Popping the WordPress Bubble  All right. I said I wasn't going to remark on this, but I think I'm going to because why not. So, there's a uh LinkedIn post by this guy Jay Owen. I won't link to it, but you can search for him. It starts out with his, of course, clickbait intro written for LinkedIn, probably assisted by AI considering he has a join my AI conference banner on his profile. We're done with WordPress. Our agency is abandoning WordPress development this year for a full AIdriven workflow. I don't even know what that means. Probably written by AI. Then I took to uh Twitter to remark on this because this was uh posted by Jeff Chandler and of course friend of the show Mark Samsky says it's nuance and I sort of agree with this mentality. Well young Mark and others here's my thoughts. WordPress has never been the catch-all tool for everything. And if you think we're living in this bubble where it has been promoted in that fashion, I would say, well, you're in the bubble of WordPress agencies and freelancers who are constantly talking about it and wanting it to be a better tool for XYZ, whatever XYZ means to them. It's either a blogging platform, a true content management system for the enterprise, a professional website builder tool. It's the unfortunate and fortunate thing of WordPress is it just doesn't have that one lane. And you can sit here and debate what your favorite page builder is and what WordPress should be doing from a page building perspective. But the beauty of WordPress is that you can crack it open and at its essence, we're publishing words on the internet. Okay? We're getting content out there. we're getting our message out there and then WordPress has of course its own way of doing things on with with of course the Gutenberg project the editor the site editor and how they want you know to build sites but its essence is an open source tool to put stuff on the internet and when I hear people say that you know we're we're trying to force feed WordPress into into everything I would have to say that maybe it seems that way from a particular perspective or a particular vantage point. Once again, if you're hearing this stuff at word camps and in WordPress communities and in WordPress podcasts and in WordPress YouTube videos, well, you're watching a WordPress YouTube video and I'm listening to a WordPress podcast and going to a WordPress conference. So, yes, it's going to seem like you're in the bubble, but you're literally on the home court of the piece of software. When I was an agency owner, the solution wasn't always WordPress. Granted, that was 10 years ago. I'm hoping that 10 years forward that people say WordPress isn't for everything. However, if you have a website, e-commerce platform, membership product you're trying to build, maybe WordPress is the solution. And then there's like the 10% maybe even 1% outer edge. Do you need some kind of intermediary app to develop to write and and curate and publish content to which it's then distributed out to other platforms like mobile apps and other headless systems? Well, maybe WordPress is a solution for that. Maybe you need a donation site, a nonprofit site. Maybe WordPress is a solution for that. And when I see people say that we're in a bubble or WordPress is not the AI forward solution moving forward, well, a few things come to mind. Number one, the bubble thing. Well, I think I just answered that. like you're in a WordPress community. We're all talking about WordPress, but the onus is up to the agency owner and the freelancer to say maybe WordPress isn't the right solution. So, it's not a particular bubble that we're creating. It's maybe a bubble that people are perceiving because when I was that agency owner and somebody came to me with a particular project and it didn't fit, we didn't build it. And since the core competency of my agency was WordPress design and development and support, we didn't recommend another tool. I'm sure there are agencies out there um like my good friend good friends at uh at uh Barrel Holdings which has a ton of different like agencies in their portfolios. Well, they have WordPress solutions, they have Shopify solutions, they have web flow solutions. So, if you're going to an agency like that that is multiddisciplinary, then maybe another solution comes out. And I said this in a tweet. If you're an agency owner and you're trying to take on a project that you're unsure that WordPress can solve and you're shoehorning that solution into WordPress for the sake of doing it in WordPress because that's all you know potentially you're harming your business. And the same goes for if you're rolling out that project for a customer and you're giving that customer WordPress, you're doing your customer a disservice. I'm going to remark on the uh AI stuff that this J guy mentioned a little bit, but I think what we're really missing the point on here is we must educate the freelancers and hopefully by the time they're they go from freelancer to agency owner, even if it's a boutique agency, two, three people, 10 people, by that time they've they've realized I've leveled up my business. I understand what works for the business. Therefore, I can serve this group of customers. In other words, take care of yourself first. When the oxygen ma mask drops, put it on yourself first so you don't pass out before you try to get it to the person next to you. WordPress has never been, no one has ever said, "Oh, you're trying to build some kind of, you know, registry app that connects to government APIs and some kind of uh commercial ERP system and it has to have uh mobile readiness and interactivity on all." No one has ever said like, "Oh, you should use you could use WordPress maybe, but no one has ever said, oh, certainly WordPress solves that. So, we have to understand what the abilities are, no pun intended, of WordPress as the freelancer/ agency owner. Take care of your core competency first to build a healthy business. Understand which lane you can serve through WordPress. And if you want to become multi-disciplinary, then you can learn another technology stack alongside that. First thing that comes to mind is a Shopify or a web flow. There are agencies out there that once they scale the business of WordPress, they go, "What's next?" Okay, maybe we bring in Shopify. Maybe we bring in Web Flow. Maybe we bring in Woo Commerce, right? As like a whole other thing. Just because you know WordPress doesn't mean you know Woo Commerce, you know, depending on who you are and how long you've been in the business. Get grounded in the business first. Then understand at some point of of scale, have I scaled to the point where I can no longer grow with this solution and now I must bring in other streams of revenue. Therefore, I must learn another technology. Why do people choose WordPress to begin with? I think if you're new to the space, it's easy to criticize people that just say, "Oh, you're just picking WordPress because you're a fan, right? You love this stuff. Uh you're just you're you're you're tied to the old ways, right?" Is as one of the remark that Jay Owen has said again. And and he retweets his or not retweets, he reposts his LinkedIn post where he says, "209 comments and climbing. Here's what I learned." Yeah, you what you learned was you're doing a great job at marketing, right? It's always the case, right? It's always the case. Salacious comments, um, you know, get all of this stuff. And of course, because people are people love to beat WordPress is a big target. It's so easy to just stand on the corner and spew a negative tone. That's not the best phrase right there, but a negative comment or some kind of like, you know, this or that and for people to pile on to it, especially when you bring in AI. But he says the future, I don't know exactly how this play out, nobody does, but I know that clinging to the old way because it's a familiar because it's familiar is the fastest way to become irrelevant. Sure. Sure. Yes. Fine. Clinging to the old ways. But what does clinging to the old ways mean? it. I mean, it's just as confusing as, you know, we're dropping WordPress for a full AIdriven workflow. You could have a full AIdriven workflow with WordPress. So, whatever. It's just marketing speak. But people often look at go, "Oh, WordPress is 20 years old. People are stuck in the past." Am I the first one to criticize leadership and where the software has gone? Yes. But I am also, by the way, the one that also supports WordPress to those people who are just like, "WordPress sucks. So clinging to the old ways is one phrase, but here's the other phrase. WordPress is open source. There's a debate going on with Mullen WG and DHH and Jason Freed of Base Camp for their new product Fizzy or Frizzy. It's a it's a Trello like solution. It's open source, but you can't, you know, I'm just paraphrasing here. It's under a license where you you cannot host it and compete with I guess Base Camp or you know the original creators however that license is worded and Matt saying well this is not the true essence of open source but it's a flavor of open source. I will take an open-source thing and appreciate the fact that it's open source so that I can at least see what the code is doing and understand the code and maybe I can build on top of that. Um, and maybe I can just understand how my data is being managed and, you know, how the system is understanding, you know, the the the content and the data in it. I mean, I can appreciate that. It doesn't have to be this pure WordPress GPL approach, which by the way is, you know, an interesting statement after all that's happened. WordPress is chosen because it's open source and it's not for the the fact that it's just, oh man, you're just you just want this open source thing, man. No, it's for exactly what I just said. People want to know what's happening with the code. They want to be able to understand it. They want to be able to build on top of it. And they want to want the idea of this future iteration. I understand things are slow. we're not getting the features that we want. But all of that is because of everything I said before because it is open source and it does take time because there's a bunch of people doing this thing. There's a safety net there depending on where your what your business needs are, what your values are. And a in the face of AI, sure, you can write code that's available. But only you and the AI and the LLM at that time wrote that code. 20 years of WordPress, as messy as it is, at least has a paper trail. And at least we can see where the decision makers are and see the conversations that are happening and understand how we got to XYZ point to a degree. Which leads me to the next point is continuity. There's this a Owen says, "I'm just drive. I'm never building with WordPress again. I I can just go to AI. I can whip up a site." Great. And every time you do that, you're going to make a new solution for the next customer. Customer comes in, I'm go, hey, I'm going to do the same thing. You can write all the clawed code project files that you want and all the instructions that you want. And sure, yeah, it might get better and it might code a site exactly how you want it to code it the next time, but it's still stuck within your agency. Now, I'll eat my socks if you tell me in the future we have project file standards that come out, right? Where there's like an open source movement of of standards where 100% of the time the code that is written is written to that standard because that's what WordPress is. When you install it on a 100 sites, it is the same to the decimal point to the tab space in the file, it is the same. And there's that continuity aspect that amateurs just don't understand. Or if you're J and you're just, you know, trying to hype the AI train. So people are picking this for that continuity. And you can say that, oh, AI can do it. I can train it. I can write it the same way. It's only going to be within your organization. Clients hopefully choose WordPress because there's a tiny bit of an insurance there, that continuity where they say, "I'm going to hire ABC firm. They're going to build my website." But I know if ABC firm screws it up or I want to leave uh I'm out of their contract, they don't perform well, I can take my WordPress site and bring it to XYZ firm and they can build on top of it. Yes, there's going to be some, you know, I can't believe they built it this way. That's not how we would have done it. like every, you know, contractor and landscaper and plumber and electrician that comes to your house and criticizes the last guy that was at your house, they're going to say that too in WordPress. I get it. But the core is WordPress. And that's the assurance, insurance, and continuity allinone. So when you're just building stuff in your company, at least in the year the end of 2025, you're only building it for within your walls. And how does how do you train a team? Go back to sustainability of your business. How do we go and train your team to say, "All right, I'm the agency owner and to improve profits and speed and rapid deployment and to keep up with the breakneck speed of the technology space. We will now use claude code to build all static sites moving forward. How do you train the team to support that?" Because the website for the amateur, the amateur sees it and goes, I need to build a website for this person and give them a website and they can ship it and they can do their thing and move on. The website is for hopefully the length of your support contract, but also for the next person that comes in and takes over the website, whether that's the customers, employees, if you're selling into a bigger business and they're not just a mom and pop shop, or your own your own team to come in and support that site. If there's a support issue with the site, the site is down, there's some kind of security thing, it's running slow, how do you how do you build that team? Oh, I'm just going to run agents against everything. Okay, fine. That's what you that's what you want to do. But good luck telling that to the customer who's knocking on the door going, "Hey, the site's still down." And you're going, "I'm just waiting for the next release of ChatGpt and it'll just get better. the amateur can look at this thing and go, "WordPress is old. WordPress doesn't have all the things. I can build this. Look how fast I can build this with with AI." And I'm a I'm trending to the more positive side of at least coding with AI. But it's certainly not replacing the backlog of 20 years, thousands of people that have built an open source tool which allows more movement, uh, more collaboration, more longevity than just like the best LLM that's being shipped right now. And by the way, once again, I don't know what a full AIdriven workflow means to Jay. Owen, but the abilities API is supposed to help them, right? So, if you're just sitting there going, I WordPress isn't doing anything with AI. Well, they are, and they only started 6 months ago. And don't forget of the disaster we had at the end of 2024 going into 2025. So yeah, like I said in another episode, give WordPress and yourself some grace because look how far we've come basically in the back half of 2025. Now, I don't know if I fully agree if WordPress should be, you know, going into like where the thoughts are with abilities API and how much AI is going to control that. You know, I got to see how it all plays out. But if you just look at the essence of open source commented code is obviously open source and public. So yeah that helps with AI. There's a lot of like community forums that I'm sure AI can scrape has scraped to help its understanding of how to develop with WordPress. So those things sound particularly good. I I don't know if you've ever done this with AI. I mean, everyone say, "Oh, Chad, have you seen this nano banana? Look how great great these graphics are. You can make these photos." Okay. I I I mean, I spend a lot of time in AI and yeah, I can make some good-looking photos the first time. And you see this too with AI coding. Your first oneshot app, oh man, it's pretty awesome. But poof, it's like 20% off. That 20% is nearly the hardest. Like that is the hardest part. Like it can write 5,000 lines of code in one shot and you're like, "Oh my god, look how cool this is. But now I just got to tweak this." And then as soon as you start to do that, it starts to devolve. You know, if you don't, you know, if you're trying to make these big changes, same thing with like photos. I've seen this happen where you start to continuously prompt it and it just starts getting worse. So, like I think on the AI stuff again, at least in December 2025, the first shot is fine and then when you start to iterate on it and it's constantly like building off of its own, I don't know, data set or whatever you want to call it, it gets worse. I can't see a future of supporting uh the same AI app or the same AI solution and it getting better. I mean these things aren't thinking right everybody realizes that like AI isn't thinking it's being trained like we all see that keyword right yes the models get trained better with more information and they get more efficient and while the chat system feels like you're chatting with somebody thinking it's really just quickly comparing and disseminating what answer you want based on the prompt that you gave it and the instructions and so forth. So until it's actually thinking and learning, which I don't know when that is. I thought it was supposed to be like 3 years ago, then a lot of this stuff is still at the at the mercy I don't know if that's the right word of the training data going into it. We don't live in a WordPress bubble. Let me take a step back. We live in a WordPress bubble be of those of us who want WordPress to win. Yes, that is the bubble on the commercial side where you're making your money. If you're living in a WordPress bubble, you're doing yourself a disservice. If you're in the bubble to make WordPress better, that's fine. That's what the community is all about. On the outside, certainly look at other solutions. Do I think you replace AI or you replace WordPress with a pure AI approach? Absolutely not. If you're Jen and you're trying to sell tickets to an AI event, sure. It sounds good. If you're trying to sell seats to your membership course that teach you how to build stuff with AI, yeah, sounds good. And hey, I'm not even mad about that. I'm just here to support WordPress. Anyway, it's the WP Minute. Oh, no. Actually, this is the Matt Report. It's the Matt Report. Thanks for listening. If you want to follow the WordPress stuff that I got, go to thewpmin.com., Popping the WordPress Bubble, YouTube, 01kcpksgyjgqkntht0xv8crq1e.