I think AI has hit a little bit of a ceiling, it cracks that ceiling. So I don’t want to say this is as… Ai is not going to get good enough to do it. It’s already better than the cheap developers. That’s for sure. I think there’s a whole separate question of how much it really is costing and what it’s going to really cost when these companies actually have to start being profitable. But I do think we should expect that AI development is only going to get more and more advanced. But like I said, you do need that human… You need that Brad Williams from WebDev Studios to do the final look at Will we need that in 12 months? That’s another question. So I think what’s going to be interesting is that whether we like it or not, WordPress has always been hackable. It’s always been something where you could crack open the code and edit it. And I think that’s a good thing. And I think what it’s going to be now is it’s up to, I don’t know, hosting companies, product companies.
[00:26:20.690] – Brian Coords
Automatic, obviously, is trying this, which is figuring out a way to make that a safe, reliable thing that you can do, which is, can I open my WordPress site, let AI loose on it, and actually trust that it’s not going to break things, or it’s going to do it in a staging environment or something? Because that’s what people are getting with things like Lovable and Replit, and that’s what they’re getting with these other platforms, like Azure, where they’re developing locally with Claude or something like that. Wordpress is going to have to offer that at some point. I think we’re already seeing it with some of the stuff automatic has, like Telex, which is a little AI that builds blocks for you, these sorts of things. We’re going to see it because it’s not going to go away. And I think it’s just going to be the expectation that, yes, I need anybody should be allowed to ask AI to write some code for you. But if your website is a huge e-commerce store or a membership store where you’re processing payments and all that stuff, then hopefully you’re not doing that. And hopefully you weren’t doing that in the past with cheap developers, and hopefully, you’re not doing it now.
[00:27:21.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:27:22.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s interesting. In the post status, agency calls sometimes, you’ll see where some agencies, they won’t even work on pre-existing projects because they’re afraid of the liability that might come with that baggage. And then there’s other people that are all about it because they’re like, well, whatever you got, I can probably make it better. And so it’s an interesting dichotomy in the way people address, especially what’s happening right now in that space.
[00:27:48.400] – Brian Coords
Well, software feels intangible because nobody knows how much work it really takes to build a website. Nobody knows how much code was really written. The code itself in the software, your clients have no idea. They come to you with an idea. They go, That’ll take 5 hours, right? And you’re thinking, No, that’s 50 hours. It’s just hard for them to wrap their head around. But they’re now going to think, Well, it’s going to take 5 hours because you have AI. I know that for a fact. They’re going to feel that the code itself is not as valuable. So you really do have to come with the other expertise, which is, I think, what people have been telling agencies all along. You got to have the marketing expertise. You got to have the structural expertise. You got to know how to set things up. Because one of the things that shocks me sometimes is there are Woocommerce stores that are huge, huge volume, huge payment volume. And they don’t even have a developer. The owner of the business just goes in and clicks update on the plugins and hopes for the best. And they’re processing thousands of dollars an hour.
[00:28:51.080] – Brian Coords
And you’re thinking, with all that money coming through your store, you don’t want to just maybe hire one developer part just to keep an eye on it for you or something. Something. It’s crazy, though.
[00:29:03.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
But that does speak to the reliability and stability of it.
[00:29:07.160] – Jonathan Denwood
But do you think they really understand what they’re in, or do you think they think in some way they They’ve got a version of Shopify. Do you think they really understand and they’re just tight? They basically don’t want to spend the money, or do you think it’s a mixture of both? Or what do you think? That’s amazing what you’ve just said.
[00:29:30.000] – Brian Coords
I mean, it must be a cost-benefit analysis to them, which is like, how much downtime might I cost myself by breaking a setting or something versus how much it would cost? If it was me. I’m the person where I value my time more than my money, and I’d rather pay somebody to do a certain thing. Some people, they’re the opposite. They just want… They value their money more than their time, and they’re willing to put the time in. I don’t know. It’s interesting.
[00:30:01.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, that was an insight. I think it’s been a good discussion, folks. We’re going to go for our middle break. We got some other fabulous questions, topics to discuss with Brian. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great discussion with Brian. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point something out to you. If you’re looking for a great hosting partner and you’re building a project in the eLearning, in the community space with either Fluent Community, Buddy Boss, Lifter LMS, or LearnDash, why don’t you look at hosting with WP tonic? We offer a lot more than fabulously powerful hosting, we become your true partner. We offer a suite of the best WordPress plugins and technology. Plus, we can consult with you. If you’re anything around the project, we are your true partner. So go over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. So let’s go forth then, Brian. So I think in the next… I just sense in the next year, 18 months, we’re going to go through some of the biggest changes in software and in WordPress that we’ve seen in quite a long time.
[00:31:37.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Probably people are going to get the impression that all they’re going to watch is YouTube, but they might be right, actually. But there’s a couple of people on YouTube that being senior in software development had senior positions and been consultant consultants. They’ve been saying lately with what Claude has been doing, perplexity, that software development is just going to… Where the bottleneck has been in development resources, it’s just going to go away. The pinch point is going to be getting your software in front of the users and basically marketing or building a community or having any of your end users being interested in it. That’s where… But the normal pinch point of development a minimum viable product and then building it out, it’s just going to fundamentally change. I don’t know about that because I just don’t have enough technical knowledge. And then you’ve got other people. Now, I use a lot of AI products. A lot of them that you see reviews and then you spend a little bit of time are at best extremely disappointing. Some have functionality that actually is very interesting. I helps people, but a lot of it is inflated at the present moment.
[00:33:35.160] – Jonathan Denwood
So this has been a very long-winded question, but hopefully you got the patience for it, Brian. What are some of the biggest trends that you think are going to happen over the next year in AI and WordPress and vibe coding in general, where do you think we’re going to be in 12 months, 18 months time?
[00:33:56.540] – Brian Coords
Yeah, it’s hard. Obviously, any prediction, you could be wildly wrong. I don’t think it took me a while to even admit AI was going to get as good as it’s already gotten. I was late to agreeing on that. But I do think I go back and forth on it. Sometimes I’ll see it. I think the guy that made Clawed Code or something tweeted recently that all he’d use is Clawed Code for everything, and Claude Code is going to replace everybody and everything. And it’s like, I I don’t know. It’s like the guy that made Kraft Mac and Cheese saying, I’m on the Kraft Mac and Cheese diet, and everybody’s going to be on the Kraft Mac and Cheese diet. And it’s like, well, yeah, because you’re making a lot of money.. People are trying to That’s going to go away, and it’s definitely we’re going to get better and better developers. And I think that writing code is probably going to be a less profitable thing. But then what’s weird about it, too, is you could go to Facebook or Netflix, and they’ll pay you 400K a year to write code. There’s these over inflated salaries in coding.
[00:35:16.960] – Brian Coords
And you have these companies that don’t make any money. If you go to Claude and you pay per the API, 200 bucks gets you about 10 minutes. If you pay them the $200 a month max plan, you get all this unlimited, but it’s clearly not profitable for them. So there’s all these questions that have to be hammered out.
[00:35:35.740] – Jonathan Denwood
But they’re intangibles, aren’t they, Brian?
[00:35:38.160] – Brian Coords
Yeah, that we’re not going to know. But do I think that humans are going to be sitting down writing code? Probably not. But I also think in WordPress, a lot of people weren’t writing code the last five years.
[00:35:49.160] – Jonathan Denwood
We discussed the thing about vibe coding, building a whole website for you, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. But then, do Do you think vibe coding and lovable and some of these other… They’re coding editors on juice, basically, aren’t they? In your heart, do you think it will accelerate the software development process considerably.
[00:36:23.240] – Brian Coords
Yeah, absolutely. I think that writing code has never really been the bottleneck, though. That’s not When I look at WordPress or something, the problem isn’t that people aren’t writing enough code. It’s that they’re not solving the user experience problems to make the software better. They’re not marketing it, growing it enough. It’s all these other things. Honestly, you could give someone 100 developers and get them writing more code, and maybe you’ll ship a bit more features, but that’s not really the problem. So yes, it’s going to definitely mess with people who just write code for a living. But right now, I still think we’re in a good place where And I think your expertise is really valuable. And I think if you have expertise for setting up sites, setting up complicated workflows, for working with businesses, helping them optimize their marketing, all this stuff, I think it’s only going to… You’re You’re in a good place right now because you just basically have access to cheap, free, subsidized labor, and you should be able to sell that. And I think WordPress needed this because we had a wave of, I think mobile design was the big wave of WordPress.
[00:37:31.770] – Brian Coords
It was like, get your site mobile responsive. I need a new website. And everybody got a new website, and we built all these responsive websites. And in the last few years, it’s been not the best for agencies. Everybody’s been feeling a little stagnant. Now, here’s a whole new crop of things that people think they need for their website. So I think it’s going to be really great for a certain segment of people with certain skills. But I barely write code very much anymore. And I, Claude writes a lot of code for me, and it’s getting very good.
[00:38:05.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you made some excellent points there, but it’s dropped out. Hopefully, it’s coming. Oh, your picture disappeared. All right. No signal, but we continue to see if you…
[00:38:16.540] – Brian Coords
I can switch camera if I need to.
[00:38:18.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. I think you made some excellent points there, Brian. I think I could ask you another impossible question because I haven’t made my mind up. Is AI going to really hit Shopify or let’s say Wix harder than it’s going to hit an open-source project like WordPress on other open-source projects? I wonder where the… Or is the pain going to be spread evenly anyway? Have you got any sense there? Because I haven’t made my mind up there, really.
[00:38:59.260] – Brian Coords
I think what’s nice about WordPress is it’s not like there’s just one company that you have to come or go. And honestly, WordPress, I think, has shown that it doesn’t have to ship a lot of features to stay relevant. It’s not like it’s changed dramatically in the last three years or five years. Actually, I think a lot of people that live in Elementor or something like that, probably haven’t seen anything that’s come from WordPress. Everything to them has come from Elementor or come from their page builder. I think WordPress is fine. I think these big companies have some issues. I’ll switch my camera in a second. But I do think… Let me just switch my camera because I… Yeah, sure.
[00:39:42.660] – Jonathan Denwood
No problem. I just want to say something. You know what you were saying, Brian, about the YouTube influence there and there, and my obsession in watching all these people? I like to point out, folks, I’ve got it playing in the background when I’m actually doing something, is that I don’t even know if these people are for real because they could just be an AI avatar, couldn’t they? I don’t even know if they’re real after these people.
[00:40:14.820] – Brian Coords
I mean, I think, and we’re probably on the cutting edge because we’re in the tech world. I mean, I don’t know if you have a partner or friends or something and you ever open up their Instagram app. It’s amazing how much AI is getting fed through all this stuff. I can’t do that.
[00:40:33.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I can watch some TikTok, but that’s probably even worse. That’s the Chinese government, isn’t it? But talk about AI slot everywhere. There we go. It’s over to you, Kurt.
[00:40:47.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, this is a unique question. I like this one because it lets us know who we’re all paying attention to, right? When we think about some of the individuals in the WordPress community or the outward stretches of the community, are there people that you follow in the WordPress space, or are there people that impress you or that you have really good relationship or admiration for in the space? But that you could give a shout out to that maybe listeners and viewers follow them on X or something after you say the magic name?
[00:41:21.900] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I mean, I think I feel like there’s two very opposite people that I follow the most. Sometimes follow, sometimes you have to mute people for a little bit. That’s just life.
[00:41:34.620] – Jonathan Denwood
I would say- Can you mute me, Brian? I don’t blame you if you’re mute me. I try to mute myself, Brian.
[00:41:40.300] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I’d mute me if I was someone else. I think in the WordPress in the block editing space, I think Mike McAllister, who has the Ollie theme, is worth it because I think he’s carrying that banner forward. I was just working on a site with Ollie. He has so many little nice things he adds to it. Really good.
[00:41:59.560] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m trying I’ve been trying to get him on the show. He did say yes, and then I haven’t heard anything. I will make another attempt to persuade him to come on the show.
[00:42:08.480] – Brian Coords
Yeah, you should get him on. So I think he gives you a good sense of the blockader stuff. And then my complete opposite pick is, I will check in on Kevin Geary every once in a while.
[00:42:21.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Kevin doesn’t like me anymore. He doesn’t like me anymore. He said some nasty things about me.
[00:42:27.880] – Brian Coords
I don’t know if we’re friends or enemies. I’ve met person. He’s a nice guy. I think- He’s not nice to me.
[00:42:34.240] – Jonathan Denwood
He said, I interrupt. I do, though, but there’s element of truth to it. But I’ve got broad shoulders. But yeah, I think he’s gone off me, Brian. But there we go. I think it’s having to do with… I said you’re a troll. I don’t think he liked that, but there we go. But there we are. But no, he’s highly intelligent, and he’s building something in Edge. That’s interesting, isn’t it, Brian?
[00:43:04.940] – Brian Coords
I just think that it’s two extremely opposite approaches. That’s what’s interesting. Edge is you’re going to write a bunch of code yourself and you’re going to completely author everything, and Mike’s like, I’m going to use the full page builder and I’m just going to have everything. I just like seeing the two different… Obviously, different people have different workflows for different reasons and stuff. I feel like I learn the most seeing their two different approaches and stuff. This is just on work stuff, not on anything about personality or anybody arguing about things. As far as what you can learn about WordPress, I think those are two good people to follow.
[00:43:42.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I agree with you. Last question, and you can’t say, Coming on this show, Brian, you can’t say that one. But my last question is, if you could go back to the beginning of your career and you had a couple of minutes to give yourself a quick pep talk, a quick tip insight. What would you say to yourself at the beginning of your career, Brian?
[00:44:07.780] – Brian Coords
I think probably the most important cliché advice, at least for me as a person, this would be different for other people is the like, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I think that when you first start in, I think the first thing you got to start doing is just thinking about how people are going to know you, what they’re going to know you for, if you’re going to make friends, build a network, help people out, be helpful. Just I think the earlier you do that in your career, I think that just makes it so much easier. You could be a really good developer or whatever working in your lane and stuff. But I don’t think if you don’t build that network of people around you and just be a part of something bigger, then I think it makes it a little bit harder later in your career. So I would say that’s the first thing, because at the end of the day, technical experience is only so much. And who you know and who wants to have your back in the community is really important for your career. That’d be my advice.
[00:45:07.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Are you okay to stay on for another 10 minutes? We have some bonus content. So we’re going to wrap it up now for the podcast. So, Brian, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:45:23.260] – Brian Coords
Yeah. So my website is just my name, briancordes. Com, where I try to blog and newsletter I do still hang out on Twitter because it’s the only place where I find WordPress people. And then if you’re interested in what we’re doing at Wu, if it’s developer. Wu. Com has our developer blog and everything that we’re working on and what’s coming in new releases and that stuff.
[00:45:45.650] – Jonathan Denwood
And, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, Kurt?
[00:45:50.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for business, manana nomas. We’re manana nomas. Com, and then manana nomas on all the social channels. And then if you just want to connect person to person, link to LinkedIn is my jam. I’m the only Kurt Von Annen on LinkedIn, so it makes it easy.
[00:46:04.180] – Jonathan Denwood
It does. All right, we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show, folks. You’ll be able to see the main part, the interview and the bonus content by going over to the WP Tonic YouTube channel. If you could subscribe to the channel, that really does support the show. Plus, if you’re listening to this podcast on your mobile device, on iTunes or Spotify, why don’t you leave us a It’s really very easy. You just have to scroll a bit and review comes up and you can leave us a review. I do read the reviews, so if you want to upset me, leave a bad review. That’s very entertaining. I’m sure Kevin will. But there we go. Sorry, I can’t resist it. We’re going to call it a day now. Like I say, we’re going to do some bonus content. We’ll be back next week with another great show. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. So, Brian, what do you sense how Woocommerce is doing versus Shopify? How do you think things are going? Do you think that Woocommerce is losing market share or it’s reasonably static? Or where do you, in general, feel the e-commerce space is going, actually?
[00:47:30.860] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I mean, specifically against Shopify, I think I think Woocommerce has been holding strong. Obviously, it’s just such a different business model that’s hard to compare. They’re 10 or 100X the amount of people and the amount of funding that they have. So it’s very hard to compare. Plus with Shopify, everything goes through Shopify and everything goes through their payment processor with who commerce. The vast majority of who commerce sites, they’re not paying us. They’re not doing… There’s out there running the software for free. So it’s really hard to compare a proprietary SaaS platform to an open source code that anybody can use. But Woocommerce does its best to try to make enough money to continue to fund its development. And so I think it’s good. I think overall, what we’re seeing is that Shopify has a certain side of the market. I think they get those solopreneurs and they get those really run your own business early stage, that stuff. And then I think Wu comes in more popular at these crazy levels where the customization is really important, the scale is important. People that want to run their own servers, run their own stacks, run their own integrations, run their own payment processors is a big one.
[00:48:44.500] – Brian Coords
Gray The market is a big one, too. Things that you can’t do on Shopify. So I think there’s a lot of value. It’s just like two different sides of the market, essentially.
[00:48:54.700] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:48:59.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
What do I reckon for-Well, what do you sense this WuCom versus Shopify? See, you put me on the spot, Jonathan, because I’m afraid I’m going to-I do that regularly, don’t I? I think on newer projects, I just think there’s easier platforms to use than Wu. I think for me to use WU on a client’s project, it’s got to be complicated enough that WU is the right answer. And that’s, unfortunately, that’s not on a lot of what we do. I mean, I do a lot of eLearning stuff with Lifter LMS websites. And so in selling those digital products, it’s rare that I need something heavy and complicated to manage that. The thing where we run into is when they’re in other parts of the world and they need different payment gateways that Woocomers can plug into where a standard Stripe plugin is not going to work. So I tend to see I think adoption might slow down for it unless, and maybe Brian could say this is on the roadmap. It would be awesome if there was a Woocommerce 2. 0 that was lightweight and more direct and easier to set up. That would be awesome.
[00:50:16.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like Woocommerce light and WuCommerce Pro or something. I don’t know what the definition of that is, but I see Wu having a little bit of a struggle.
[00:50:26.920] – Brian Coords
But that’s just me. Yeah, I I think you nailed it where it is. It is the best choice for complicated. I think a lot of where Wu has gone is towards the block editor. And I think being downstream of the block editor is not the best position to be in because you’re waiting for the block editor to get a little more user friendly. And there’s a lot of power in that customization. But again, a lot of people, they don’t want customization. They just want simple. And so it’s just a different value proposition. There’s Conversations about that concept obviously happen a lot internally. There’s obviously a lot of things that get tried internally. It’s a concept that gets talked about a lot, the idea of what would Wu look like if it was started from scratch or if it was a simplified version of it. I don’t think you can take Wu commerce as it is now and just start pulling things out because every single thing in it, somebody wants and somebody uses. It’s the same issue that WordPress has. There’s a lot of stuff in WordPress that I think we don’t need anymore, but you can’t take it out.
[00:51:32.440] – Brian Coords
It doesn’t work that way. I think it’ll be interesting to see what is coming in the next year and stuff. I also think AI is changing a lot of it, because a lot of what people struggle with in WooCommerce is that the user experience is a little dated. I’ll go into that single product edit screen, and I was just talking to James Kemp about this yesterday. I was like, We got to clean this thing up. It looks like 2005 software. But at the end of the day, I was setting up some Woos stores, and I didn’t… Honestly, I didn’t even log in. I just had AI do it for me. Connected to my Woos store, here are my products. Turn it into a CSV, bulk-import it for me, turn it into this, and go into all my products to change it. And I think that that’s going to start becoming the user experience, and we might look. Can we look at this now and go like, Oh, remember when we used to log into websites?
[00:52:17.320] – Jonathan Denwood
You just made the fundamental observation that was the theme of this whole, the podcast and this bonus content. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it, pride? You used AI to set up a stall using open source software. That really overcomes one of the major reasons why you might use something like Shopify, wasn’t it?
[00:52:52.860] – Brian Coords
Shopify has some great AI stuff, too. You do have to play in their sandbox. That is part of it. I don’t even know if they have staging sites. I think that’s another weird thing where you are just messing around with life. So I think there are a lot of advantages to our very flexible modular stuff, but it’s about the stuff that has to be shipped. We need a really good way to interact with WordPress using AI. And I feel like that’s why that’s the main goal of the WordPress AI team right now is they’re just so focused on that, and that seems to be where all the energy is, because I do think we have to get WordPress prepared for And Bluecommerce has made that mistake of getting ahead of WordPress, and I think it’s got us like, we have to see it in WordPress.
[00:53:36.580] – Jonathan Denwood
And then-Well, really good because your boss is coming on the show in February. Matt is coming on the show in February. And I will be asking this particular question because I think it leads on. Do you really think… Personally, I think a lot of people disagree with me, but if it’s possible, I think there should be a WooCommerce that is a SaaS, hosted product. If you really want to customize it, you can self-host. But I really feel that when it comes to marketing and building the community in general, if there were a truly SaaS version of WooCommerce, that would really go head-to-head with something like Shopify, or would you totally disagree with me?
[00:54:33.980] – Brian Coords
No, I agree with you. And I think there was something they tried before I worked there, Wu Express, which was similar. I mean, the first thing that happens when you go to WooCommerce. Com is it’s, Hey, where do you want to host it? That’s not a great onboarding experience for somebody. I think the WordPress community would have been a little more upset in the past. I used to argue that WordPress. Org. They should just go straight to. Com, and they should just… Every other open-source project does this. When you go to Laravel, they’re not, Oh, where do you want to… You can host it, but go to ours. If you go to Ghost, it takes you straight to theirs. Marcel, next, all these. They have theirs, and then you can self-host it if you want. I would love to see WooCommerce have that. There has been a lot of internal work to ensure the infrastructure underneath is pressable. Com, it’s called WP Cloud, and I think Bluehost uses it; a few others use it, but the infrastructure underneath is really optimized for WordPress. And so we’re trying to make sure that first we have the hosting so that we are the best place to host it.
[00:55:41.060] – Brian Coords
That hosting is preferred, and we can move closer to that vision, I think.
[00:55:46.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I think about a really successful Wu product I had a year and a half ago with a client, and it was because it was self-hosted, because it was Wu, because there was the add-on I could buy from Poodle Press, and because we ended up making this really cool custom cart. To your point, it didn’t look like it was from 2005. It came out exactly like the client’s Figma dream sheet. They were like, We have this thing in Figma that we made. We think it should look like this. And I was like, So you want to change the way the Internet works? But three months later, we had a working live website that looked exactly the way they wanted, and it worked. And the engine behind Wu handled all sales and automations perfectly.
[00:56:34.120] – Brian Coords
And I’ve seen Wu sites that send you to a Shopify checkout, and I’ve seen Shopify sites that send you to a Wu checkout. There’s a Shopify integration for WordPress that imports all your products, and you use WordPress for the design layer. I mean, people do it every single way. So there’s no world where there’s that ever gets taken away from the community. But I mean, I’m with you on the, I would love to see a WU SaaS personally.
[00:56:58.940] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s to me, it’s totally logical. And I think, in general, the community would much prefer that somebody go to WUSAS on the SaaS version, and then when they want customization, they look at a self-hosted solution. I would rather the revenue went to automatic than to Shopify.
[00:57:28.580] – Brian Coords
Yeah, I agree with that.
[00:57:30.560] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. I think we’re going to end it now, folks. It’s been a great discussion with Brian. We will be back next week with another great guest. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
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