[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 488, entitled WPVibe and the AI powered future of WordPress sites. It was published on Thursday, the 5th of November, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin and embark on our episode with John Turner from WPVibe, a few bits of housekeeping.
Black Friday is just around the corner. You may be deluged, you may be overwhelmed by all of the deals. Well, I have a solution for you. If you're in the market for WordPress deals. We have a page with currently about 175 deals on it, something like that. It is sure to grow. Head to wpbuilds.com/black and you'll be able to search and filter your favourite deals.
There's a big yellow button at the top. Once you've scrolled down a little bit, it'll be fixed to the viewport. Use that to search and filter for your favourite deals. You can type in the name of the product, or perhaps you're looking for a particular category. It's all there.
There's also a button on that page entitled Add a Deal. Click on that, fill out the form and it's completely free to add your deal.
What isn't free and which might help you gain a little bit of notoriety and a little bit of extra breathing room in the ever so crowded marketplace that is Black Friday. There are some sponsored slots at the top. I think there's about three remaining at the moment. They're on little black cards, so if you scroll into those cards, there's a button in there. If you would like to purchase one of those. We'd certainly like to help you out and get you noticed in what is a very, very busy time.
As you may have heard me talking about in the past, I have launched a podcasting SaaS app. That is one of the deals featured on that page. But if you want to head over to show.fm to find out the pricing, we have some pretty competitive pricing, really quite a lot off for the Black Friday deal. It'll run out, you know, at the usual time.
But if you've got any idea that you want to podcast, you're thinking about a podcast, you run a podcast already, we have a whole suite of tools to save you a bunch of time and effort, and make your whole podcasting experience a little bit more professional. Once more, show.fm. You don't need to go to a particular URL. It's just right there.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with John Turner. John comes from WPVibe, and he is really in the moment. He's having a great time. A few months ago, the whole thing didn't exist, and now they're probably up to about a hundred thousand installs. It's a plugin which allows you to connect your MCP to your WordPress website, and really do pretty much anything that your heart desires.
They've got some integrations built with some existing successful products in the WordPress space, but it really is having a great time of it. Like I said, up to a hundred thousand installs. There's a reason for that.
So John's on today to explain how he built it. What the things are that it can do. What the guardrails are, so that the AI doesn't go nuts and destroy your website.
And all of that is coming up now on the WP Builds podcast. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by John Turner. Hello, John.
[00:04:08] John Turner: Hey. Nice to meet you Nathan.
[00:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:04:11] John Turner: The podcast and talk a little AI and WordPress.
[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. so I just said to John just before we hit record, this episode is going to be John educating Nathan because Nathan doesn't really know that much about ai.
Not only do I not really know what I'm doing around AI because I just decided to stay off that whole bandwagon, but I wouldn't even know what the tooling looks like or what a prompt might look like. I really am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to this. So John's gonna pick me up by my, by my coat straps and drag me through all of this.
But before we get into it, John, I think it's fair to say we're gonna frame this conversation around a product that you've launched and seems to have gone absolutely gangbusters in terms of downloads. it's called WP Vibe. it's exactly as you might expect. The URL, by the way, WP vibe.ai.
Congratulations for bagging that.
[00:05:10] John Turner: Ah, thank you.
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: that's a good one. do you wanna just give us your little bio, a couple of moments just to say who you are, what you've done in the past, how you ended up doing this kind of plugin work on AI and vibe coding.
[00:05:23] John Turner: I've been in the WordPress space for 20 years. I built a product called Seed Prod way back in the day, which is a Coming soon page builder in 2011. And I've been working on products ever since and deep in the WordPress space. lots of WordPress experience. Again, I have several WordPress products.
My main one being WP Vibe right now, and I'm actually a partner, with SED Bulk, yet automotive on this product here. yeah, that's where we're at here. And,
[00:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:05:55] John Turner: as far as AI in general, I got on the AI bandwagon very early and I started seeing the trends and that's where WP Vibe came out of.
[00:06:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. How long have you been working on it and how long has it been available for public consumption? I think, I dunno if this number's still correct. It feels like this number's gonna be changing on a daily basis, but the, the last time I looked you had something in the region of about 80,000 active instals.
I dunno if that's moved up or,
[00:06:22] John Turner: we just hit 90,000. We
[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: okay.
[00:06:24] John Turner: a, we should hit a hundred thousand this week.
[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: So I did that research about seven days ago.
[00:06:32] John Turner: Yes, It's moving very, fast. So we've been putting about, 10,000 a week on, it's, yeah, so it's very fast [email protected] stops reporting till 200,000, so we won't really see the number till
[00:06:48] Nathan Wrigley: John, I'm serious. That's an insane amount of instals.
[00:06:52] John Turner: it.
[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: anybody getting to 10,000 would be happy, but to do 10,000 a week, good grief.
[00:06:59] John Turner: me.
[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:07:01] John Turner: and far as your questions, when this all started, so I actually had the idea, WP Vibe has pivoted about five times. So W WP Vibe actually was a side product of seed prod. We were gonna build out themes, I started building it out and I realised how I like to work.
I, if you use ai, most people will wanna work with their main agent as opposed to going to like, and building out the site there. people will sign up for Claude or chat GDP and they'll just eventually wanna hook everything up to that and talk to that agent.
[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:07:41] John Turner: that's where I came to in March this year.
I was like, how I like to work. again, after several pivots, I started talking to a lot of people, which I had never done before. I started, I built a, prototype in March and I released it and then I started talking to people. I started taking one-on-one calls and just saying, Hey, try this. I want to hear from you. And I started doing just tonnes of calls and I really didn't think much about it. but a YouTuber just outta nowhere picked it up. It was like, you've got to check this out.
[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:08:17] John Turner: really opened my eyes that we hit on something. So once I saw that, I really started leaning into it because I was like, okay, this, we've got something here. it's easy to use, it's easy for, I call 'em Normies and it's not derogatory. It's just people that aren't super nerdy and technical.
found out that it was easy for them to use and I said, okay, this is it. So I started leaning into it and building it out, and my writer was actually one of the main test cases.
So she writes for seed prod and I gave her the MCP and said, Hey, use this and let me know your thoughts back. And we started going back on a weekly basis and she'd be like, oh, this doesn't work, or This is a pain. And I just started iterating and I released a Pro versions in June. that's where we're at right now
[00:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: Incredible.
[00:09:09] John Turner: it took off.
[00:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. You must be delighted. Yeah. Anyway, congratulations. Bravo.
[00:09:15] John Turner: Thank
[00:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: is something. So
[00:09:16] John Turner: it.
[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: what is the, the elevator pitch for it. What, how would you describe the capabilities of what it can do in a short space of time? Yeah.
[00:09:26] John Turner: Mt. P, most people don't even know what that means. So I start there. So the way I think of it is, imagine that you have a house that's your WordPress website, all right? That's your house. You own it, it's all your stuff there. And then say you ha you wanna work on your house. Typically you would hire like a contractor or someone to come in.
Okay?
[00:09:46] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I like this. Yeah.
[00:09:48] John Turner: what that that's your ai. That's the brains they know how to do stuff right? And how to do stuff on your house. Now the missing part is they don't have any tools. WP Vibe is basically their tool shed them to work on your house with. So WP five fills that gap. So AI can talk to your website, and it's essentially like having a WordPress developer there with all the tools it needs to work on your website. what we've done is we've gone a little bit further. So there were a lot of CPS out. We were not the first MCP out, but when I built it, I started realising, okay, a lot of these M building A MCP first off is unique because it's for ai. So you have to really understand and be in the AI to understand how to build a good MCP.
It's a catch 22 here. So when I saw this, I started building it out and I realised all the downfalls of all the other cps, I was like, all right, we just want to make this stupid simple and just work. So that's where we landed right now. The, the idea is we want this to be first, a first class way for people to use AI with WordPress, first and foremost.
Second of all, it needs to be safe. We didn't want it to go off and do anything that you didn't expect it to do. So anything destructive on a WordPress website, we actually gate that. So we one of the, one of the first ones to come out the MCP to have an approval layer,
we really understood how that worked and what AI could do versus what a AI could not do. And then we really understand how AI works because we have a feedback loop as well. So when you work with the website, we're actually feeding AI back information to help it achieve its goal, essentially.
[00:11:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's such an interesting, an easy way to understand it. I appreciate that. The house metaphor worked really well for me. There's just one thing that I would like to ask about that though.
[00:11:45] John Turner: Sure.
[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: if I have a house, then I'm completely cognizant about what's in my house, I know where the walls are, I know where the stairs are, and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm gonna shift that analogy over to WordPress. Do I have to have some sort of basic technical understanding of how a WordPress website works and some vocabulary around that? So for example, do I need to know about things like categories and tags and hooks and custom post types, or can I just talk in normal, in my case, English,
[00:12:16] John Turner: Yes.
[00:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: and expect outcomes that you would hope for?
Or do I have to have some understanding of WordPress in this case, the house.
[00:12:25] John Turner: So that's actually the beauty of it. You don't have to have any technical knowledge. In fact, a lot of people, so I talk to, again, I talk to a lot of people. I encourage people to book calls with me one-on-one. And I've had people just amazing stories. for example, I had a guy that was partially blind. He
[00:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:12:45] John Turner: and he was like, John, you allowed me to create a website just by talking to my ai. it
[00:12:52] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:12:53] John Turner: amazing. He
[00:12:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:12:54] John Turner: a song for me and I released it out. I had another guy call me the other day that said, Hey, John, I asked Chad did be how to create a website and it recommended you. And I created my website in an hour with a baby in my left hand and talking to chat DTP on my right hand.
[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: That's so great.
[00:13:11] John Turner: don't have to have, and that's the thing, like when people want a website, they don't care if it's WordPress underneath. They don't care what actually the substrate is. They just want a website. So we try to extract that way out, and we think WordPress is one of the best abstraction layers because it has 20 years of just working, right?
So we're just giving AI that ability to use something that's been around forever. It has plugins that are deterministic. You don't wanna vibe code this functionality every time you spin up a website. So we take the best of both worlds and combine them, and it's created a really powerful product.
Like I'm looking at a, a, advance, or, testimonial right here. And a woman's 77 years old, she says, I have no, I live in France. I have no technical ability, and you have made my life so much easier for an old lady.
[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: that's so interesting.
[00:14:05] John Turner: herself an
[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:07] John Turner: I just, it's just, I hear that all the time.
[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have plans? So I, would normally ask roadmap things towards the end, but I'm quite curious, do, you have plans to decouple this from WordPress or be, because it sounds like almost in a sense the, the WordPress layer is, so abstracted away that you may never encounter it. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Obviously you need to go and instal the plugin, so there's that piece of the puzzle. But would you, for example, consider in the future having a SaaS service, which obviously would bind itself to WordPress, but you might not necessarily need to in any way interact with WordPress. So it almost becomes like, the, services that we, heard of, yes, the year Lovable and Bolt and those kind of things, but using WordPress.
[00:14:51] John Turner: so I haven't really looked into that right now. So where, what the way the gap we fill right now is that WordPress, again has been around for a very long time, and there's so many websites out there that still use WordPress. They have processes built around it. and we are, we wanna come in and again, anybody that's currently using WebPress, we wanna give them a easy way to do it. And we also wanna open this up to new people. So when you go build a website, like you said, some people might, like AI will probably say, oh, you can just vibe code this website. But again, we wanna give people a way to safely and do it easily using WordPress so we can continue to grow WordPress's base as well.
yeah, go
[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: I was, no, it's okay. I was gonna say, do you, do you find this tool is most, maybe the answer is both for what I'm about to say. Is it most useful for people who are beginning a website? In other words, they've got a blank canvas, or is it actually quite useful for people who've got an existing, perhaps successful website already to make modifications to already existing content?
in my case, I've got a podcast. I've got maybe 800 or so episodes listed on there. It might be that I want to go and swap out the podcast player or something like that. A fairly tedious task if you're gonna open it up programmatically, I could do that, but be quite nice to just speak to an AI and say, swap out the podcast players, all of them for this one.
So what I'm asking is it better with a blank canvas or does it work just as well for pre-existing content?
[00:16:24] John Turner: It, it is works just as well equally.
[00:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:16:28] John Turner: for example, the WP vibe.ai website I built from scratch with WP Vibe in our recorded video. I did, I built that website in an hour essentially.
[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: Nuts.
[00:16:39] John Turner: it works just as good. some people might go in and build a, it depends what you're building.
if you have a one page website, vibe code it and put it up on a static host. But, a lot of times it's not just a one page website. You ha you have some functionality, you need forms, you need payments, you need multiple users, all that kind of stuff. And that's where we're pressed.
It just excels because it's been around forever and that's what it does.
[00:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it looks like from the website you are also leveraging, pre-existing tools. page builders, popular plugins, form solutions, custom post type solutions, things like that. did you have to do specific work so that, it detects that a, I dunno, a CF is on this particular website, or we've got WS form over there, that kind of thing.
[00:17:28] John Turner: WordPress has an initiative called Abilities API, and what that does is it allow plugins to basically expose how they work with AI specifically. So we do, honour that, but what we found is most plugins have not adopted this. So when we looked at the WordPress to ARC website, only 90 something of the top thousand plugins have implemented Abilities API.
[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:17:57] John Turner: those, most of 'em were flaky. Like we would run test on 'em and it just wouldn't work, right? we've been publishing webs recipes on our website because we go through and we test all these plugins. That's what we're doing right now. since WordPress has primitives like the rest, API, the W-P-C-L-I, all this kind of stuff, we leverage that to make changes and manipulate your WordPress website just like a developer would essentially.
So our ai, we hand it the primitives and it goes off and handles what needs to be done, and we tackle those, we use those at different levels depending on what needs to be done. So we let AI make that judgement call.
[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so let's imagine then that I've got a vanilla website, brand new version of WordPress. There's not a single plugin on there, apart from the default things that are installed. So a default theme and a default set of, hello Dolly and that kind of thing.
[00:18:51] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: I go, I instal the WP Vibe plugin.
Presumably there's some sort of, I don't know, licence key or something like that, that needs to be copied in. But, where do we go from there? What, how, do we begin our journey?
[00:19:03] John Turner: Yeah, so there's no licence key. you instal the free plugin. the features we have are absolutely free. We only charge based on tool calls, so most people use the free version. But if you're making a living off this or you're using it, hours a day, that's when you'll, be charged. But the way it works is you instal our plugin, we ask you what agent you're using, are you using chat GPT or Claude?
And then you just click that. And we actually have official, plugins within those directories as well. So it's a one click,
[00:19:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:19:42] John Turner: You click it and it instals WP vibe then it walks you through the whole process. You just create a WP Vibe account with your email. It automatically logs you in and then you say, Hey, I want to add website X to ai, and it will give you a one click link.
We use the built-in, OL system, but, AI already, or that WordPress already provides with Jetpack, it signs you up. And then you have connection to your website. Also, our plugin, we actually have a connection check on it, so you can hit, check my website and it'll tell you your website is blocked at any level where we can't talk to you.
[00:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:20:22] John Turner: to make it as seamless and as easy as possible. And again, if you go and read our reviews, you'll see most people are like, oh, this is the easiest thing I've ever done. You've made it so simple to
[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice.
[00:20:32] John Turner: yeah.
[00:20:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And then how do we begin the journey? Do we go into a menu somewhere and invoke a chat, a chat widget or something like that? how does it, how do you start us off?
[00:20:44] John Turner: Yeah.
Yeah. So in chat, GDP or after you instal that official plugin, it'll say start a chat with this plugin and it just starts up a new chat window and you just talk to it. You can, you can even say what all can you do, right? So
[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:21:03] John Turner: WordCamp US this year. We had a prompt card we gave out, educating people on ai.
And one of our prompts was, Hey, I'm a freelance developer. I just tell, took over this website, tell me what I'm getting into. And it will give you a breakdown of everything. Like anything you can imagine here. It'll give you a breakdown like, Hey, your plugins are at a date. this person didn't maintain this, is how the website is set up.
So it'll go in and give you an analysis of your website and tell you where you're at. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. again, some of the things people been doing with it, like I'll do webinars, I'll do live webinars, and a lot of people will be like, Hey, can it do X, Y, or Z? And I'll be like, I don't know.
Let's
[00:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: I
Isn't that curious?
[00:21:49] John Turner: and really, I haven't ran into a time when it hasn't been able to achieve what people want it to do.
[00:21:55] Nathan Wrigley: This is the beguiling thing. And, also the fairly confounding thing as well is, that that you are basically staring at an infinite horizon
[00:22:04] John Turner: Yes.
[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: that is just not what we're used to.
[00:22:07] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:22:08] Nathan Wrigley: th 30 odd years of the internet, 20 odd years of WordPress, and almost every thing that was doable, you had to climb a hill to do it.
you had to learn H-D-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript, the, different bits and pieces that a WordPress website would typically require. And so if you wanna do something new, you're probably looking at days and weeks of work. Now it's concocting a sentence.
[00:22:31] John Turner: Yeah,
[00:22:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's so prof. it's, utterly beguiling and terrifying and equal measure from where I'm sitting.
[00:22:39] John Turner: it's not just in the WordPress
[00:22:41] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[00:22:41] John Turner: if you look at the news, you'll see math problems that have been around for hundreds a year being knocked out daily
[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:51] John Turner: yeah, we're just, we're in this very strange time right now. And, the way I look at it is, I don't know what the future holds, but I do know what the present moment has, and using the present moment, we're just trying to make, know, people's lives easier and able to achieve their goal.
[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of the things which I see constantly in the social media posts, there's obviously a lot of people who are not necessarily opposed to ai, but questioning, where it leaves us as, an industry, whether you're a WordPress developer, plugin developer, and what have you. One of the things that seems to be being raised a lot is, it's all very well you building things with ai, but then you hand it over to the customer, which is the promise of A CMS really, isn't it?
And now you know, it's over to them and they're gonna, they're gonna break everything because they haven't a clue of how the AI constructed things and what have you. What's your experience of that? Is it to the point where you can actually hand it over to a client and so long as they're fairly competent, they can take it and run with it?
Or do you think there's still a bit of a beachhead there for web developers, WordPress developers, to keep that moat around the work that they're doing?
[00:24:04] John Turner: Yes, I don't think developers are going away. I think it, it comes back to the client. So if you look at, the clients, there's some people that even though they could build their website with ai, they're just not gonna want to do it.
[00:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:24:20] John Turner: gonna wanna hand it off to somebody and not worry about it. I think developers in the WordPress space need to understand that if they're not leveraging ai, then their competition is, and they will get beat out by their competition. So just like everything else, it's a competition in your space. it's, not making the decisions on whether you should use AI or not, but I think the industry is, so I think developers just need to be aware that, Hey, I need to learn how to leverage ai. if I do leverage ai, oh, I can c crank out this many more sites, I can do this many more retainers, et cetera. even pull, we have an agency plan where they can give their user access to ai, but they charge them for it. So
[00:25:10] Nathan Wrigley: that's interesting. Yeah.
[00:25:12] John Turner: a, they can charge whatever they want, right?
basically they're sponsoring their account. So it's that kind of stuff that you have to think different. And again, it's not just in the worker space,
[00:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: No.
[00:25:23] John Turner: all over, job is changing, at this point.
[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: Let's, let's imagine a scenario then where I've got my, I've got my website. it's all been connected to let's imagine we're using Claude or something like that. And, and I've gone in and I'm, making a start. So I've asked it a variety of questions about the, the nature of, what's installed and what have you, and the answer comes back, nothing.
[00:25:45] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: I'm absolutely brand new in vanilla and I wanna create a, a landing page. Let's say that I'm selling a, a widget and I want to demonstrate how great this widget is and what have you. I begin doing the prompt. So where do I go to look at that? Am I doing things in the block editor? Is this working with native call WordPress blocks inside the block editor?
How is it building and scaffolding the stuff which is displayed on the front end?
[00:26:13] John Turner: So if you don't give it specific directions, the model will choose for you. what it choose is depending on how it was trained. So for example, if you go up and just say, Hey, can you build me a website? It will build you a website however it thinks. Now, typically what will happen here is I can tell you how it will work, will try to use blocks, but most of the time blocks WordPress right now are very vo verbose and they're a little flaky.
So what we typically, what our AI does is mostly it will create a classic theme for you and build out everything with prone to PHP, H-T-M-L-C-S-S, unless you tell it specifically. Now, it might try to put some parts of block, but it would create a block capable themes. if you were to create a blog post, you'd still be using the block editor, but it's gonna try to achieve your goal the best way, how with the primitives and the tool it has access to. Now, if it sees you have Elementor installed, not a a blank site, then it would use Elementor. So it's gonna look at your site and try to make a decision. And the model may or may not ask you questions. Again, a lot of this depends on the model. Typically, if you use the more frontier models like Claude or Chat, GTP, the astro models, they will typically feed back to you and ask you speci questions to help narrow down so they don't just go off and build something without you knowing.
So it comes back to one kind of knowing how to prompt the system, and two, just understanding how the model works in general. and typically if you use AI on a daily basis, you'll get a feel for how they work and how much you need to specify, but ultimately it would just, it will just try to achieve your goal.
[00:28:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it could be, H-T-M-L-C-S-S. It could be if you're using Elementor, it could be Elementor elements. If it, you could tell it. For example, I wish to work in the con within the constraints of the block editor, only use core blocks.
[00:28:13] John Turner: Yep.
[00:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: you can right at the beginning, create some sort of context and say, only use core blocks, or, I dunno, I've downloaded, generate blocks or something like that.
[00:28:23] John Turner: yes.
[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: go with those and presumably then it will go out and figure out, okay, what are the capabilities of generate blocks? Okay, there's a new set of constraints that we're gonna work within.
[00:28:33] John Turner: and, typically what I tell people, they're first starting with AI is to ask it, give it a goal, and then have it reflect back its plan, and then you iterate on that before it goes off and does something. That's typically how of the new models, that's what, that's the behaviour they'll have as well.
They'll ask you questions so it knows what to actually do, so it understands the goal that you have.
[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: And how do you main maintain that kind of, obviously, if you've got a website we are worrying about, consistency of font or consistency of colour palettes and, brand guidelines, that kind of thing.
[00:29:15] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:29:16] Nathan Wrigley: that all work? How, do you carry that through? So let's say, in July I sat down and I did a little bit of work and I was fairly happy with it and I've waited until November and I'm just gonna carry on.
And how does that context get maintained so that it's got this design palette that it keeps coming back to reliably giving you something predictable every time.
[00:29:34] John Turner: Yeah, so what it'll do, so say you build out a website and it's got a, a, colour context built in, and then you'll be like, Hey, I wanna add a landing page. What it will do is it will go and look at the code on your website, look at the colours it's already using, and, build it based off of that essentially.
[00:29:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay,
[00:29:51] John Turner: So it's not guessing, it's not saying, oh, let's just come up with a new design here. So when, we load, when WP Vibe has all WP Vibe can inspect your entire website that context and pull it in essentially.
[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: Do you provide some sort of guidance of how to, prompt, so I'm thinking in the case of me, a real novice beginning at the base layer of the ground layer, it sounds like you're doing things like webinars and things like that
[00:30:18] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: illustrate that. But do you, provide that kind of guidance as well?
Something like that for me would be a goldmine in all honesty, because I Don dunno where to begin.
[00:30:26] John Turner: not specifically what we do is we provide recipes. So right now we have recipes on the website for hundreds of plugin, and we're constantly adding those. So you can go in there and say, oh, here's what I wanna do. Can I find a recipe? And it has a prompt you can copy and paste in. If it's not there, you're can request one. And like I said, I, in the emails we send out, you can actually book a call directly with me chat with me or email me and I respond back. but I think that's the big thing that we're doing is just trying to educate people on how to use it, how to get the results, how to achieve the results they want,
[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, everything that we've described so far could be put under the umbrella of design, putting pixels on a page. But actually most of the time when I'm in a WordPress website, my interactions have got absolutely nothing to do with putting pixels on a page. it's the grunt work of, I don't know, updating plugins or, checking forms, submissions and things like that.
Does this stretch to all of that as well? I've got 28 connected. I, don't even know if you can connect 28 sites, but let's imagine that you
I then say, just go off, gimme a report of what needs updating. I'll see the report and then, okay, let's go ahead, update everything there. Does it do that kind of thing too?
[00:31:44] John Turner: Absolutely. So we have, a feature. We released a few, about a month ago, called Fleet Management. And so you did have 28 websites and you wanted to update all the plugins. Now, previously you could use a managed tool and update 'em or something like that, but now you can do that with WP Vibe as well.
And it goes a little bit further. So what happens is, what it will do is it will, we have the ability to create a background job. So
[00:32:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:32:10] John Turner: you're updating that many plugins, it will time out on a regular PHP site or the AI chat will time out. So we shift it off to a background job and it does it, and when it's done, it'll let the AI know it's done and then the AI will actually go back and check to make sure everything's still working properly. So it has that check back in to, a lot of times when you're updating plugins, you're crossing your fingers, but now you have AI watching your back on it. And if there is a problem, it'll tell you what the problem is.
[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And do you have any sort of guardrails built in? So in other words, I dunno, a a, plugin updates and we get the old white screen of death, which is increasingly not a thing. But anyway,
[00:32:52] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: the point. It's
[00:32:54] John Turner: Yeah,
[00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: something went wrong. Oh, where did it go wrong, figure that out. Let's roll back, shall we?
Do we have some sort of, trash can for recycled bin, that kind of thing.
[00:33:04] John Turner: exactly. So like I said, anything destructive AI tries to do, we, gate. So say you have a WooCommerce store and you wanna update 5,000 product descriptions. our AI would do is it would write a SQL script and say, Hey, here's the SQL script I'm about to run. Do you wanna run this? And you click yes or no.
Now again, on stuff like that, we recommend you have a backup because doing that many changes, we can't back up for you. But if you're updating post or anything like that, it will use the built-in revision system for WordPress and you can roll back that way. And then again, anything you do, you know that WordPress has that built in safety layer, we can push back.
But, what, I'm sorry to get back to your que, what was the original question? I lost track there.
[00:33:53] Nathan Wrigley: was really were they were, are there guardrails in place?
[00:33:56] John Turner: Yes. Yeah.
[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: And it sounds like, yeah.
[00:33:59] John Turner: Yeah. we put guardrails in with anything destructive so that you basically see what it's gonna do and you approve it. Now, back to your question, if it happens on a white screen of death, so if you get that white screen of death, hopefully WordPress will send you that email.
It
[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah.
[00:34:16] John Turner: because it, if it's white screen to death, plugin can't actually talk to the WordPress site because the entire, loop is down at that point.
[00:34:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. so I think one of the things that would, be interesting for me, if I was to go through the experiment of moving everything and, starting to have a, an AI workflow instead of a log into WordPress workflow, one of the things that it would take me a fairly large amount of time to overcome is my scepticism.
that the things are going to be, reliable. Let's go with that word, reliable. I'll be able to see the pixels on the page where I'll be able to see the output and what have you. Where are you at with all that now? have you become a cavalier version of the three, like if you go back to February for you, before you were really spending all of your time on this, were you much more cautious about what you would do and the checks and balances?
So you would write a prompt, check the output religiously, make sure, okay, yeah, that's fine. Okay. We can do another prompt. We can move on. have you become pretty cavalier with this now? Have you become in, in very trustful, or do you still have a fair degree of scepticism every time you do something and wanna just manually go and check things?
[00:35:28] John Turner: yes. So as time has progressed, say the last year here, I was at that point where I was checking everything, but really within the last six months, like the last round of the frontier models like Opus 5.5, I don't really do any checking at this point. Even
[00:35:44] Nathan Wrigley: That's so interesting. Yeah.
[00:35:46] John Turner: company,
[00:35:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:35:48] John Turner: it's me. I have some, some other, a couple other people, but the majority of it's agents running, the company at this point because I have to understand how AI works to
[00:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:36:02] John Turner: people and then pass that on basically into the plugin and that workflow.
So we have AI doing its own checks and balances.
[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: And you are happy with that. that's an interesting position and it would appear that almost everybody that I know who has pivoted into a, an AI first workflow, they've now reached this point as well. they've, drawn the conclusion that I, think this six month thing that you just mentioned, like at some point over the last six months, these certain models arrived and got dropped.
There was a, a real recognition that, boy, this basically doesn't make much in the way of mistakes.
I find that really curious. but I think that would still be a body of work that I would have to go through. Yeah.
[00:36:48] John Turner: mean, it still can make mistakes, but it's better at under, understanding. It's better at understanding when it does make a mistake and letting you know, so it doesn't just, it's not just like a silent mistake.
[00:36:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:37:00] John Turner: then again, when you're working with ai, it's just like working with a, in a normal environment, you wanna make sure you're doing the normal things like backing up, having a backup plan, like just the stuff that's typically, table stakes for running a business or a website or something
[00:37:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So how does it work if I go to, WP vibe.ai and I'm, beguiled by it, and I wanna become one of the probably a hundred thousand by the time this episode goes out, how does that work? do you, obviously you mentioned that there's the free plugin. What's the pricing?
How does it work? Who do we pay? When do we pay, how much do we pay? That kind of thing.
[00:37:40] John Turner: so on WP Vibe website we have a start page and you just enter your URL, it will send you to back to your website and show you the plugin. You click instal and then when you instal the plugin again it walks you through hooking up to your agent and checking your connection. Alright, so after that, basically what happens here is you can use the plugin absolutely free.
Any of the features we provide, you can use. And the way we measure is we measure tool calls. So imagine you update something, again, a WooCommerce, you have a hundred. If you don't tell it to update it all at once, it would do a hundred tool calls. But if you say, Hey, update it all at once, it would batch it and use one tool call. Okay? So again, it's more of an AI understanding how to use the tools. And then what happens is we charge if you're getting value out of it. So if you go over that a hundred tool call, then you can buy bigger plans like a day, all the way up to 20,000 a day. And it scales out from there and you can add sub, people to your team and clients and stuff like that.
So essentially the more you value you get our, of our, plugin is where we start to charge and that's our value proposition at this
[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: it's kind of a la carte. So if you, walk away from your website and don't touch it for a whole, let's say two months, there will be no charge made at all because you haven't done anything. And then if you come back and for a month, you go absolutely, ballistic on it.
[00:39:09] John Turner: So it is a subscription.
[00:39:11] Nathan Wrigley: aha. Oh, okay.
[00:39:12] John Turner: Yeah, it's a, it's not a one-time price. It's a, subscription, but you can stop and start it at any point. Pause it. And then again, our plugin has no depen, like your de depend, your website has no dependencies on our plugin being active or not active, so
[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Got it.
[00:39:32] John Turner: lock in,
[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: So if you were to pause your subscription, everything should, in theory, just carry on as yeah. As it was before you really have landed on your feet with this. I genuinely can't think of it. maybe Yoast in the day or something like that, probably had this kind of traction.
I don't know, they got to 5 million over time. But it does seem that the trajectory that you've landed on here is absolutely incredible. I think, Bravo, you must be pinching yourself when you wake up.
[00:40:02] John Turner: Yeah. it's so amazing. And like I said, just talking to the people and, sh people contacted me and sharing the stories with me of how it affects their lives. It just makes me so happy. 'cause that's our mission. we're in this to help our end users and that's, our mission and our goal again, is to make it easy for people to use AI with WordPress and, achieve their goals.
[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: a hundred thousand people. Let's assume it's that when this podcast goes out, can't be wrong. WP vibe.ai is the URL you're gonna go to. Go and check it out, have a little poke around and see if it's any good for you and your business. John, where do we find you online, apart from, the website that we've just mentioned,
[00:40:45] John Turner: Yeah.
[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: hang out anywhere?
[00:40:47] John Turner: I'm on Twitter the most. It's just slash John Turner. I get in pretty early there,
[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:40:52] John Turner: good handle, so
[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. so we will link to the, WP Vibe website, but also to John's Twitter handle. If you do not, you might be driving a car or something like that and you want to remember it. So go to wp builds.com, search for the episode with John in it. And, yeah, all it remains for me to do is to say, John, thank you very much.
Bravo. Well done. amazing.
[00:41:17] John Turner: you,
[00:41:17] Nathan Wrigley: to the next a hundred thousand.
[00:41:19] John Turner: In our next episode, you're gonna be teaching how people how to
[00:41:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:41:22] John Turner: ai. All right?
[00:41:23] Nathan Wrigley: boy, that's in a, that's in a while. Thanks, John.
[00:41:27] John Turner: All right. Thank you.
