WordPress Agentic Workflows ft. Ian Svoboda

Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome to Webmasters.FM. Today I got a repeat guest, which I’m pretty excited about because it’s been a long time and it’s feels like it’s been a decade in WordPress and AI world since we last talked in like January twenty twenty five. So like eighteen months, nineteen months, something like that. so Ian Svoboda, introduce yourself for people who don’t know who you are and welcome to the show.

Ian Svoboda (00:20)
Hey, yeah, thanks again, man. Great to be here. Always a good time. I am Ian. I live in Jacksonville, Florida. I have been a software engineer professionally for like the last 13, 14 years. Spent a lot of that time doing WordPress things. And over the last year or two, I’ve been delving a lot more into like moving into doing agentic and AI development things. But I was historically coming from doing custom WordPress builds, so like a lot of. ACF flux layouts and then later FSE custom builds with blocks and all that. Not not I’ve done page builder stuff, of course, but I have a lot of extensive experience in in doing more those bigger coding kind of projects in WordPress, that sort of thing as well. just currently operate my own digital consultancy. That’s what I do for work now. And I’m also an aspiring educator, so I gotta. Got a couple of things I’m trying to put out there soon, but yeah.

Brian Coords (01:11)
it’s been kind of a wild year. It’s like the the shift from I’m gonna open like VS Code and start typing some WordPress stuff to I don’t know what you use. I I generally use Codex. It’s just the I’m like I’m not hopping around, I’m not build I’m just like, give me just some simple chat interface. But like The things that used to be really important, like you mentioned education, showing people how to do things, showing people code, all that sort of stuff, it just feels like that that was like ancient history now. Cause it just feels like the types of things you’re focusing on are so different. I’m curious, like in the last year and a half, how much have you brought AI into it and like what was your journey? Were you, you know, if you were against it or you, you know, quick to it? Kind of like how has how’s that gone for you?

Ian Svoboda (01:59)
That’s a great question. Yeah. And when I was let’s see, a couple of years ago, 2023-ish, is when I started working with Tom at Generate Blocks. Shout out to Tom, one of my favorite

Brian Coords (02:10)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (02:11)
Canadians and people in general. Yeah. So

Brian Coords (02:13)
huh.

Ian Svoboda (02:14)
I I started doing some some work with him, and this is right around the time when AI was starting to become like vaguely worth it. Like Copilot, I think, had just recently come out of Access or whatever. See, no, we did we tried a little bit, but I really was not using it to write any significant portion of code. the the

Brian Coords (02:29)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (02:29)
style indicators thing, which was remarkably involved. that was none of that, none of that used AI or any significant portion of AI was involved with the 2.0 release, really, even right. So it was it was very much a we got the chat interface, we use these inline auto completions, they’re good sometimes, not, but that was about

Brian Coords (02:45)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (02:46)
it, right? And then even over the next year, right? Not not the huge change in that way. There might have been a little maybe the chats got a little bit better. The hallucinations got less. The docs that they would tell you about actually did exist ninety percent of the time.

Brian Coords (03:00)
Uhhuh.

Ian Svoboda (03:01)
yeah, I I get less hallucinations out of it, say, but it was it was not driving everything, it was not doing anything really on its own, it was all highly supervised. it’s kind like when you

Brian Coords (03:11)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (03:11)
have a a kid and you’re like teaching them social skills and stuff, and you have to supervise until good habits are established, right? And things

Brian Coords (03:18)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (03:18)
like that. So it was the same thing, and then by the time early Q1 2025 came around when the tools just got massive. Passively better. I just I took a a bigger shift into doing more agentic development. So like using Claude Code and codex in the terminal. And I’m just like going to a project, I open up a brand new ghosty or whatever window. I type Claude.

Brian Coords (03:41)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (03:42)
I’m getting in there and I’m doing stuff. You know, not a lot of nuance to it or or anything. And then as time goes on, I started to kind of pick up on a few things. And some of these techniques that you learn maybe in this stuff are like. more relevant because of the time. the model gets better and then it doesn’t matter anymore or whatever. Like certain compaction

Brian Coords (03:57)
Yeah, for sure.

Ian Svoboda (04:00)
schemes that people have talked about a lot. A lot of that stuff largely doesn’t matter anymore. Sure. But one of the one of the things that was instrumental and still is, I think, is the concept of delegating reviews or otherwise

Brian Coords (04:12)
Mm.

Ian Svoboda (04:13)
having a different model andor provider doing work checking. So like if I have Claude and I’m saying hey I need you to make a PR and a branch for This particular feature thing that I’m doing. And now there’s a code review that’s needed. I could have that same Claude model, say it’s Opus 5.5. I could have Opus 5.5 review. It’d probably do a pretty good job. I could have

Brian Coords (04:31)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (04:32)
even Fable maybe do a review of it, probably do a good job. But in my experience, if I have Codex do a review of Claude’s work or vice versa, they tend to catch a lot more stuff. And it’s because I think that, I’m not exactly an expert, but AIs are all based around pattern matching. They have certain things they’re trying to do to get your expected result and The tunings of those are a little different in different models and providers. Some excel more in certain types of work or other, you know what I mean? There’s all these little things

Brian Coords (04:56)
Yeah, for sure.

Ian Svoboda (04:58)
that it’s hard to articulate, but I the the anecdotal and otherwise statistical evidence that I now have suggests that that is very much a good decision. More on that in a second. So I I was put onto this whole concept, you know, by Joel Hooks, who, if you all are in the WordPress space and thus might not know him by name, he’s the guy who founded egghead.io. He is

Brian Coords (05:18)
Okay.

Ian Svoboda (05:18)
a all-around cool dude, wizard, half orc nerd as he describes himself. He’s he’s

Brian Coords (05:24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (05:25)
doing all kinds of ultra nerd stuff in in AI. And I, you know, I look at his stuff and I I try to use that as like I I I’ve got to get to this level of understanding. I aspire to this level of understanding, right? But he he put me on to this next thing that was huge for me, which was herder. H-E-R-D-R.

Brian Coords (05:41)
yeah.

Ian Svoboda (05:42)
Yeah, which has been making the rounds too. And I had heard of Tmux before, but Somebody’s like, it’s a terminal multiplexer. My eyes go, I don’t know. I don’t know what any of that means, dude.

Brian Coords (05:50)
Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Ian Svoboda (05:53)
And for those of you who have heard of that, and you’re like, what the hell is that? It’s basically like browser tabs and groups, but for your terminal, right? And it persists

Brian Coords (06:01)
Yeah. Okay.

Ian Svoboda (06:03)
all that stuff if you close it. So, if I make a a group for each of my projects, and then I have tabs inside there, but then I close my whole terminal on accident, I can just run her. If I only have the one session, it’ll bring it all back exactly the way that it was everything right there, suspended animation. And you can do that with different sessions. It’s mad powerful, especially if you’re crazy and you want to be a nerd or whatever. But it has like in the TY, dude, it’s clickable. You can take your mouse, just click over there. It’s awesome. Because I’m not, I’m not like

Brian Coords (06:28)
okay. Okay. Okay.

Ian Svoboda (06:32)
a Vim guy. I want to be so bad.

Brian Coords (06:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (06:35)
this guy on Twitter, Josh, is we were just talking about this and Yeah, I was he’s dude, you gotta do it. Now’s the time. We’re in the terminal all the time. Anyway, because that’s the next thing I was gonna say. You were asking about what agentic tools, right? I was doing a lot

Brian Coords (06:47)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (06:47)
of stuff with the Nova editor from Panic. I’ve always liked that because the SFTP and like key syncing integration stuff. A little bit of cursor. I didn’t pay for like a month, but I don’t know. I I didn’t

Brian Coords (06:58)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (06:58)
I didn’t want to buy into their whole it’s a whole thing. You gotta like do everything

Brian Coords (07:01)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (07:02)
in their very specific box and you can’t use Claude separately. And I don’t

Brian Coords (07:04)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (07:05)
know. I it it wasn’t for me, it’s a little too rigid, but The editor, it’s basically VS Code with a trench coat. So I was using that. And I I still kinda sorta do, but I rarely ever open either one now, simply because I just don’t need to, right?

Brian Coords (07:15)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (07:18)
I still look at the results of these things, but I found that once you can if you have a system and you have a way for the agent to be able to understand what doing it the right way or your way actually means, it becomes a lot easier to not have to manually check every single thing they do. It’s kind of like If you’re hiring somebody to clean your house and you want it cleaned a certain way, if you told them that, but then they forgot and never remembered it from time to time, you’d have to remember to tell them each time or the result might be different, or you might go, I gotta check every room. But if you but if you told them that and they did it like correctly, mostly the first time, and then maybe you go, hey, remember this, and then they do it basically perfectly the next time, you’re not gonna stress it for times three onward and every other

Brian Coords (08:00)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (08:00)
time since. And think about how many sessions we do, right? It’s not just two or three, it’s a lot.

Brian Coords (08:05)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (08:06)
No, so you you have to establish a certain level of confidence, right? And and doing all of that does start to get into a little bit more like nerdland, as far as you got to be a little bit more on the on the technical end of doing these things in the terminal to really dial this in. Do most people need to though? No. No. I I don’t I don’t think so. I think that like I use Pi right now. And if you’re not familiar, Pi is the agent harness that powers open claw. It’s little minimalist setup. It’s very pluggable. You can make it do all these different things you want. So it’s kind like my own version of Claude Code or Codex, but it can use different models and model providers. So I got ChatGPT, Claude, this Qwen model that runs locally on my machine, all

Brian Coords (08:45)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (08:46)
this different stuff that can go in there. It can it supports other things too. It’s just whatever you want to turn on. Most people don’t need that, maybe, right? I mean, especially

Brian Coords (08:53)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (08:54)
if you’re if you’re doing one thing at a time and so on, or you just don’t have the inclination to be involved with that. Claude and Codex both have built-in memory now. And even if you don’t have the ability to really dial in or tune it, it’s definitely okay, at least for getting started. Right. I think over time though, what we’re gonna see is a more dialed-in setup to deliver on that validation aspect, right? Because there’s kind

Brian Coords (09:17)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (09:17)
of two parts to it, isn’t it? Like if you asked me to do something and you wanted it done like to a certain standard or whatever, a way that would make you feel satisfied with it. It’s like on the one hand, you have to satisfy the business requirement. But then on the other

Brian Coords (09:30)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (09:31)
hand, did I like do it in the way that’s acceptable? Right? You know, it’s

Brian Coords (09:34)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (09:35)
I think of that that line from Silicon Valley with Guilfoy where it’s like, well perhaps Anton decided that and the best way to remove the bugs was to remove the software. Which is statistically and grammatically correct or something

Brian Coords (09:43)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (09:46)
like that. So like that’s wrong, right? You can’t just delete the app and say I fixed all the bugs, right? You have to and there’s nuance to that. You know, like if I’m doing classes, you know, I want you to use BEM, I want you to favor using like CSS variables with local inheritance versus overriding

Brian Coords (10:02)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (10:03)
root level variables inside components or something. It’s like you have to be able to communicate that stuff. Some of that stuff is exactly the same, no, no matter what you’re doing, right? Whether it’s a WordPress build with WooCommerce or an Astro build or a Next.js app whatever, you’d probably more or less feel the same way about all of those things. I think codifying

Brian Coords (10:19)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (10:20)
that stuff in a way that is low context and and harness agnostic. So like it works in Codex, Claude, all the shit. I think that’s that’s gonna become a lot more of a thing. It’s kind of like everybody’s IDE setup, you know? Like you’d have your VS Code profile or whatever. You’re gonna have

Brian Coords (10:34)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (10:34)
you’re gonna have your own agents thing like that. I bet that’s gonna become a lot more common. But that’s what I that’s what I did these days is I I have this like pie set up, and I mainly did that just so I can use code and codex and claude in the same deal. But the best part about using herder with all of this, right?

Brian Coords (10:50)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (10:51)
Herder has a skill, dude. You can tell the agents how to use herder. So you can say, Hey, go ahead and open a codex pane and do the review. And then you guys can talk back and forth to each other. It can actually read the pane,

Brian Coords (11:03)
yeah.

Ian Svoboda (11:04)
but you can for long form, if you had a a code review and it had a bunch of markdown, you can’t just easily put that in a chat box, right? So I came up with this really awesome pattern. Well, I don’t know if I don’t I don’t want to say I invented it, it’s just something I use, it’s really cool. I have this local state folder, dot state or something, and

Brian Coords (11:19)
Okay.

Ian Svoboda (11:20)
it’s untracked. So nothing actually like gets saved in there usually or I g I don’t I’m kind of up in the air on that, whether I want to save them or not. I don’t think I need to because

Brian Coords (11:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (11:28)
it’s just too noisy. But then the agents can just write messages for each other that just sit in there. And then they can like so I can say, watch the state folder. You’re gonna get messages, they’re gonna come back. And when you get them, do this. And it’s able to just pull and watch the folder for changes. And so then they can talk to each other. The herder skill, though, literally you can have it watch the pain and see when the pain’s done, though. So it’s

Brian Coords (11:48)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (11:48)
like. That some of these, it depends on how what your setup is like. if you’re using Codex, yeah, Codex and Claude, and you don’t have any of that. I don’t know about all that. That’s fine. If you have Ghostie or whatever terminal you’re using, Herder and Codex and Claude, you can basically do them the cross pane communication using that state folder pattern, right? Because the may

Brian Coords (12:08)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (12:09)
the the panes now have a way to talk to each other. And it’s like there you there’s maybe different what you could do it two different ways, but it’s all doable. There’s a couple ways to skin that cat, but having a way for those two sessions to be able to talk to each other, I think, is very important. Right. The moment you start getting into multiple sessions running at once, I found that’s important. So I used Base Camp also for some of that too, because I still use that for project management, which is great, especially for

Brian Coords (12:34)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (12:34)
agents. It’s very agent friendly.

Brian Coords (12:37)
Do you like I feel like one of the hardest things people are still grappling with is if you’re doing WordPress and WooCommerce work, like one is it’s open source code, which if you’re like actually working on those projects, your code like has to be Perfect because other people are gonna build on top of things like other code that you didn’t write is gonna interact with it. So there’s just this extra layer building in that way where you don’t control all the code, you just control some of it. But then also a lot of like if you’re saying you’re just like, I’m gonna build a WooCommerce store, Only a small percentage of what you’re gonna do actually needs to happen in code. a lot of it is like setting screens and did I configure the shipping correctly and am I using the block editor and all these sorts of air other areas and stuff. So do you bring the agentic workflow into WordPress and WooCommerce successfully and like how’s that been?

Ian Svoboda (13:27)
yeah. absolutely. And it’s gotten better and better as time goes on because it takes a little bit to feel your way through this. And it, most things, if you don’t have guardrails or the understanding of what the kind of right way or not to do this stuff is, it can be tricky. one of the things I did early on though that I think’s really smart is having a reference for where the cr like what are the credentials or where do I find a reference to them? So it might be like a dot file or you if better yet. That has a reference to one password or something. So the secrets aren’t like on disk and it’s so it can never read them directly. But it’s like

Brian Coords (13:58)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (13:59)
once it knows how to get in through SSH, once it knows how to authenticate to the REST API or has a login for the site or both, whatever, then all bets are

Brian Coords (14:07)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (14:07)
off. That thing can drive a browser. You know, I I I can have I can have it establish an end-to-end test to see if that new attribute that we added to all button blocks actually shows up. And I can say, give me a screenshot in the PR. Show me the screen.

Brian Coords (14:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (14:20)
Tell me it’s there and it can do all of these things now. But if if you’re thinking about what was it like a year ago or even at the beginning of this year, that might feel like, there’s no way I could do that. No, there is.

Brian Coords (14:29)
yeah, it can.

Ian Svoboda (14:30)
Just using Claude, baby. You don’t need GrockBot even for anything like that. You

Brian Coords (14:34)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (14:34)
know, like the the tools get so much better. And Pi, especially, is is pretty good with headless browsing out of the box. I mean, I think they all do it now at this point,

Brian Coords (14:41)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (14:42)
but and you and you can even see them clicking around in there if they’re actually running the launch Chrome instance, the whole thing. But it it’s been great because you have the MCP, which I use sometimes, but I find for me anyway, usually using more of like WPCLI with SSH or and then like like REST API kind of shit, just because there’s

Brian Coords (15:02)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (15:03)
there’s some type of weird nuance to like the way this thing works. And it’s like, well, you know, we gotta set this image a certain way. It’s all this little small edge casey stuff. And I’m I’m looking at this thing going, like, why aren’t you done with this yet? Yeah, the MCP keeps fit just use the REST API, Roger. And then after I tell it that a few times, it knows. I have my own memory system that I built that actually works with Pi and Claude. It’s not like super elaborate, I don’t think. I don’t feel like it is, but it’s getting better all the time, and it’s all based through Git. Like using Git as any source of truth, whether it’s a straight up memory system that has retrieval or whatever, or if you’re literally just keeping certain decision records in there like ADRs. That kind of thing.

Brian Coords (15:42)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (15:43)
I use that grill with docs skill from Matt Pocock a lot. That thing’s awesome

Brian Coords (15:47)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (15:47)
as far as just being able to like talk through a technical decision. But yeah, doing things with like when you’re when you’re talking about like doing things with WooCommerce, the like the API is so well understood. WordPress API is very well understood. Same thing with

Brian Coords (16:00)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (16:01)
the CLI, there’s tons of docs, tons of everything info about these. It’s very good for agents because they can just look and there’s like, okay, yeah, I know how to do that. I say I’m having I’m on a diagnose a performance issue. With this website. This thing’s running the CLI doctor commands, checking timings and stuff, hey, after setup, after theme setup, we have this way delay. It’s it knows all of this. Like

Brian Coords (16:22)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (16:22)
it’s able to just get in there and just go at a at a level and a pace that that you wouldn’t be able to do yourself. So what’s great is like for me as a solo operator, I’m able to do these WordPress builds that would be really big, but and normally would cost clients a bajillion dollars by comparison to what I have to charge them. for my own time

Brian Coords (16:40)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (16:40)
or or whatever. And it’s just it’s way it’s way better. So I found that it it can be really instrumental when you’re creating posts or doing other things like that. one big thing I did recently that I’m still prototyping out, but so far it’s worked great. I had a client who’s coming to me. He has a site that I actually built for him years ago back in the ACF flux layout days. You know, talking about that before, right?

Brian Coords (17:01)
huh, huh. yeah.

Ian Svoboda (17:03)
So now now you know they he’s like, I want to be able to do all these things with the pages, but it’s too limiting. So know we’re talking about getting onto generate blocks and such. And one of his concerns though was I want to have SEO parity. I don’t want to lose rankings because we

Brian Coords (17:15)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (17:16)
had a technical SEO change or something. And so I I told the I told them this. I’m like, we want to construct it. And it might have some design defects initially because that’s just the way that the site is, but we’re trying to bring it over essentially as is and make sure that it has these validity checks. So it it literally created like I talked through it with this, but we created this VRT tool. that also checks for technical SEO aspects and and everything else.

Brian Coords (17:39)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (17:40)
So it was able to run largely unattended and not for an expensive amount of tokens. It was just

Brian Coords (17:44)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (17:44)
a long running Opus five five on medium thing. And it because it was a lot of it was deterministic checks, running the VRT tool, waiting for

Brian Coords (17:52)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (17:52)
it to send the screenshot back. So it ended up being pretty light even though it was long running and it was huge because that site has hundreds of pages. Checking all those by hand would not be possible. Let’s just put it that way. No, ain’t nobody got time for that. But we were able to take all the Tailwind CSS colors, map them to generate box design tokens and that new design system thing that they have, which is freaking awesome, right?

Brian Coords (18:13)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (18:14)
And then, you get those global classes and styles, so those things all using them. And then they have a sister site, so it’s same company, different brand, though, kind of deal. And it uses basically all the same components, it just has different brand colors. And so now we can import those patterns using generate cloud. So they all Are homed right here. We import them over here and we the design tokens just have the different values on the other side and it all just works. So it’s been it’s been really nice with all those things. WooCommerce wise, I think one of the biggest advantages that I’ve had is like doing any sort of like nuanced changes to product details, things like getting hooks in place and stuff, it becomes so trivial. know, it’s so it’s so I I’ve said it before,

Brian Coords (18:56)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (18:58)
I’ll say it again, it’s so freaking well documented. All you have to do is be able to adequately explain this is what I’m trying to do. Here’s a really good example. I wanted to use the jetpack related products function or the like jetpack related posts, and then I believe there’s the related products that comes like from WooCommerce itself or what have you, right?

Brian Coords (19:16)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (19:17)
So these are both like existing queries that aren’t like in a generate blocks loop thing. So I told the agent, I was like, that’s cool, but I want to do that. I want that query

Brian Coords (19:25)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (19:26)
to work in this freaking block. And we were able to do that. So we we have this block output. It’s just a standard query block. And it’s using the inherit option, right? But the thing that it inherits is just different. So we just know that it’s

Brian Coords (19:38)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (19:39)
the right thing. But like doing that sort of thing, it bridges so many gaps. Cause even though WooCommerce doesn’t explicitly do that, my agent can do that. So it does not

Brian Coords (19:47)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (19:47)
matter. And I I like I there were a couple of times where we needed different this or a different that. Okay, cool. We’ll make a a commerce plugin that just has all of our all of our little things that we add, and then now we have the functionality and it’s just so easy. So you’re not having to cram your site full of a bunch of random people’s plugins, spaghetti code. I gotta make this thing, but wait, the buttons aren’t on brand, so we have to override them with a PHP hook and an important and god, shoot me. Like

Brian Coords (20:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (20:14)
I’m getting tired just saying it out loud, right? it’s so much easier to to get around these types of problems, in ways that would have been very difficult for a small team or very expensive for any team, really, at a certain level. So that was cool. getting the custom Ajax mini cart thing that we made for this

Brian Coords (20:29)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (20:30)
one project. I really wanted to do that, and this is a custom theme, generate blocks, right? It doesn’t have functionality like that built in the way I wanted it. Right. I think it has something that you can enable

Brian Coords (20:38)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (20:40)
for that, but it’s not like you can just customize the content of it to do whatever you like. And if you had asked me, hey man, how much is it gonna how long is it gonna take to do that? I’m like, I don’t know, probably eight to ten freaking hours at least to do like an Ajax,

Brian Coords (20:51)
Yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (20:52)
a custom Ajax cart implementation. Sure did not take eight to ten hours to do. Right. So it’s got a lot of

Brian Coords (20:57)
Yeah. It’s

Ian Svoboda (20:59)
benefits, but it’s been instrumental, dude, in working in working with that.

Brian Coords (21:04)
It’s crazy because I mean there like earlier you’re talking about MCP and I think like MCP is gonna be useful for really non technical people, you know, like one click, connect ChatGPT to my store and do some basic data management and that sort of thing. Like obviously someone like you or I, I’m my agent has, you know, WP C L I aliases to all the production site. I don’t care. I let it crank. I don’t ever worry about it. But like it also changes the dynamics of like what is worth the building and what is worth just leaving it open. because once you have, WooCommerce has a store API where you can interact with cart, you can interact with products, you can do all that stuff. Is it how much time do we need to spend, you know, building every single little widget when it’s like, I don’t know, an agent can just build exactly what you want. And if the fundamentals are there, it’s gonna be pretty robust. And so I feel like it’s just changing the whole dynamics of the WordPress plug in ecosystem because you’re just it’s the off the shelf solution s it’s just sometimes not even worth it anymore.

Ian Svoboda (22:03)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a it’s a huge thing. I I just had a thought about this coming up recently with the WooCommerce shipping plugin, right, which is

Brian Coords (22:11)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (22:11)
free. It’s just in you probably know it’s in the plugin repo. But for anyone who doesn’t know, it’s a thing that you can use to print like USPS and DHL labels and stuff, right? So

Brian Coords (22:20)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (22:21)
it’s been having this problem though, where for some reason the the labels for media mail and stuff will just randomly not show up for a package that it normally shows up for. You look at the support forms and they’re like, yeah, the it’s like this token auth thing where the API to WooCommerce.com to USB S and whatever. And so it’s like, okay, well, that sucks. So it’s like, what do I do? I could I could we could go buy some other plugin or service. Gross. We could, completely make our own thing from scratch, which we could do. Agents can build things, right? On the other hand, we could just fork that plugin and then update the auth mechanism to use one where we just plug something in a settings page and then bob your freaking uncle. Then you don’t even have to do that, right? the the this whole notion of using off the shelf. you gotta reach for off the shelf first. I’m not always sure that that’s true anymore. I think that for certain products that function, here’s here’s an example. ACF is probably something that’s not gonna go out of style anytime soon. Why?

Brian Coords (23:15)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (23:16)
Because it has a UI for things that are very difficult to just make a UI for and doing that every single time, a date picker situation. coming up with a new version of that each project’s horrible. even if you

Brian Coords (23:27)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (23:28)
have an agent that’s tokens that you just don’t need to spend, it’s a very well solved and established problem. Same thing with with WordPress. I could vibe code my own CMS. you could, but if you’re doing posts and pages and user things, you could just do that and save a whole lot of tokens and money. Save a lot of water or whatever. Right.

Brian Coords (23:42)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (23:45)
All that kind of stuff. It’s just it it’s it’s crazy to me. And I don’t know, like I don’t know. I I feel like it’s it’s the direction that all of it’s going, where you’re able to use these agents to take something that has maybe these low-level primitives, these all these little tools and the nuts and bolts of the thing that you want. But the agent can then put those things together into the thing, and it can do that so efficiently that’s like, why pay $300 a year? You know? Right? Cause because

Brian Coords (24:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (24:15)
that’s understood. There’s some some things are more niche. Though, right, where it’s harder to do that. A good example, I I’m maybe I’m tempting fate with this one, but the plugin that I make, GB query announcements, that thing is going to be very difficult for any person to just vibe code their own version of. Mainly just because

Brian Coords (24:30)
Yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (24:31)
it’s like there’s no real published information on how all of those hooks work. I know because I wrote it originally, and thus I have at least some knowledge of those things and shit like that. So maybe I’m in a bit of a better place to do that, but it’s a very high domain specific level of knowledge. It would take it’d be expensive to have an agent solve that. the likelihood they could do that for sub one hundred dollars of token usage. Watch I say this Fable six is gonna come out and reverse compile everything. You know, I’m just saying it’s not

Brian Coords (24:57)
Come out and just do it. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (25:01)
worth it for a one time for a one time cost. But if you’re asking somebody to pay four hundred dollars a year, they’re very quickly gonna start to ask, but why? You know, especially

Brian Coords (25:08)
Yeah. I mean

Ian Svoboda (25:10)
for plugins for every little thing. That’s that’s going away for sure.

Brian Coords (25:13)
yeah, the the single use plugins, I’m I feel like I think we all kind of expect those to go. I feel like anything that’s a anything that’s a connection to something else, it’s like you can’t like the shipping example, I probably would be like less likely to fork something like that only because like those APIs change. I don’t wanna pay attention to that, the things go down, whatever. It’s like once there’s that external part of it that like I don’t wanna have to trust that that’s never gonna change, but a good amount of the things that your website needs to do, WordPress has been doing for like 20 years and they’re not gonna change. So when you’re talking about, you know, even like an SEO plugin or something like, I, you know, I could pay for a premium SEO plugin, but and I probably would use one off the shelf, but the minute I need something custom, my first thought is never gonna be let me go find something to buy. It’s gonna be like I need to I need an input and an output on the site somewhere. There’s no way I’m gonna think about that as something I need to buy. And I mean it’s just it’s just like a a really changing time, but it’s it is what it is, you know. Like that that is the way things are going. It’s crazy.

Ian Svoboda (26:15)
Absolutely. I’ve it it’s funny you say that. I’ve had that exact notion about things like say schema output. things like Yo some

Brian Coords (26:20)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (26:21)
rank math are like, hey, you can upgrade to premium, do whatever schema output you no, no, I don’t. I don’t have to do that at all. I can spend a couple minutes

Brian Coords (26:27)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (26:27)
in the terminal and then I have everything that I want in addition to this. It’s tough because it’s like a lot of us. We gotta you gotta come up with a different business model at a certain point,

Brian Coords (26:35)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (26:36)
right? And that and that applies to me too, and everybody else who who If you ever said I I write code or I I build websites or something for or build apps for a living, you have an you have to describe yourself in a new light now, right? Because everything’s gone upstream. But it’s like you said, just because you can build stuff faster doesn’t mean you should build it or necessarily or anything like that. You have to validate these ideas somehow. And I, I sometimes you have to build something to know it’s awesome or whatever,

Brian Coords (27:02)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (27:03)
right? But you know,

Brian Coords (27:04)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (27:04)
you can take these, you can take the time to make these small focused bets on something that’s not gonna annihilate a month’s worth of your time that nobody actually wants or or what have you. there’s there’s ways around that for sure. But yeah, I’ve I’ve tried to I’ve tried to keep things grounded with these things, right? I I had this genius idea, which I would strongly recommend for anyone who does agentix stuff where you’re in the terminal a lot. You’re doing client work and other things. If you want to just even if you just want to know where your time goes, right? Tracking

Brian Coords (27:35)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (27:36)
your time though, hitting the stop and start button. My ADHD does not permit that. I forget

Brian Coords (27:40)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (27:41)
that immediately, right? It’s just I or I’ll just never touch it, whatever. So I had the idea, I was like, hey, could you just look at my sessions and get a reasonable idea of where all this stuff goes? And now it automatically tracks the time for me.

Brian Coords (27:51)
Uh-huh.

Ian Svoboda (27:53)
I don’t have to do any of this. And it’s actually reasonably accurate. You know? It’s because

Brian Coords (27:54)
It’s yeah. Probably more accurate than you having to actually switch, you know, like a something in an app somewhere for sure.

Ian Svoboda (28:03)
Yeah. And a just a quick little how the sausage gets made on that, because if everybody’s wondering how could that possibly be accurate? Well, let me tell you, my friend, that these agents, they all track all these sessions. There’s timestamps and all kinds of things here. And if you couple that with checking, on a watcher, if you’re focused on a particular pain of your terminal. So, like, is

Brian Coords (28:22)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (28:22)
this herder pain receiving focus right now? Sure is. And it has been this whole time. And ghosty’s in focus and everything else, you can reasonably assume I’m staring at. But it has a timer, where if it’s been a couple minutes, it just cuts off if there’s been no activity, right? Cause like if you’re just standing there watching a long-running bash script or something, that doesn’t really count as you doing anything either. But it’s like the the it’s got certain nuances into it, like that. Stuff I would not have thought of. Again, this is what’s really helpful about having them. But I built my own version of toggle because I was sick of paying for it and it didn’t quite do all the stuff I wanted. Now I have this,

Brian Coords (28:54)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (28:55)
it tracks all those things. And so it makes it easier for me to say, like I wanna try to spend more of my time on doing sales and marketing stuff versus, just fucking around with my internal agency tooling as fun as it is.

Brian Coords (29:06)
As I know. Especially if you’re a developer builder type of mindset. Like I hate paying for any SAS. I hate paying for like I’ll use the free notes app on my Mac before I go pay somebody for a notes app. But now you’re kind of like All right, I I’ll just build this. Like there’s there’s so few things left that I’m like, I really will pay for that. Like maybe stuff around like invoicing people or something would maybe be something in my mind I’d say, I wouldn’t vibe code something like that. But I don’t know, maybe I would be vibe coding that. It’s it’s just if you’re like the kind of person who knows actually how to run this stuff and do proper security around it and knows the cr questions to ask and the places and the pitfalls to look for, it gets really hard to be like, yeah, I’m gonna go pay nineteen ninety nine a month for, a time tracker or a to-do list or something. but it’s I don’t know where that ceiling’s gonna be. It feels like every month you’re like, it can’t do that. And then it’s like, no, it it can do that too. It’s crazy.

Ian Svoboda (29:59)
Yeah, I think it just I think it just depends on I think it I think it just depends on like how how easy is the problem really to solve? Like for instance, if I said to you, find me fifty people that are all in positions of authority at a company that makes seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and is located in Northeast Florida or something like that. Like off the dome, no one could do that, right? Like, how would

Brian Coords (30:22)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (30:22)
you even exactly explain? concisely to anyone to do that. You couldn’t. It would, if you were gonna prompt it, it would be a long and detailed prompt. You’d have to go through a lot of conversation. How do we source these people? Where does that data come from? All these different any any of that type of shit. Nobody’s vibe coding that. Like Apollo, right? You know what Apollo is by chance? It’s

Brian Coords (30:38)
Yeah. Hm. No.

Ian Svoboda (30:41)
like it’s it’s a it’s like a B2B like go to market kind of company where you can like you basically can find prospects data in their like

Brian Coords (30:48)
yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (30:49)
database of info where they aggregate it from all these sources. Like you know places where people had consensually given their information anyway. And it’s like doing something like that, I’m not building that in my spare time. But like a time

Brian Coords (30:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (31:00)
tracker, like you said, I need it to be able to do this, this, this, this, and this. If you can explain the extent of the app’s value like that, you probably don’t have a product people are gonna pay for for very long. You seen like those harvest bills, 20K or something these people have?

Brian Coords (31:11)
Yeah, and I they’re just they’re like how much can we get before we disappear? Yeah. I I think that’s also

Ian Svoboda (31:19)
insane.

Brian Coords (31:19)
the WordPress thing is A lot of WordPress sites were like could have been five HTML pages because that nobody was ever going to look at. And it’s hard, So it was like, I moved all this to static. And it’s like, well, it probably wasn’t that worth worth that much money in the first place. But then when you start going like upmarket and you’re like, this is a large company, there’s a bunch of people, they need brand guidelines to match. They have like legal compliance before content gets published. They have, you know, 20 users log in. It’s like you see all that kind of stuff, and you’re like, yeah, no one at that company wants to be. the guy who vibe coded their new CMS and everybody’s pissed at him, they’re gonna go to WordPress and probably an agency and they’re gonna like take off that risk. But it’s just that like floor of sites, you know, is just kind of disappearing. And like the enterprise and the WooCommerce stuff I think is is probably where I would be focusing, you know.

Ian Svoboda (32:10)
Yeah, sure. And it’s like the the the lower end website is is definitely not something that’s gonna be a profit center for anyone right now. You know, I don’t I don’t think if you’re I don’t think there’s really ever been a a ton of money in that, but if there ever was, there is not now, right? Just because

Brian Coords (32:25)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (32:26)
it’s just it’s never been easier. But you know, in a way it’s like I think selling the website’s the wrong thing, right? The website for a business should be a thing that makes them money. And

Brian Coords (32:34)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (32:35)
the like I remember one time Kevin Geary made a point. about this, which I thought was really smart, where he’s like, you know, that guy who’s like the the landscaper or whatever who does all these TikTok stuff, he gets all of his business from TikTok. Nobody goes to his website to do anything. He’s just posting on social.

Brian Coords (32:49)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (32:49)
He gets all the business there. People see his Yelp or Google reviews and they come from there. Sure. That website is not worth thousands of dollars to that guy. He maybe has

Brian Coords (32:57)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (32:57)
one just so he like feels better. And you know people assume he’s more legit because he has a website or whatever, which I think there’s something to that. But that guy’s not paying significant coin and having somebody, maintain his website every month because he just does not need to. There’s no point to that.

Brian Coords (33:09)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (33:10)
Right. Whereas, like you said, if you have a team with editorial workflows, multiple authors, and a publishing publishing guidelines and stuff, like that melodic mag site that I was talking about, they have a lot of authors in there. There’s pre-published checks that they have to make sure they have photo credits and all these other different things and image sizes and all this different stuff. These are concerns that simply do not apply to small to medium-sized businesses, most of them

Brian Coords (33:32)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (33:33)
anyway, right? And like, you know, if you’re at the point where you’re building out, say a website for somebody and they say, Hey Brian, I want a website and it just needs to have a couple of pages and we’re not gonna need to update it all the time. Do they need a server that runs PHP and a database and stuff? Probably not. No,

Brian Coords (33:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (33:49)
they probably do not, right? Could you build them something else? Sure. You could build them WordPress that goes to static, you could do a statimatic build, you could just Make the edits for them and not give them back end access at all because they don’t actually care. Right? This

Brian Coords (34:03)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (34:04)
is something I think that’s also been a really interesting. my Mark Samansky, my man, shout out to Mark, he made this point

Brian Coords (34:09)
Mark.

Ian Svoboda (34:09)
too. It’s like, how many of your clients actually want to log into the back end? I think the answer is often less than you think. In some cases,

Brian Coords (34:16)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (34:16)
yes, they do. Like if you like I said, you got a team of authors. Yeah, people need to log in who aren’t just you. If it’s a large company, they almost definitely need that. I can’t you can’t

Brian Coords (34:25)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (34:25)
just be hey. Yeah, give this to Todd to paste into chat GPT. come on, man. That’s not a way to run a business, right?

Brian Coords (34:31)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (34:31)
But but if you have an operator, an experienced a Brian or an Ian who’s pasting it in, so to speak, well, then maybe that’s a little better because we can at least validate the outputs of that. But like

Brian Coords (34:41)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (34:41)
there’s there’s more to that, there’s more to that story. And I I think that a lot of the the conversation around this is really it’s very lacking in nuance. You don’t need to build anything in WordPress, you could just make it an astro site. That’s not the same, those aren’t the same things. Should that site is is this a site that should have been built in WordPress to begin with? That you’re saying you

Brian Coords (34:59)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (35:00)
could do this over here. And that’s not a false, that’s a false equivalence. I should people still be doing that stuff though, like Astro, Laravel builds, whatever, you know, is it like a static build for those things? Yeah, dude, totally. Sometimes that’s all people need. You can host it on Cloudflare for a frickin’ nickel. Not even

Brian Coords (35:14)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (35:15)
so cheap. Do that or use Space Fast, which is fantastic, by the way. Shout out to Space Fast. I know, you know, I I

Brian Coords (35:21)
yeah, have you tried it?

Ian Svoboda (35:21)
I assuming you’ve been you, dude. Yeah, I use that all the time. If you all don’t know what SpaceFast is, it’s really dope. It’s a thing that automatic owns, but it I it’s not really WordPress specific, even. It’s a way for your agents to create what’s called artifacts. An artifact is basically like a like a a graphic, a web page, a s an image, a something, not just text that comes back to you in a terminal. So it it could be like build me a web page, or it could be take this report and visualize it with a graph and other stuff, and it makes a page that has that. And that kind of stuff. And it’s private by default, the links expire after a certain amount of time. And even if you pay for it, it’s so cheap. But it’s nice because I can use that in my pie setup, which does not have those clawed artifact creation tools or the Codex equivalent of that or whatever. And so now they all can do it the exact same way. And then I can share it with people really easily. And you can have the domain and stuff. It’s it’s neat, it’s really cool.

Brian Coords (36:14)
Dude, I used it for I had to do a presentation at a WordPress meetup and I was like, I I don’t wanna go into Google Slides and pull in like our brand guideline template slides and I just hate Google Slides so much. And I was like, all right, Space Fast. This is our brand guidelines for our team. It stores it all there. And then I was like, let’s just make some slides. And I had to iterate obviously. Like I had the content and I had kind of iterating some of the the layout and stuff. But I didn’t have to touch anything. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to log into Google Slides. It made like a nice slide, you know, because that’s something that an agent I mean it made it in like a minute. It was not anything but that kind of like Some of those things where it’s like back in the day people like I made presentations in WordPress and I use the block editor to make some slides and show people stuff and it’s like now it’s like I don’t have to do any of that. I just there’s it’s just so easy and I’m it’s like I’m really stoked about this return to just like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you know. I don’t need a server like you said, I don’t need PHP and a MySQL database in the cloud for the vast majority of things. If I’m running an e commerce store, then I need it. If I don’t, it’s yeah. So Space West is pretty cool. It is built on WordPress our infrastructure. So it you can do

Ian Svoboda (37:22)
that’s right, yeah.

Brian Coords (37:23)
like apps and database stuff with it. I’m trying to build something on it and stress test it like an actual app.

Ian Svoboda (37:30)
With the data you’ve done like a you’re working on a database build with it? cool.

Brian Coords (37:33)
Yeah, so l I’m like trying to build an RSS reader because again I don’t want to pay for feedly and I I just like was like, it’s it’s always something I’ve wanted to do. But it’s like then you need recurring crons to fetch the things. You gotta pull all these static RSS feeds, like there’s all these things. So I’m stress testing it now, but but yeah, it’s That idea and I obviously ChatGPT and Claude, they’re gonna start they already do artifacts and stuff, but having it in a place you can own with a little team management, it’s a pretty cool, pretty cool idea.

Ian Svoboda (38:02)
Yeah. And you have a little bit of control over the domain and stuff, I guess. But I guess I guess for me the the main value there is the the harness agnostic nature of it, right? Like

Brian Coords (38:12)
Yes.

Ian Svoboda (38:13)
I try I try to do that thing as much as I can. Just my theory I guess is that one day when the subsidies run out, you gotta have techniques that survive more than just one model, right?

Brian Coords (38:22)
Yes.

Ian Svoboda (38:23)
Things like the cross provider or model review or being able to do the the verification loops, having it be able to understand

Brian Coords (38:29)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (38:30)
what done right means. That type of stuff’s never gonna go out of style because that’s literally the definition of making sure things are done correctly. Right.

Brian Coords (38:37)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (38:37)
Like that’s just that that that is the game. So I’m focus I’m trying to focus on those kind of ever, evergreen skills. I’ve been cooking up this idea for like a workshop for this type of thing, you know, that’s gonna kind of touch on all this different stuff we’ve actually talked about. It’s kind of funny we organically mentioned Astro and other things like that earlier because it’s all just so relevant, right? And

Brian Coords (38:56)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (38:57)
there’s there’s little d nuances. which model do we use for this? That that stuff changes so much that it’s not useful to really you gotta kinda just do your best to roll with it. But once you get those other principles in play, then these new toys become available like a space fast or whatever memory thing or whatever you want. And then now you go, Maybe I could use that, or I can look at how that works and steal some of it. That’s another thing that that Joel’s very fond of. He’s like, I love to just look at what these other things have and and steal their features and copy that shit and think how

Brian Coords (39:26)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (39:26)
did they do it? And I’m gonna try to do that or a little better. There’s definitely something, something to it. But man, it has been it has been nothing but nothing but great getting this dialed in. I did something silly. I didn’t tell you about this. I did something silly, as is as is my nature. I’m a big fan of pop

Brian Coords (39:43)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (39:44)
culture, you know, like movies and TV shows and stuff.

Brian Coords (39:46)
Uh-huh.

Ian Svoboda (39:47)
So I made these agent personas. They’re all basically characters from TV shows they like. They have portraits, they have voices.

Brian Coords (39:53)
That’s a I like that.

Ian Svoboda (39:55)
It’s so it’s so fun. It’s so great. They can send voice memos.

Brian Coords (40:00)
I don’t it’s weird how much fun it is working with a technology that’s like actively trying to put us out of a job. I mean, it’s like the AI is like, no, I’m gonna code better than you. I’m gonna do this better than you. And you’re like, I don’t know. If you enjoy it’s like I feel like I enjoy the not even productivity, but just the like, I can just do this stuff. I don’t have to say no or like I don’t have time for that. It’s like cool. I could plan it. pass it off. It’s it’s it’s really it’s really exciting I think if you if you really engage with it.

Ian Svoboda (40:29)
sure. And for what it’s worth, I I I think that I think in a way, people like you just said, maybe it’s coming for our job or it feels that way. And I guess I guess it does, but I think it depends on how your identity gets tied up in your job, right? Where like if you’re saying I’m a guy that as I I love the DHA expression you use, hand chisels code, right? I’m just in the editor,

Brian Coords (40:47)
Uh-huh.

Ian Svoboda (40:47)
I write code for a living. If that’s all you felt like your job was, then AI is definitely gonna feel like an existential crisis, right?

Brian Coords (40:54)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (40:54)
But it’s like I don’t think that really the just writing the code is really ever it, right? say w like the example I was talking about about those related posts into the generate blocks query loop. I didn’t have to do that, right? Like I I could have done that a number of of different ways, right? But we wanted

Brian Coords (41:09)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (41:09)
I wanted it to be performant and I wanted it to be consistent with the way that everything else worked. So I had it follow This established set of principles. And if I had just not told it to that, it it didn’t do that at first. It did not one-shot any of that. I had to explain

Brian Coords (41:23)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (41:24)
as when we’re doing these projects, you’re using this is like you’re making these classes and you’re you have to assign the post meta this way, and you have to watch for the HTML escaping when you’re setting this block content this way or so on. And it remembers this and it gets better over time. But it’s like, why am I doing all that? To make sure the page loads lightning fast because core web vials are super important to the site. It previously lost a ton of traffic due to all of that stuff, right? So

Brian Coords (41:46)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Svoboda (41:46)
it’s like the the I wrote code. Say I wrote all that by hand. I wrote the code, but they she didn’t pay me for the code. She paid me for the faster core web vital score, right? They pay me for

Brian Coords (41:54)
Yeah, definitely.

Ian Svoboda (41:55)
the the performance benefits or the additional sales or the result that comes it from the code. if you’re just paying for code, that’s like paying somebody to make a sculpture. It’s nice to stare at, but other than that, that’s all it does for you. Right. And even then, I’d argue a sculpture is more useful right now than just saying,

Brian Coords (42:10)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (42:11)
I wrote this right, it’s got aesthetic value and

Brian Coords (42:12)
This code, yeah.

Ian Svoboda (42:13)
you don’t we don’t even look at the code. Yeah, we didn’t look at the code that much before. You’d write it once and then you’d be done looking at it for like forever for the foreseeable future.

Brian Coords (42:21)
Yeah. In fact, never look at your old code. That’s one of the worst things you can do because you’re not gonna feel good.

Ian Svoboda (42:27)
I actually have a Stack Overflow post. I know r rest in peace, Stack Overflow, right? Like

Brian Coords (42:32)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (42:33)
from years and years ago when I first started in this business, and I have it bookmarked as a constant reminder of even everybody started somewhere and asks really dumb questions.

Brian Coords (42:42)
Nice.

Ian Svoboda (42:42)
I I I I look at the code that I use as an example, like, what am I doing wrong here? And these people are like, so much. But they nicely broke it down,

Brian Coords (42:49)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (42:52)
but it’s just like, you know, I yeah, it’s

Brian Coords (42:54)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (42:54)
You you really gotta you gotta stay dialed in. But I think that this this whole thing is just gonna allow us all to go up market. You know what mean? Like people are gonna go from just being the developer to being the guy that handles integrations, automations, and things that actually power day-to-day business, right? Like you’re talking about we talked a little bit about editorial workflows, right? Like say you’re a large company, like you know, I’ve done some work on a like a larger media company and news outlet site where they had like hundreds of employees. lots of different contributors all over the place, right? And it’s like if you’re able to do things that provide material benefit to teams of those sizes, that’s that’s money in the in their pocket, right? From not having to make airs, from getting, more coverage, more eyes on ads, all these different things. it you got to change your focus to being a results person. That’s a big part of how I’ve been trying to reorient all this. Is like, how can I do things that matter for someone? How can I creatively solve their problems? How can I truly understand what they need and then use this veritable freaking superpower, phenomenal cosmic power, you

Brian Coords (43:56)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (43:57)
with the agents to deliver on that in a way that was never possible before, especially for smaller clients, right? Who don’t have that $10,000, $20,000 a month retainer budget like some of

Brian Coords (44:07)
Yeah.

Ian Svoboda (44:08)
these huge companies do, right? Like they need help too. And yeah, I mean, there’s there’s a lot of room on the board for that, but you gotta adapt or you’re gonna be fucked.

Brian Coords (44:16)
Yeah. That’s a good place

Ian Svoboda (44:17)
That’s the true

Brian Coords (44:18)
to call it, man. Where should people go to follow you? I you’re I always consider you, one of the smarter people in the WordPress space, always sharing interesting things, always thinking outside the box. So for people that are interested, what are you do you have like newsletter, social, any of that kind of stuff right now?

Ian Svoboda (44:33)
probably the biggest thing is going to be on X at I In Sfo I A N S V O. I do have a newsletter for my WordPress courses and stuff. I’m gonna be pivoting a little bit further into that, but keep an eye on my profile, on the X profile. I’m gonna be dropping something really soon about this new workshop that I’m particularly stoked for. And I’m gonna be announcing it on there and everything. We’ll have early early access pricing, all that jazz. It’ll be great.

Brian Coords (45:01)
Nice. Awesome. Thanks for hanging out, man. It’s good to talk.

Ian Svoboda (45:04)
Yeah, likewise.