Why Your Agency Needs to Embrace AI  Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm your host Eric Karkovac. Today's episode features a segment of my interview with Brad Williams. Brad is the partner and co-founder of WebDev Studios. Now to hear the entire interview, check out our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit us over at thewpmin.com for details and to become a member. Thanks and we'll see you next time. This is a great way to test it, right? Especially as a developer is have it build a set a plugin with a settings page. Um, and that was how I generally will test AI code to see what it does because if you've done any development WordPress and plugins and setting pages, there's about 50 different ways you could do this, right? Um, there is like one recommended way which is use the settings API. Um, and a lot of the responses and things that would come back from chat GPT, from Gemini, um, other things would be the old way. It would be either using the you know add settings you know update setting or update options I think it is functions like the direct functions to work with settings blah blah blah rather than the settings API which does all the escaping all the sanitizing does all that for you right where this other method does not so if you're not including that extra stuff now you're you know potentially compromise so test it out give it something that you know what it should do you know what the right answer is and tell it like test these things out and see if it comes back wrong that oh maybe this isn't the tool Maybe it's the prompt or the way that you set it, right? Like making sure that you're um really instructing it. That's the cool thing about cursor and some of these other platforms. You can kind of give it like a I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like an instruction file and it's basically setting the stage for this bot so it understands what it is and how it needs to work. And it's like saying you're a you know an expert level WordPress developer. You follow the WordPress coding standards linked to the standards. You follow these PHP standards linked to the you know, you give it these instructions so it knows who it is and how it needs to act. the the standards it needs to follow and then it really tightens up what it's doing. Right now it knows I'm a expert level WordPress. I'm gonna follow all these standards, right? Here's the whole documentation I can go off of, you know? So, it it gets super sharp once you start feeding it those those rules rather than just saying code me something and chat GBT and it's like, okay, and it spits out something completely wrong. So, always trust but verify, but I like to challenge it sometimes when I know what the answer should be. See >> what it comes back with. It's interesting. Yeah, I I've uh taken to running anything I generate through plug-in check, which is what the uh the official plug-in repository uses to s to check against security and best practices and things like that. And I'm always amazed at how many things come out unescaped. Uh you know, and so that that's kind of like, you know, the the um the process of kind of going through that and just verifying that, okay, now I can look at this and say, okay, this isn't secure. I've got to I I've got to fix this. Don't go straight to production, please. Just >> check it first, >> put it on a staging site and then see what it does. >> Yeah, I mean that that's exactly it. Trust by verify. Um, you know, make sure what it's producing. Always Yeah. Never do it directly in prod. Always dev, always staging. Work in local environments. Um, you know, these systems are smart and they they can learn, right? Like so they can learn over time. They can understand your team's processes, your processes, your coding, your own coding standards, right? It doesn't just have to follow WordPress. You might have your own tweak on those standards and you just feed it all that right and train it to be your coding assistant your you know we always what we call the rubber duck right like you have that rubber duck when now you got AI you can rubber duck with AI say hey something's not right here I'm not quite sure you know what's going on what do you think and it's pretty wild um it's fun though it's it's just a new way of coding you know and I think people either honestly you need to get on board or or you're going to get passed at this point from from development again it's not there to replace you but if you're not using these tools to help accelerate what you're doing and do some of the more routine monotonous stuff. All your all your peers are right. So, it's going to catch up to you at some point. >> Yeah. And you're pretty happy with the time you save, I think, too. I mean, it it it has made my day a lot easier. I know that. So, I it's something that, like I said, every level should probably be uh digging into this deeply now. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and we haven't talked about the marketing angle of it, right? Like all the emails we get now, like it's even more and there's there's they're getting so specific like, "Hey, I saw you worked on this project at that blah blah blah." like it's just scraping your LinkedIn and autogenerate like but they're getting smarter, right? They're getting smarter in what they say to try to get you to interact and be like, "Wait, how'd you know that?" you know, it's all coming through these AI systems, you know, and that's that they're just getting smarter because they can figure out the data and what you want to read or what you want to, Why Your Agency Needs to Embrace AI, YouTube, 01kbd3hts2mmfztzbszrr8k2f7.