[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 372 entitled Alex Borto discusses AI integration in WordPress development.
It was published on Thursday, the 9th of May, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few little bits of housekeeping just before we begin.
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Well, what have I got for you today? Well, it's a chat with a lovely chap called Alex Borto. He is behind several ventures in the WordPress space, wpmarmite.com, but also WP Turbo Dev. That's a project which is using AI to assist you with your WordPress workflow.
Now there's loads of talk about AI in the WordPress space, but it's really nice to see a WordPress specific tool.
We talk about the journey that Alex has had getting to the point of building WP Turbo Dev. What does it do? How can it help you? How does it integrate with popular themes, plugins to enable you to write nice, clean, simple code? It's a really brilliant project. I really highly recommend that you listen to this because, if you're looking for ways of, well in air quotes, short-circuiting your WordPress development flow, and you're looking for help with writing code, then this will certainly be good for you. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by Alex Borto. Hi there, Alex.
[00:04:18] Alex Borto: Hi Nathan. Nice to meet you. Very glad to be here.
[00:04:20] Nathan Wrigley: I'm so pleased we've, we've actually been trying, a little while. We had a few sort of mishaps and, scheduling things, but we've made it, we've actually got to this episode. I'm very
[00:04:29] Alex Borto: Here we go.
[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. thank you. And this episode is gonna be all about ai. It's gonna really bind to AI in WordPress, but they'll also be, A general chat, I think at the beginning about AI in general. Just so that we're recording this at the very start of 2024. It is mid-January, and there's almost no subject in which that matters, but I think for ai, you blink and.
Everything has changed. So depending on how long it takes me to get this one edited and put out to the schedule, just be mindful of that, but I don't suppose it'll change so rapidly. Before we begin, Alex, could you just give us a little bit of background about yourself so that the audience, have some understanding of what it is that you do and what your relationship is to WordPress?
you can go in any direction with that.
[00:05:16] Alex Borto: Okay, great, thank you. so obviously I'm French. you may heard that. And I am working with WordPress since 2011. I launched a blog called w marmet.com, which, shares, Back in the day, it was like, teams selections. So I was picking teams on, on many platforms and, and, showcasing, very, like very, much, lot of cellular team selection.
And then I expanded to all the, all WordPress, oral press created, a post like, talking about plugins, tutorials, and so on. And. Day in, day out. And the blog, was very growing in France and it can be very popular and I'm still here in 2 20 24. So I launched many projects, some failed, some succeeded, and, many endeavors.
And today, and a few years ago, I launched the Turbo, which is, another project and and that's it. what can I say more? I'm like a WordPress educator because we wrote several, dozens of tutorials, but also WordPress courses, in French, for now. And yes, we got a decent following.
like we, our YouTube channel is, 67, thousand, subscribers. So only, yeah, only in French, French speaking people. And yeah, it's pretty nice compared for some, other global competitors like the Ute, which is a very huge, but it's a global market. And, yes, we, are, I have many ideas to, to expand, to do more, but, we're so, little time to, to execute.
[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: there's always more ideas than there is
[00:07:24] Alex Borto: Yeah, that's
[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: in the day. Yeah. do you, would you mind, can we just segue just for a few minutes about the French WordPress
community? we didn't really discuss that. We would discuss this, but it just suddenly occurs to me. That would be quite nice. are you part of that? Do you have, do you have meetups in the area where you live? Do you attend, events? How did it go with. COVID and all that where I am in the uk, everything kind of stalled and hasn't really come back
to life. So just wondering what it's like over there in France.
[00:07:52] Alex Borto: I don't have a very local meetup, but in Paris there is several meetups in all major French cities. everyone can participate. And, every year there is a work in Paris and which was what? Europe Just before Covid, and yes, the French community is very, very dynamic and, there is lot of contribution.
Contribution, like the word, the French War Agency, which is which, Jamba, tists address. We, we, which is in, in France and in the. And, we need agency and they're very dy dynamic. And, we have a lot of contributors, translators, people, contributing to documentation. and myself, I, don't contribute that way, but I contribute like, with, I.
Publishing, tutorials, videos and so on. yes, it's very dynamic and yes, with Covid, it's, it stopped. it, everything, froze and it's coming back at, in, 2023, there was like one or two welcomes. it was, in October we had the beer, it's bottle, which is, near the near
[00:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah. It's lovely.
[00:09:21] Alex Borto: yeah, I can, I couldn't, go there, because, of personal, issues. But, it was a really nice event. every people I know that went there was, very, how to say? Very, glad to end there. And, yeah, I guess there will be a, another for Paris World Camp.
I guess it, it was in, April or May, but, if I'm not wrong, it hasn't been announced. Yes. But, yeah, but it's very dynamic.
[00:10:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
we're in a similar situation in that not much has happened. Hopefully. it looks like the talks for Word Camp London for 2024 are happening, so we'll see. Fingers crossed,
but, thank you. Yeah. That wasn't, anticipated, but it was nice to get that little bit of a potted history of the word camp or the WordPress scene in France. Let's talk a little bit more about. Some of the projects that you're working on, I think it's fair to say that specifically, although WP Marmite, we will link to that in the, show notes. You can find [email protected]. By the way. Okay, perfect. Yeah, if you want to consume it in English, forward slash een.
Oh, that's good to know. thank you. that's there, but the endeavor really today is to talk about something that Alex has been working on, for, certainly more than a year, but I don't quite know. You can maybe give us the history of that.
and it is called WP Turbo. It's got a really simple URL to, to remember.
It's WP Tur Turbo. Dev, let me say that again. WP Turbo Dev. If you're anywhere near a computer, just pause the audio and give it a minute. go over to WP Turbo Dev and have a poke around because you'll get far more of an understanding. and then the conversation will probably have more richness to it, if But, do you just wanna summarize what it is, what the project, is about how long you've been doing it? Let's just paint a broad
picture. of what it's like and then we'll get into the weeds.
[00:11:30] Alex Borto: Okay. So at first it was late 2021. I was searching about the internet, about what project Co generator. So you, we all know generate the repeat, which is the, big guy in the space, for a very long time. And some generators were, were premium, some of them were not updated.
and I reach out to, to the guy and I don't remember, his name. He is working in at Elemental right now if I'm not mis mistaking. But, yeah, and he definitely don't, didn't want to update the project because it was too busy. So I was thinking about I launching something similar, but up to date.
And, so this is how the idea came to me and, I, always wanted to. To talk about, workplace development, but, I didn't want to include that in the mite because it's, it was, it's adding, stuff and stuff, and it was, wasn't clear enough for, the audience.
So I was thinking about, stacking, starting a new project. So I was, thinking about which, how can, I. Name this project and, it was a big process and, I almost, bought, like an old, WordPress project. Talking about dev workforce development, but, we, didn't meant, we didn't have an agreement, so I have to start something, brand new.
So I chose that because the idea was to help workforce developers to, to get, to cut the need very fast. So the, was, a, was a very, I, choose that then. And the idea was air. But I, as I'm not an a developer myself, I, I needed someone to, to help me to create that. And just the idea was air, but I was also busy with Uhy mite and, and so on.
And someday some people, reached out to me. And, asked me to write on WP Marmite, and I was not, I wasn't looking for writers, but, I asked him, he, if he was, if it was a developer, if you have developed my skills. He said, yes. And so let's go. So I have a project for you and, this is how the project began.
So it's a guy called Moit, in India. And, We worked, very, hard on this to breed, WordPress generator without ai. it was the goal was, just to create free WordPress generators to help the community and, and be, A great rules for resource to, to help the Yes, the WordPress developers and then AI came out and, we thought that we have to do something about it.
So we, imagine, at first a chat chatbot and then it evolved in the, in a. Editor, with, combined with a chat bot. And then so the, we went type to prop in the chat. The, it, will generate code in the editor and then we are still upgrading and grading and, and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. We are today.
[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: That's perfect. the idea really is to allow people who don't have the skills or the inclination to go out onto Google, for example.
'cause you can probably find a lot of. Almost anything if you are willing to do the spade work. But the enterprise for most people is to do things as quickly as possible.
And so that's the idea here. you have T two aspects, then you've got the kind of human created. snippets, if you like, whereby you can, input what you'd like and presumably there's a much more mechanical thing going on in the background and it will give you the code snippet that matches the requirements that you have. and we can go into what categories and what things you've got. But then also recently then you've decided to step into the AI arena. And we all know. What that means, you've got like a chat bot, you tell it what you want
and you wait for the output to, to come. So there's those two things of which the AI is the more recent bit. Let's, concentrate on the, sort of the more mechanized things, the things that you did in the beginning. firstly, just so that, there are, a whole bunch of free things, but there's also. A paid tier, so that's important to know. But when I first caught sight of your website, what really I liked was the amount of free. quite often you get a bit of free and then most is not free. And I really didn't get that intuition with WP Turbo. I got the impression that there was a really, quite a lot, for free. So that was nice. And then I ended up subsequently purchasing an account and this. Whoa. There's load loads in there, but let's categorize it.
I dunno how you want to break that down by the kind of tasks that you can do. We don't have to touch on everything, but just give us a flavor of the kind
of things that you can do. Yeah.
[00:17:02] Alex Borto: Yes. But, so with, the free workflow generators can help you to generate post types, custom taxonomies, to create some menus, to get the cut to, to have, do some menus. another popular generator on the website is the team that GSM generator where you can specify, all your needs, your colors, your font, your, and so on.
And, you can also have, a starter plugin generator when you can, you, you can add some, some useful features like, or en enable, SVG format and, so on. And, also you have some, dashboard with that generator, but it's like the developer page. And you have then to have, you have to, have, to, to code what you need inside.
But right now you can add. this by ai, which is very, very, much,
[00:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: you do a bit of both? Yeah.
Yeah. Nice.
[00:18:03] Alex Borto: So you can add everything you want. Admin, admin notice, page settings, register styles and scripts. you can also, have some query generator. So the repeat query, the repeat text query, 10 query, user query, common query and, what, Checking the website. You have also WooCommerce generators
[00:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: it keeps going.
[00:18:30] Alex Borto: can, yeah, you can add, a accounts, page tabs, for the my account page. you can remove some fields and the checkout and so on, and, add some currencies, add, address fields, some emails. And we have also two generators.
For Elementor, but it's pretty basic. I, guess we are going to remove it because the AI is, it's more powerful, than the, classical generators. But, that's it. You have also, if you need a plugin, either or time, either generator, we have that in, in store,
[00:19:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so
what Alex has just painted is great, but truly you've gotta go and look because it, there's so much under
[00:19:22] Alex Borto: it's more than 40 for more than 40
[00:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
but the permutation, so you described it and the way it comes across is you go and there's a generator waiting for you. that's true, but what you get is you get, you get to fill in a load of, form fields so you can add things in.
So for example, I've just decided to open for no reason. It was one of the ones that I saw initially, the plugin header generator. okay, let's imagine that's what I want. So I get to name the plugin, I get to give it a URI. I get to name the author, all the usual things, and then I move on and I get to give it a version number.
I get to put in some sort of license information. There's a bunch of miscellaneous fields. There's way ways of sharing it. Then the code is output. then you could copy that to the clipboard. You can download it as a plugin. You can save it in your account. If you've got one, you can add it to a project and then is a whole full on tutorial. Underneath explaining what, it is that, that all of those fields that I've just said do Okay. If you've come across this for the first time and you don't know what this might do, there's a brief description. Then it goes into, explain what all the fields are for, and it does that for all of them.
So it really doesn't leave you behind if you get to a plugin, sorry, a generator. you could go there with the purpose of learning. It's not all about getting the code. It might be that you wanna look at this just to say, what is this even? How does it work? And all of that. So yeah. Bravo's a lot of work gone into this.
[00:20:54] Alex Borto: Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, yes, a lot of work because, but obviously the goal is to rank, on specific keywords, on Google, yes, plugin, WordPress plugin generator and WordPress plugin, either generator and so on. So we have to add some content to the pages in order to rank.
So we, we made a. We made, we made this, yes. But it took a lot of time, but it was, it's not like perfect. We have some things to, to optimize, but I guess it could help a lot of people.
[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: at the risk of being boring, I'm gonna read a lot of what
they, A lot of what's there, right? just. Belt strap in. This'll take a minute, but it's worth doing. So here are some things that you can do. and if I get any of these wrong and I overlap with the pro version, just tell me. That's fine. so you can create, there's a post type generator, a taxonomy generator, menu generator, short code generator, hook generator, WP config, PHP generator. There's a code snippet generator. okay. And we move on. these, so that was all classified under popular. Then we move on to admin generators. Login form, generator dashboard widget, generator.
I'm just gonna stop saying the word generator. I'll just say the first words and then append generator to the end. Admin notice. Meta box, settings page, admin bar, term meta register style. Register script, user role. That's nice. user fee, user fields, child theme, and then we're onto query generators.
WP Query, WP Tax Query, WP Term Query, WP User Query, WP Comment Query. Then we're onto other plugin header, theme header, post status. we say post status, but I'll say status. widget, sidebar, CR job, ad image size, ad theme support. Oh, embed. Provide a Google font. I'm nearly there. then we're onto WooCommerce. Checkout fields, validator, checkout field remover, add new address fields, change subject lines, disable WooCommerce, emails, add WooCommerce currency account page tabs, and I've. There's a couple of elemental ones, but it sounds like they're going away, so I won't mention those, but that's a lot.
You could do a lot of damage.
[00:23:23] Alex Borto: the blue sections there is, and.
[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. I've been Okay. I apologize. Okay, so I could've gone on. but you get the impression there's a lot, right? And, if, obviously, if you are, okay, if you are new to WordPress and you just are trying to acquire, this knowledge, this seems like a really credible. Way of doing that, really credible way of learning this stuff.
And obviously, hopefully Google's picked up on it, but you can go directly to the website and inspect, all of those things that they do and get those for free. you've gotta play around. You'll get the hang of it almost immediately. but so what have you, hidden behind, a paywall?
What are the bits and pieces that you pay for?
[00:24:09] Alex Borto: Yeah, we, so the, at first the provision, had some settings in order to, to simplify, to go faster actually, for generating code because. When you have a project, you're a developer, you need to add some specific, function prefixes, to have your own text domain. So you can set it in the generator if you need.
But if you are, if you want to generate like several, things and and you have to search on my pass. Every time. So it's pretty boring. So we added some settings in order to define, function, prefix, text domain. what else? you have, author ul author, name, CSS class prefix, and CSS ID prefixes.
If you need, if you can define this and then use a generator, it'll use all the, all this data for, to generate your code. So it's pretty fast. You just have to copy, paste in, your visual studio or other code leader, whatever, and then you can, have some project up and running pretty faster.
[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, nice. And so yeah, that just speeds up the process so you can reuse things that you just have to type in each time you did a generator. I get it. Okay. That makes sense. But also, you are able to, and I don't know, I'm guessing that you'd have to pay to, to be
able to save things and store things as projects and, it's almost like you've got your own little cloud of, snippets that you've saved over time.
is that locked behind the paywall as well?
[00:25:54] Alex Borto: N not everything. as a, free member, you can save Snipes, generate the repeat. You can save Snipe, but they're public if you want private snip iPads and projects, so which is projects are, are like, a collection of files like your. Plug something similar or team, you can save this, to your account.
But if you want to stay free, you can save snip and it'll be available publicly.
[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really interesting idea. So that what a great, I've never come across that before. I don't think so. The
[00:26:32] Alex Borto: Oh
[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: is if you want it, if you want it to be private and there's obviously really legitimate reasons why you want
something to be private, but if you don't, if you're just doing something out of curiosity, it's, available.
And what do you have a directory of those that you can search and
[00:26:47] Alex Borto: Yeah, you can, go to the, Snipe, Snipes, page, on the repeatable, and you get, you'll get all the snipes from the users.
[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Got it.
[00:26:58] Alex Borto: EE every, actually it's the, it's everything like, generate wp. So I didn't bring the idea it was, I just, produced the same system, but we just add project on top of that, which are, private by default because they're only available for pro users.
but for the Snipes thing, it's it's just, it's the same.
[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really neat bo business model as well, because in a sense, the people who are piggybacking off your service and using it for free are also helping you to make the service more useful.
To other people. So that's a nice, bit of quid pro quo. you're slapping each other's backs a little bit.
Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating.
so all of that is set. do you have things in that more manual, less a IA setup that you are still working on or the things that are gonna be added in the future? Or is that where it is and where it'll stay?
[00:27:58] Alex Borto: No, that, that's all for now. But maybe we can add some more generators, but I don't have some, I don't have any ideas for now, but maybe with the workplace evolution, maybe we have, we will have. More opportunities in the future, but right now it's, but if you have ideas, you can suggest some general results.
If you think something can be useful to, to add, to the platform, would be a great, would be a very fantastic to, to learn more about that.
[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's
good to know. And at some point at the end, I'll give you an opportunity to say where you can be found. And so anybody listening, I'll put that into the, the show notes as well. Okay. So let's move on to the bit, which is. From the year 2022 onwards, almost nobody is able to talk about anything in technology without saying the words ai, you've obviously decided this is important.
let's, be honest. Writing code sometimes can be incredibly frustrating and a little bit boring. so we get our robot overloads. To, to take on that work for us. How does it work? What is the WP Turbo AI and how does it differ from the new thing, which is WP Turbo Chat?
[00:29:15] Alex Borto: Okay. the, reputable ai, as we said before, is like an editor combined with a chat interface where you can prompt, your needs and then, and, it's connected to open ai, a i and then, it's gonna generate some code. if you need a, I don't know if you need a dashboard widget. If you need something, to, for your, WooCommerce shop to be updated and I don't know, and so on. You can ask and you can ask to, it to generate some snipes, some very simple plugins. and that's it. And then you can also, you need to. Understand a bit, programming because it's not like for complete beginners because you can copy and paste and it could work, but having some dev experience is, it's necessary I guess for now.
For
[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: so you enter like a chat GPT type of interface, staring at it now, and you can prompt it and then the output. Okay. Firstly, rewind. it, is it using, I. gt, is it using open AI's, GPT? So you have an account or do you have to bind your own account with an O? Open ai, API Key. or is it going through your
[00:30:44] Alex Borto: it's going, is it's running, under our, API. But, pro users can put their own, API keys in order to, for example, use GP four. Right now it's the GPT triple per triple 0.5, for all users. And, but if you are a pro users, you can, paste your, a i and use GPT-4.
[00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: how have you found the, I dunno if you've got any data or metrics or just it's anecdotal data. is there a marked difference in what 3.5 returns as opposed to four? people seem to say that four is, was a big, moment. it really did get significantly better, but I, haven't played with it enough to know whether it's worth making that, step.
[00:31:31] Alex Borto: Yeah. that's very different. 3.5 is good, but, the GPT-4 understand better, the needs and, is doing less mistakes in the in code. Yeah.
[00:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so let's just be clear on what you can do. So you can ask it to do something, it will give you something in return. But we are, we're, not saying that this is guaranteed to be right,
but it's, given. Oh, okay. let's rewind. So GPT, chat, GPT in particular, the GPT project OpenAI, is going out and crawling the internet.
And one fabulous benefit of working inside of an open source project is that all of the. The code and the materials, they've all been online, freely available for chat, GPT to consume. Now, if you are working in proprietary software, which was hidden, it wouldn't know, but my experience with using Chat GPT and WordPress is that it is phenomenally good at doing things correctly.
So I guess that's important to say. The code base being open really helped a project like yours take off,
[00:32:47] Alex Borto: yeah. that's really good to the output is very good. And also we have to refine it to, and to help it to, in order to give it, like the, last documentation in order to use the, best practices, for coding. But, yes, it's definitely a huge, huge advantage to use ai, as a, developer.
[00:33:12] Nathan Wrigley: So you ask it a question, it outputs the code. It's, a fairly obvious interface. There's like a chat area, on the right of
your screen. It occupies, a, I dunno, aqua a, a fifth of the screen or something. Whereas the majority of it is given over to a text editor where you get to see, the output and what have you. and my understanding is also, and this is something which I think is quite important, is keeping a history. As well. I, if you, I don't know, you wander off and close the computer down, you can come back into your account later and you can keep track of what you did over time. I know that sounds trivial, but it's easy to forget that you were halfway through something and you don't want to go through it all.
So that's quite nice. Does, can you keep delving into things and asking it to go back and repeat things? that it's already done. for example, if I put a snippet in and. Tell it to do a particular thing, and then I realized that it's done something, but I want to add something into it to improve it a little bit or expand its capability. Is that possible? can you, for example, use words like, run that again, but do this thing as well? Does it work in that way?
[00:34:19] Alex Borto: Yeah. Yeah. it can work, but sometimes you can lose some, some code, but you can ask the, p to, to write, the whole code, if you need, if, some, if, if some code were generated and rest. but you can ask the, it's conversation that every Like for charge GPT, you can ask to, to make a summary.
You can ask to every, everything you need. And, but at some time we are going to update the, feature in order to, for example, to add something like just for one place, not to regenerate all the code, but to adjust what you need. if you need a specific function, it'll not.
Rewrite everything and just add the function you need or the features you need, even if it's a small thing. But right now it's pretty good. But, as, some users are telling us the still need to work with. Visual Studio Code or any editor, on the computer to, and do copy, some copy pasting.
So it's pretty, it's it's like something pretty, pretty sad to, to do right now, but we are working on it in order to, improve the, overall experience in order to get something, working, fine. as the chat, continues.
[00:35:56] Nathan Wrigley: I've just asked it to do something whilst you were giving that answer. And it was, it was really cool watching it happen, so I asked it, I, won't bore you with what I asked, but I said do this. and it was create a WordPress plugin and then I gave it some things to do and so I. What's quite nice is the interface, the, fact that it's the interface is split up is really nice because my, only experience with chat GPT typically, has been in the interface and I expect that's the case for a lot of other people.
So it splits the chat itself. So the code gets output in the editor.
And then the conversation carries on in the chat next to it. So that's quite a nice separation of, things. And, it did it, it did, and I'm just scanning through it and as far as I can tell, it's about 40 lines of code and I, the quick
scan that I did, it checks out.
It should work perfectly and then quite helpfully. And I love that it does this. on the right hand side it says, the code snippets. There you can go and look at, it's on the left, and then it explains what all of the different variables and functions and hooks and filters are one by one. And it highlights them to show how they map to the, content.
So this is a, this is genuinely. Not only was the generators that we looked at earlier, not only were they a great way of learning 'cause of your SEO copy,
but this is a really nice way of learning as well, because you can put things in here, you don't have to use them ever. You could just make it a learning exercise, like show, build me a plugin that'll do this. You could put a local site together, test out, see if it works, see if you can refactor it. And there's a nice explanation as well. So it strikes me, this is a really credible way of learning.
[00:37:35] Alex Borto: That's it.
[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: well.
[00:37:38] Alex Borto: yeah. Because the, right now, the repeatable AI is, we actually, we scraped, all the WordPress documentation in order to, have the latest, the latest, best practices. So it's based, it'll pick on the documentation in order to generate code. So yes, if you want to learn, you can, you can ask WP and you can, You can learn some workplace development.
[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: What's quite nice as well is, and this, you may even miss this if you're using the interface at the end of the chat just before the, area where you begin writing, there are a bunch of, Prompts, which you can then ask after you've c created code, which might actually be really helpful.
So for example, it says, check this for security issues. And you type in that and it obviously creates a, I guess a, boilerplate prompt or something to, ask that question of check GPT. And then it goes into, to, that, it explains what's going on there. one of them is simply add comments to the code, and you click that button and off it goes.
And it's. Just done it in real time. It's added comments to the code, so that's really helpful. add type hints to the code. Make the code more readable. Okay, interesting. chunk the code into smaller functions. Add document, add documentation to the code. This is extraordinary. Okay. Explain this code to me.
I think we've probably went through that one a little bit. add error handling to this code. And so I dunno if they're contextual based upon what you did or if they're
always the prompts that you get,
[00:39:11] Alex Borto: they're always there for, but maybe in the future we can adapt this and, yes. Yeah.
[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: But that's perfect. So it, if you're out of ideas, you can just click the buttons and it'll give you some more help.
Okay. so the bottom line is if you haven't experimented with AI and WordPress and you're curious, this really does strike me as a very credible resource, for using, what do you have? I know that you've touched on it a little bit, but do you have roadmap features which you're thinking of adding? In the next, I don't know, three, six months, a year, whatever.
[00:39:48] Alex Borto: yeah. But as I told before, we need to build something in order to not ate all the code, of, which, after each prompt, is sent to the reach w repeatable, it'll be really nice to have something like, to add just the right function to the right place, without originating, regenerating every, everything.
Also, when we are thinking about. multi file generation
[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:40:20] Alex Borto: if you can create a plugin with I don't know, like CSS assets and GSS and, maybe the plugin can have some several, PHP PHP files, but it. It couldn't build like a, you can, you couldn't say, you can say, build me a form plugin.
It'll be too complex. But for simple demands, it could be really interesting to, to split the, content and several files. and right now we are adding some integration in order to have some best practices. popular teams and plugins. right now we have elemental included.
We have D dv, we have bricks, and we have a CF pro. And, we are thinking about adding, other, page builder like breakdowns, but also WooCommerce. And we have many programs to, integrate, with. But, we are adding new features, on a good daily of, on a regular basis. Yes.
[00:41:29] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing that if you're putting so much effort into this, and I dunno how to phrase this question, but I'll just ask it. is it working out as a commercial platform, is it working out for You is there enough interest in this for you to think, yeah, this is gonna be going for years and years?
or are you still what's the word, bootstrapping yourself. How is it, commercially successful yet or are you still waiting for that moment to
[00:41:56] Alex Borto: it's coming, it's better and better. it's, we are not, breakeven yet, yet, but, it's, it's very interesting. The, growth is very growing. almost like. 10 new peoples are signing up, every day for free accounts. so yeah, we are, it's really, and right now we have 2,200, free, all members, free and, pro, let me check the exact number, but yes, it's.
do I? Yes. Two, 2002 and 40 exactly. Right now. So bus free and paid and about paid members. We are like, it's like a quarter of it right now.
[00:42:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's great. that gives us confidence to go and play with it some more, doesn't it? Because, obviously to think that it's, if it's tipping towards profitability,
the moment it hits, that is the moment where you can really delve in, can't you? You
can, surrender other things and do other, do less elsewhere and concentrate
on this. I think that's more or less everything I wanted to ask in terms of the plugin. Just before we end, just let's segue one little bit. How do you feel about the, sort of impact on AI in the job market and things like that? 'cause obviously here we are talking about how great this is and, how wonderful it is and how time saving, but there's. There's gonna be an impact at some point. if, the code that we've all been used to writing for clients and our own projects can now be done by an ai, what are your thoughts on that in terms of how it might shrink the amount of work that's available specifically in the WordPress space,
[00:43:42] Alex Borto: I guess he's gonna, he's gonna, I guess he's gonna or some recalibrate, some tasks because, developers have to do some boring tasks and AI can do that. So they can focus on very, on very, How to say, very, impactful, work. Yeah. more important work and more difficult I guess.
But, AI Rhino and you, even if you can generate some basic plugins, if you want to do something more complex, you still have to be a developer, a very good developer to. To imagine the structure, imagine to the, hierarchy of how to organize your software. So it's, AI can definitely help, but you still need to, to be a developer to, in order to, do something very complex.
But I. It's gonna evolve too. So, as, we were talking just before the show, about, writing, AI and writing and some journalists, we are leading off to in order to be replaced by ai. So developer just will have to up their game in order to stay relevant. But,
[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: adapt adaptation, I guess
is the key. and very final question, about, and then we'll move on to who, you can give out your email and things like that. What do you keep your eye on? Rival ai. So what I mean by that is, GPT-4 seems to be the one that everybody's talking about, but I'm, assuming that there are, commercial rivals, Google and all these other Anthropic and what have you with their different rival things. do you keep an eye on that and, would you move over to something different if it became obvious that one of those other companies was pushing ahead temporarily? Maybe offer a choice of different ones if you wanted to.
[00:45:37] Alex Borto: Yes, we are, just, keeping, an i a at. But, maybe we will add some other ai, infrastructure maybe, if, but right now we are, we're focused on open ai. But, there are some AI that are really interesting. There is a cloud ai. there is also a ai, which is a French, French startup, which is very growing real fast.
And I don't know how we can integrate with, with, Google ai. But, Maybe we'll do that in the future, but also it adds some more complexity to the pro, to the product. So for now, we are keeping just open eye. It's something that, a lot of people is, find a lot of people know.
And it's also easier to manage e especially if you are a beginner, but if you are afraid with some, List of five or six ai platforms. I don't know if it's gonna help be very helpful and maybe, I don't know if it, if that will be, will deliver a better result. So I will, we don't know for now.
[00:46:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. we'll wait and see. As I said, we're recording this at the beginning of 2024. I'm not entirely sure when this will come out, but, yeah, once more. The, the URL, if you wanna go and inspect this project, go to WP Turbo dot. Dev and you can have a look at Alex's and his colleagues work over there. Final thing then, Alex, just tell us if anybody's been curious about this and they want to just learn a little bit more, but want to speak to you specifically about it, is that possible? And if so, where do you hang out? Is it an email, a Twitter handle, a contact form?
[00:47:27] Alex Borto: Yeah, you, can go through the repeatable website, so the repeatable dev slash contact and you can, follow our, x, X Twitter account, which is, the turbo. And, you can also check the Mait, on the. And also we are on many networks, but in English we are still on X Twitter, and and is Theit Marmite in French U we a Meit,
[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:01] Alex Borto: EN.
And you can check the website doit.com/ian for the English content. Yeah.
[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: will make sure to link to those in the show notes. dear listener, when you hear this episode, you should have a episode number attached to it and you can go and search for that on wp builds.com. And all of Alex's details are there, at the end of the post. So Alex Bto, I appreciate you chatting to us today. thank you so much and best of luck with w Peter, but I hope it's a great success.
[00:48:29] Alex Borto: Thank you very much, Nathan, and it was a very nice, to chat with you. It was my first, live chat, live, podcast with, my, my thought English podcast. So sorry for the misspelling and my English accent, but I guess
[00:48:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Alex, if we tried to do this in French, you would be fabulous and I would be silent. I think you've done a remarkable job. Thank you so much for chatting to us today.
[00:48:56] Alex Borto: Thank you very much.
[00:48:57] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very pleasant chatting to Alex all about his new tool, how it works, how it integrates AI, and how it can help you with your WordPress workflow.
If you've got any commentary, please head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 372, and leave us a comment there.
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Okay. That's all. I've got time for this week. Just a quick plug for the page builder summit again. Go and sign up. pagebuildersummit.com. It's happening from the 20th to the 24th of May.
But that's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you have a nice week. Stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
