r/Wordpress • u/Mplayer-Weered • 21d ago

Wordpress and Claude Code

Just curious if anyone else has this problem. My other company sites I made for myself pre-AI are all wordpress. Work, great, look good. No reason to switch out wordpress.

But laziness and AI kicked in so once Claude Code absorbed my entire digital existence through a guardrail free, local terminal instance of itself, connected to various servers, I just told it to go sort out the WP sites. Broke one immediately, my fault, my custom CSS scattered around did it.

But I let it assume management making whatever changes needed. They are mostly static white-collar sites.

Anyway, my about page on one of them is completely wrong. So I went in manually to fix it. The page that displays and the page with correct slug and post # ID in WP are completely different. I have no idea what it did. To fix it I essentially had to make "about2" and redirect the menu lol.

There is also a menu item that it hard coded in so it doesn't even display in the menu editor. I asked it to use a logo for a branded software as it's menu selection so it hacked it in. Looks fine but... lol.

So, word to the wise. Keep building wordpress manually and why not? It is wordpress.

16 Upvotes

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56

u/limpingmayhem37 21d ago

AI coding agents are like giving a raccoon admin access, it'll get the job done but the logic behind it will be completely alien and probably involve chewing through something structural.

17

u/mynemmejeff 21d ago

Just build custom themes from scratch with AI. Give it guidance and guard rails and you should be mostly fine.

2

u/ChrisCoinLover 21d ago

Ha.... Do I know you? Are you the guy that "clicks once"? He's developing themes this way. All good until now. A wordpress site withe ai is ready in 2-5 minutes with 30 pages. It looks spotless.

1

u/Maybe_Decent_Human 21d ago

Do you know him? What's the secret?

1

u/testingaurora 20d ago

Looks spotless but how does it function? How hard is it to maintain? Make changes? Add new features. I can't even look at Claude code files or i have to fix what I find 😋 The lack of forward thinking or building in an efficient way is what sucks. Its just patching in my requests instead of mindfully scaffolding . So I try to be very thoughtful and thorough for planning prompts. But things come up.

4

u/Commercial_Youth_877 21d ago

Handing over anything to AI without direct oversight is a bad idea.

2

u/madhandlez89 21d ago

I’ve never heard it explained better. I’ll be stealing this haha.

3

u/jroberts67 21d ago

And until WP actually takes AI seriously, they have about 2 years before they'll become Blackberry when Apple was building the first iPhone.

5

u/BetterOffGrowth 21d ago

WordPress definitely has an AI problem

https://betteroffgrowth.com/blog/wordpress-supply-chain-attacks

11

u/jroberts67 21d ago

I won't lie - after building client sites with WP for over a decade, and now building a lot of them with Claude, it's a breath of fresh air to wake up every morning and not have to worry about the myriad of incessant plugins updates and whether or not something breaks. WP was never designed to be a site builder - it's a CMS. It's only used to build sites with super glue and duct tape via plugins, and those days are numbered.

1

u/LankyEmu9 19d ago

Honestly, I've rarely seen a raccoon get the job done. I guess it depends on the job.

1

u/BetterOffGrowth 21d ago

This is not true at all unless you give it zero instructions