Brian and Jonathan Jernigan chat about Jonathan’s web development journey, spotlighting his Laravel experiments and AI tool use. They compare Laravel’s structure and features to WordPress, discuss JavaScript-PHP challenges, and explore AI’s role in balancing simplicity and quality. The duo also considers Laravel’s clear purpose versus WordPress’s broader ecosystem and AI’s potential for non-technical users.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:07 Transitioning from WordPress to Laravel
05:59 Exploring Laravel’s Structure and Features
09:03 AI Integration in Development Workflow
11:52 Challenges and Learning Experiences
16:59 Navigating AI Tools in Development
20:46 Balancing Simplicity and Quality in Projects
23:10 Understanding Laravel’s Framework and Features
25:39 Transferring Knowledge Between Laravel and WordPress
28:16 The Future of Non-Technical Users and AI
32:16 Comparing Laravel and WordPress: Clarity and Focus
Links
Brian (00:00)
Welcome to Webmasters. Today I got Jonathan. Jonathan, it’s so good to see you again. Welcome to the show.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:04)
Thanks so much, glad to be here. I was wondering, do I get a cool wizard pin or badge? Do I get any kind of award? I want something like your logo.
Brian (00:13)
I’ve been experimenting with setting up like a WooCommerce drop shipping thing where you can do like t-shirts and stuff like that. And so I want to make merch, even though I know like not only will I not sell like basically any of it, but also with drop shipping, it’s like you make like 50 cents for a shirt or something like that. But I am doing it. So a pin, that’s a good idea. I wanna do like punk like pins and stickers, like, you know, something cool.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:37)
Dude,
I have a whole sticker board right there that’s all WordPress stuff, I need it.
Brian (00:41)
Nice, okay, I’m gonna do it. Because I have one laptop too that I’ve sticker bombed. I’m a big sticker and pin fan, so yeah, that’s a good idea.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:48)
Well, your logo’s sweet,
so glad to be here though. Thanks for having me.
Brian (00:51)
Yeah, why don’t you give us like the one second, you know, bio of how people might know you.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:56)
Sure, I create content on YouTube around WordPress and I have done it for coming up on 10 years now. I’ve been doing WordPress for over 10 years and then on YouTube making WordPress content since 2018.
Brian (01:08)
And I think of you, I guess mostly around generate press and generate blocks, but I mean, how much do you think is generate press content versus just WordPress content in general?
Jonathan Jernigan (01:19)
Yeah, I mean, over the years it’s shifted from oxygen builder to kind of dabbled in some like agencies to kind of topics like pricing and clients and stuff. But in more recent years, it’s mostly around generate press and generate blocks because that’s what I personally build with for the most part. And then also, you know, for, all kinds of client work over the last three or four years, it’s been in generate press. and then that’s what I teach courses on as well.
Brian (01:43)
Yeah, that’s right. So you have, um, like premium courses for people who are getting into it. It’s funny because when you start out on WordPress, you’re kind of like, you’re kind of wearing all these hats. It’s marketing. It’s like building your business. It’s freelancing. It’s the actual code. Like you have to learn like 50 things and then like narrowing down your voice on YouTube to like, no, no, no, I’m just going to talk about these things. Mostly, uh, did that take a long time to kind of find like your groove?
Jonathan Jernigan (02:09)
It actually wasn’t, it took me longer in my actual business to hone in on what that was than it was on YouTube because when I first started creating videos on YouTube it was only Oxygen Builder content because it was like for me this level up as a, I’ll still call myself a non-developer where like suddenly it’s like I don’t even know how to write a CSS class by hand but suddenly I had a class attached to three buttons and I could style all of them at once. Like I felt this
Brian (02:20)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (02:37)
just super power unlocked. And so I wanted to make that kind of content on YouTube to help other people. then you just experience this natural progression as a inching closer to what you might call a real developer with suddenly you’re like, whoa, I can drop a WordPress function in this little box and it does cool stuff. It was like these revelations that I just kept having. inside my agency, was like chaos of like,
Brian (02:39)
Mm-hmm.
Haha.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:04)
Early on I was doing social media and graphic design and websites and all this stuff, but on YouTube I was only Oxygen Builder. So thankfully over the years I’ve managed to really hone in just on one kind of focus for both the business and the YouTube.
Brian (03:06)
Hmm.
Yeah, that’s like a normal starting place in WordPress where you’re like, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll make your like annual report PDF for you that I have no business making at all. All those sorts of things. It’s totally normal. It’s funny too, because we’re not even going to talk about WordPress today. So we both both work on WordPress primarily, but I think I know I have like a little side love like all WordPress developers do for Laravel. And you told me you were just like messing around with a little Laravel on the side. So.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:25)
Exactly.
Brian (03:42)
think it’s just gonna be fun to talk about that. Maybe you can give me how did Laravel get on your radar and what made you think I’m gonna try a non-WordPress approach to something.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:53)
Yeah, it’s actually interesting. I don’t really even know how Laravel came onto my radar. I’ve known the name for a long time, but never really knew what it actually was. And then if you go to the website now, they just redesigned it, I think like two weeks ago or something. But prior to that, if you went to Laravel.com, it just said like the artisan framework for PHP lovers, know, something like that. And I was just like, I don’t know what this is. Like I’m out, see ya. And…
Brian (04:07)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (04:17)
So I had this, my love outside of WordPress in terms of passions is cars, automotive, tinkering, engine builds, and all that kind of stuff, racing, all those kinds of things that I absolutely love. So I’ve had this idea in mind for a long time and never really was able to pull it off in WordPress. The idea is it’s just a simple little tracking app that will tell you like, hey, your oil change is due and…
Brian (04:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (04:44)
2,500 miles or next month, know, just like essentially a tool for DIY car people like myself to like get service reminders and go log your own service history. Yeah, you could do it in a sheet, but it’s not really like, you know, that’s not interesting or cool. The catch though was that I tried it in WordPress multiple times. I mean, like I said, I’ve been in WordPress 10 years. So like I have a super deep understanding of custom fields and CPTs, relationships and.
Brian (04:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (05:12)
All those kinds of things that, you know, talking about like leveling up and feeling like these superpowers, like you discover ACF and it opens this whole new door and then like you discover relationship fields and it just continues. But with this car project, it was like, well, you have like sort of like a multi sort of like inception tier of relationships where it’s like you have like your, you know, kind of your base like index of vehicles.
Brian (05:20)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (05:40)
Then inside of that, you have service records. Then below that you have notifications. And then there’s like, you know, another tier of, of like data. So suddenly you have four layers of relationships and WordPress really falls apart in that, that kind of instance. So that’s, that’s where I went looking.
Brian (05:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it’s a-
Yeah, and I’ve had that same thing where you’re like, could build this with WordPress. I think from like the first like 10 to 15 years of WordPress, it was like, I will build this in WordPress. And I think we all start there. And you’re like, it’s all just content, right? I’ll make a post type for this and a post type for that. And I’ll string them together. you know, all maybe I edit it in WordPress. Maybe it’s on the front end. It’s kind of weird disjointed thing. I, it’s like recently there’s like a dividing line where you’re like, you know.
WordPress is really great at content management and like publishing. And it’s kind of leaning more into that with the block editor and stuff and all those things where you’re like, I can kind of do it with WordPress and get a bunch of plugins on there and stuff. feels like Laravel is the go-to thing, mainly because it’s probably PHP and like, you know, WordPress developers, we all love PHP. It’s very, I think it’s the easiest of languages. It’s very like, you know, this line happens, then this line happens, and then this line happens. And I can just do whatever I want.
Not like JavaScript. and so, I mean, it kind of makes sense. So did you, did you just go to Laravel.com and just like start following instructions?
Jonathan Jernigan (07:03)
Yeah, so I just, I just had attempted this so many times in WordPress that I came to the conclusion like, I don’t think I’m going to be able to pull this off. I had tried like with, well, you know, to your point about like, I’ll build anything in WordPress. It was like, I knew how from a, from a foundation’s perspective to do it with a CPT, ACF, a form plugin, some front end, you know, hooks and filters. But even then you’re still like piece milling all this stuff together. It’s not really designed to do what it was I was trying to do.
Brian (07:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (07:32)
So I just went hunting and actually now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I went to chat GPT and I described all of what I had attempted to do and the overall idea and I said WordPress doesn’t feel like a good fit. What would you recommend? And I had a couple different suggestions, but the only one I’d ever heard of was Laravel. So I was like, okay, well, let’s give it a go. So I just fired up a simple little Vulture server and it’s got like the Laravel package, you know, on there.
Brian (07:58)
Hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (08:00)
and just started noodling with it, just as in SSH into this server, just like doing stuff, just again, feeling like a wizard, just like typing in like, CD slash my Laravel app, and you’re just like, whoa, this is so cool. But yeah, to your point, because it’s PHP based, even for someone like me that’s a pretty rudimentary coder, it feels familiar, because PHP is similar enough across both Laravel and WordPress that you can…
Brian (08:11)
huh.
Jonathan Jernigan (08:25)
You can noodle around in it and get some stuff done pretty quickly. And then because, you know, something like Claude is so good at, at writing that kind of thing, like you’re not asking it to create custom JavaScript. It’s like PHP that’s been out there for 10 plus years all over the place. I was able to get something working really quickly. So it just became exciting. And now I’m so deep into this thing that it’s going to be a Laravel app. That’s for sure.
Brian (08:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And there’s something to be said about like PHP where I just write the PHP. I reload the page, the PHP runs, and now I can decide, did I do a good job? Did I do a bad job? And if it doesn’t work, guess what? You’re going to know, cause there’s going be a massive error on the screen and it’s going to just like shut down. It’s like, Nope, giant error. You made up something in JavaScript. You’re kind of like, I don’t know. Is it working? It seems like it’s loading, but then like this isn’t happening. And there’s this.
weird asynchronous stuff and everything. And so in that sense, it’s easier, but Laravel’s PHP compared to WordPress’s PHP, that’s very different, right? I mean, they’re using like namespaces and a lot more objects and a lot more like dependencies and like extending classes and all these sorts of things. How was it looking at that PHP the first time from like the WordPress background?
Jonathan Jernigan (09:41)
it’s definitely scary for sure. mean, for someone like me who, if you asked me to write this, like no AI assistant, I just straight up couldn’t do it. So, you know, it’s definitely a bit scary, but it’s not, it’s not like when you, when you understand like the, at first it’s just the opening PHP tag, then a namespace, then some of those use statements. Then, then it starts to get familiar because you’re like, okay. There’s just a function and it’s doing some stuff inside of it.
And like from that point, it’s pretty straightforward. It starts to feel familiar enough. and you know, Laravel has a totally different, you know this, but I would assume they’re people listening that never have used it or messed with that at all. Laravel has a totally different structure. And so you have kind of this like their, their frameworks, that MVC model view controller setup, which certainly you know more about than me, but it’s like kind of all the like under the hood stuff happens over there.
And then you have these like blade files, which are the templates. And that’s where it feels really familiar. Cause that’s just HTML mixed in with what I would refer to as like their dynamic data. They’re like carbon tags or these like predefined like tags that you can drop in that do cool stuff, like add things together or like access data from your database or you all these kinds of things. It’s like, it’s like working in WordPress where
Brian (10:34)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (10:59)
you go into a generate blocks and you click the button that says insert the post title here. Like it’s the same idea. So once I get out of the like super nuts and bolts controller model kind of thing, it feels really familiar and I can really like work with it there.
Brian (11:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and there’s even versions of WordPress, like Bedrock is a popular one, where they move all the files around in WordPress to give you, and it’s like, here’s your blade components for your front end of your WordPress site, and here’s the WordPress app, and they try to do that, break it apart and stuff, and it’s like, WordPress is just so weird. WordPress just does, they call it the WordPress way, it doesn’t follow any conventions, it lives in its own universe.
Jonathan Jernigan (11:40)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (11:40)
puts things in weird places. So it’s like, it’s never really a good matchup, but if you’re learning like the underlying fundamentals of PHP and you know, basic, you know, loops and template syntax and all this sort of stuff, like it, it generally works pretty well. When, when you did it, did it want you to do a certain, like there’s, so like Laravel has like flavors almost like.
Here’s Laravel with React on the front end. Here’s Laravel with Vue on the front end. Here’s Livewire, which is like its own kind of weird PHP JavaScript thing. Did it give you like a specific thing or do you think it was a very vanilla like just Laravel, some blade templates, nothing too crazy?
Jonathan Jernigan (12:19)
Yeah, yeah, that’s, it’s actually something I knew coming into it was that I didn’t want any of that complexity. specifically was, was coming into it with the idea that like, I want this to be as close to just native PHP, Laravel, you know, HTML as possible. and then the, like when you go through that initial Laravel setup, it does ask you, says, what, package do you want on top of it? React, Alpine, Livewire, and so on. And I, initially just didn’t have that.
Brian (12:44)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (12:47)
But there was a lot of like interactivity stuff, especially on the front end of like drop downs that, you know, you want to drop down that doesn’t look ugly or like has a search field. Suddenly you got to incorporate JS. So I actually went the route of much, much later. I went the route of adding in the Alpine JS, the package that they include. And, it’s definitely gotten a bit out of hand with some of the stuff that just, mean, like you said, you know, one.
Brian (13:05)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (13:13)
stray comma and then Alpine and the whole page is broken. it doesn’t correlate like PHP does where it’s like, okay, well this part works and this part’s broken. So I can go look in my code and it’s like right there. The JS, it’s like, oh, it was the very first comma and the whole second half of your page is broken. So that feels scary to me because I have to rely on AI for all of the JS piece. But my goal was to keep it as simple as possible and not have React and all that stuff.
Brian (13:16)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, I’ve done a few different versions of Laravel and I always come back to like, just want the like very basic vanilla Laravel Alpine I really like. And there’s one, think it’s Alpine like Ajax or something that can do a little bit of like submit a form and it doesn’t reload the whole page. But like when you see that compared to like what’s happening, I don’t know in the block editor in WordPress where it’s like things are so interactive and I click here and I add a block mode. Like I get why that’s all JavaScript. Like I get why you need react or some crazy thing.
for this, like, if you don’t have to deal with all that and you’re like, just know exactly what I want to make and I’m going to make it and it’s this, that’s pretty good. How did, how much, so how, what was your AI workflow? So you used Claude, like would you copy and paste back and forth or how are you doing that?
Jonathan Jernigan (14:27)
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, it was like as rudimentary as it could get. I’ve been working on this since December and it’s now early March, so a good couple of months, and with two new babies at home. So you can imagine, it’s not been a consistent three months of work, it’s been heavily segmented times. initially, Claude, prior to its current 3.7 sonnet iteration,
Brian (14:45)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (14:54)
it was on their 3.5, I think it was called, and you could add project knowledge. And it was basically just like a text field. So I would go through manually and I would copy in VS code, I would say, copy relative URL, put that as the name of the file in Claude, then drop all the contents of that file in. And I would just do that over and over and over. So there would be 30, 40 files sometimes. But it was able to then just analyze those
Brian (14:57)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (15:22)
project knowledge files and I would just ask it questions. And then as things started to get more complex, it wasn’t quite as good as looking at all of the files kind of together so that it had the whole picture. And then I would run into issues of like, well, then it made breaking changes like two hours ago and now I don’t have any like recourse unless I manually saved stuff, which I started doing. I would like.
Brian (15:36)
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Jonathan Jernigan (15:49)
download the whole thing and save it again separately. But now it’s way easier because Claude can connect to a GitHub repo. So that was all new to me. Like I can set up a GitHub repo and now I’m working with branches and doing all that kind of stuff, which is, I feel like a big boy, which is cool. But Claude can connect to that GitHub repo. So all I have to do is just push the changes and it’s got a fresh
Brian (15:58)
Mmm.
You
Jonathan Jernigan (16:14)
you know, set of information to work with. So the workflow at first was super, super rudimentary, time consuming, but it worked. And now they just made it even easier by honestly pure chance.
Brian (16:26)
And have you tried any of the like cursor or windsurf or any of these like, like VS code versions that are more or like cope, get up, copilot or any of that stuff or was clodged kind of like your go-to.
Jonathan Jernigan (16:37)
Yeah, I did try, both, tried both copilot and cursor, but I found it to be too steep of a learning curve initially for me to want to pursue them because the, was already like, we, before we started, we had talked about like building something like this. It’s easy to get 80 % of the way. And then that final 20 % becomes really hard. And that’s kind of where I’m at now. So like products like cursor and stuff really weren’t that helpful because it wasn’t able to do like the meat and potatoes. It was more like.
Now I need to work on the super fine, intricate details of how this thing works and how these individual pieces connect. So I didn’t find it to be that helpful. But I was researching over this weekend about Claude code, the thing where it runs in your terminal. And that has me interested. I might give that a go.
Brian (17:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I, it’s like, I feel like I cannot keep up with the innovations. It’s like the models. Yeah. There’s like new model every few months and it’s great and whatever, but it’s more of like them realizing like, well, how, what’s the best like user interface or user experience or product like design around the models where, you know, you can do it like cursor and then cursor changed where it used to have like multiple tabs of like chat versus agent and composer.
Now they’ve like figured out the better way to do that. And then it’s like, well, now there’s this other one and it does it this way. And now Claude code, if it’s like, I haven’t even had time to look at it. it’s pretty wild. Do you, do you try, like, do you try to keep up with it do you just try to like, like, like not spend too much time working on the tooling and actually like, keep like moving progress on your actual project.
Jonathan Jernigan (18:09)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. mean, I think my philosophy just in general in my business, YouTube content, like the courses, everything it’s like keeping it as simple as possible while still being effective and making forward progress. So, you know, like I, I definitely hold myself to a decent quality standard. So, you know, I’m, balancing that of like as simple as possible while still having a good output, but like I already had with the VS code, like I already had.
a remote SSH extension, because I switch back and forth between my laptop and my desktop all the time, so I didn’t want it to be locally on my desktop, and so I had it just living in this server. And that way I had this remote SSH extension in VS Code, then there’s the terminal thing on the bottom, so it was already all these side bars, and I don’t know what you call it, bottom bar, and then there was the code, and then you add in cursor, and it just became this like,
Brian (18:39)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (19:03)
So honestly, I just stripped that back down and I think I signed up for cursor and in like 24 hours I had canceled my trial because it’s like, I’m not gonna bother with this.
Brian (19:11)
Yeah.
Yeah. And it’s like at a certain point you like, you just have to focus in on whatever’s, if it’s moving you forward, you know, like that’s kind of the main goal. And so it can be fun to like, there’s definitely a room for people who their job is trial the tools, make content about it, show everybody all that stuff. And like, I’m glad those people are doing that and that exists. But then there’s like, at end of the day, you’re like, I got to like make the thing. I got to like learn the stuff. Do you feel like.
your knowledge is growing as you’re using the AI? it’s not like, like is your brain, is your brain absorbing information and you’re leveling up your skills still the same way you felt like you were leveling up when you were, you know, cracking open WordPress and stuff like that? Like, you, do you feel like you’re gaining knowledge?
Jonathan Jernigan (19:58)
Yeah, I mean, certainly in the context of like how the individual pieces of a Laravel site work together. Like if you rewind the clock 90 days ago and asked me to explain what the MVC framework is, I’m like, I don’t know. Now I could be like, well, it’s like, I think the controller does the, you know, like I could at least like fumble my way through it. But then on the, on the blade, like template side of Laravel, I’m much more comfortable in that now. Like I’ve become familiar with the
Brian (20:16)
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (20:25)
the carbon syntax and like it’s mostly HTML and I understand how these pieces are fitting together, creating like something else that’s really cool is the function. Maybe it’s not specific to Laravel, but what they call partials. You can have like little components that are separate that you can bring in anywhere around the site. Kind of, guess it’d be like a reusable pattern in WordPress. Similar idea.
Brian (20:30)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Like we have template parts and things that used to exist, like not as robust as, all the little blade partials and like the little props you can pass them and stuff. Oh yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (20:57)
Yeah.
So I would say my knowledge is definitely increasing, you know, going back to like the fact that there’s Alpine JS in the app, like that’s, that’s pretty scary. Cause it’s like, I’d have to like call you be like, can I pay you to come help me? You know, like, I don’t know what’s going wrong here. if there was no AI tool suddenly, for example. but it’s really cool because it’s forced me to, to learn a Git based workflow, which for somebody like me, that’s for eight years built.
Brian (21:19)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (21:23)
client websites, you don’t really need a Git workflow for like a, you know, a standard kind of small business site, even for some of the more complex, like membership dashboard stuff that I’ve done for clients. It’s like, I mean, I’m a solo dev. I don’t really need a Git workflow, but for something like this, especially when you have this like rogue AI agent helping you off to the side, it is helpful. And it’s something that is like transposable too. You know, you don’t, I can take that knowledge and apply it somewhere else inside
high calendar or whatever that before it would have been this just like black hole for me.
Brian (21:56)
Yeah. And I mean, people have always asked like, when is version control and get important? And I’ve always said like, one is like, yeah, if you’re worried about like rolling things back, things are high stakes website, but the other real reason is collaboration. If you’re collaborating with other developers, that’s when version control like saves your butt. And it’s kind of interesting. I never thought about it, but like now you are, you, you have a second developer now working on the project. Cause the AI is this other person that you’re collaborating with. So it makes a lot of sense that version control would be one of those things.
The other thing I’ve seen with Laravel that kind of like was intense the first time I dealt with it. But then I realized like this is why people like it is that Laravel has all these other things that you might need if you’re building an app. So like recurring jobs or like a queue where you can stack up intensive tasks and it can work its way through them and like other integrations and stuff like that. Have you messed with any of the like crazy heavy packages or brought in any additional like has it been like
All right, now you need to bring in, you know, workers or whatever, and, know, any of this other stuff. Have you, have you crossed that threshold?
Jonathan Jernigan (23:00)
The only little bit of that that I’ve had any reason to explore so far is their notifications and their queuing system. Because the whole idea of this app is that it reminds you on like a time-based interval. So sometimes you could have, I mean theoretically, because it’s still like kind of in production right now, but theoretically you could have, you know, a thousand notifications that need to go out at 9 a.m. on Tuesday and doing all that once is going to just obliterate your server. So yeah, that queuing system would be cool.
And then, you know, other things that I anticipate needing to use in the future is like there’s already like kind of a pre-built sort of stripe setup. Like it already has an authentication package like WordPress. there’s user logins, password resets, all that stuff that you just drop in with one command. And then same thing with the stripe setup. It’s like it does 80 % of the heavy lifting of like a stripe integration into the site. That’s just like a drop in package. So that stuff is really cool, but
for the most part it’s just been kind of the core Laravel for, you know, right now because this app is very basic.
Brian (24:02)
Do you feel like you’re seeing anything in here where you’re like, I’m gonna take this knowledge or this experience back to my WordPress work and let it, it like, some skill you learned or even just some like mindset thing that you’ve seen where you’re like, I’m gonna apply this back to WordPress now that I’ve like experienced this.
Jonathan Jernigan (24:17)
I think it will not so much be learnings that I would take back to WordPress, but cases where I might identify a project or something that somebody is talking about would be a better fit in the Lyravel kind of universe. So that’s definitely something that I’ve been kind of identifying. There’s a project that actually was the reason we built PyCalendar. And that in hindsight would have been for this particular client.
that gave us the idea for PyCalendar, it would have been abundantly easier, like ridiculously more easy to do it in Laravel than it would have been in WordPress. So I think I would have a better gauge for like, you know, this should be in WordPress and this should be in Laravel in the future. So I don’t anticipate building that much in Laravel, but I do welcome the opportunity if something were to come up that would be low stakes. Like if I was going to be working with somebody, would have to be like,
Brian (25:09)
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (25:12)
a fun project like this. couldn’t be building real, like, you know, paid sites by any stretch.
Brian (25:17)
Yeah. Well, one of the things like, so you were on a podcast with Matt Maderas recently. I think you were on the gravity forms podcast, right? And one of the things I’ve been me, Matt and I go back and forth sometimes on blue sky. like jive each other a little bit and stuff. Cause he’s got lean so far into AI. and I mean, I think a lot of us have, but it’s, we just like to joke around about it, but it’s the, idea that you’re a very technical person. Yeah. Maybe you’re not like.
A trained developer. mean, I’m not either. I, know, I, I went through the whole journey of breaking apart WordPress sites and having no, you know, I, studied English in college. So, know, I’m not technically trained on this either, but like you go through the journey, but I think there’s a technical mindset that a lot of people have where they can learn technology. can break things apart. They’re comfortable on a computer. They’re comfortable with just the paradigms of interacting with, you know, robots and computers, but like mass mobility, all these things. And the conversation is like, do you think.
seeing what AI can do now compared to what it was doing two years ago already, do you think that non-technical people will ever get to a place where they’re like, you know, I’m going to use AI to build my to-do list shopping app because I don’t like any of the ones out there. I’m going to use AI to build my, you know, family chat app to plan our, you know, Disneyland vacation or whatever. Do you think you’ll, we’ll see that like just if you were to throw the prediction out there or do think it’s always going to be a bit of a
technical hobbyist kind of thing to build your own little software.
Jonathan Jernigan (26:47)
It’s a great question. think based on the changes that we’ve seen, like for example, with when chat GBT first launched in what was that? 2022? Like it was immediately a revelation for me. was like, holy crap. Like I can do some things now just immediately that I never could before, partly because I just, I never had any interest in learning a JavaScript or like deeply, deeply learning like
Brian (26:57)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (27:15)
how would I create a complex WordPress function to do multiple things in one pass? Like it just wasn’t something that I was super interested in, but it giving me the ability to then made me think, well, what if I play with this and see, you know, kind of what it can do. So if I look at some of the things I accomplished in late 2022, now we’re in early 2025, the jumps have been nice, but I wouldn’t say that it’s been revolutionary. Like it’s not…
Brian (27:19)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (27:42)
so much easier now than it was back then, relatively speaking, because you still have to have an understanding. You want to build a Laravel site. Well, there’s all this pre-AI stuff that you still have to do. Where are you going to host it? Is it going to be local? Is it going to be online? Where’s your domain registered? There’s all kinds of questions you have to answer before you even get to that development space. And AI could help you through it, but I think most people are going to shut down when they realize like,
Brian (27:42)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (28:10)
There’s a whole lot of pre stuff and like we’ve already said, these AI tools are really good at getting you 80 % of the way, but that final 20 % where like experience and real knowledge really matter, it kind of falls apart exactly like I just knew from experience in WordPress. I don’t want anything to do with React in this this Laravel project. And I avoided that. And I think, you know, to my own
Brian (28:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (28:38)
future self-benefit. So do I think that it will ever get to that point? Certainly a possibility, but if I had to put money on one way the other, like absolutely right now, I think I would say no, I don’t think it’s gonna get to that point. Kinda like, sorry I was just gonna say like as an analogy, like yeah, absolutely you could go do something to your car’s engine, but like should you?
Brian (29:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (29:02)
Probably not. Do you want to be messing with your, it’s not quite the same, do you want to be messing with your family’s safety as you’re driving down the highway because you didn’t put one of the bolts in properly? It’s not the same thing, but you could make that analogous to user data. Do you want to accidentally expose all these people’s private information? Yeah, I don’t think so.
Brian (29:14)
No it-
Yeah, I’ve kind of the same way, like when the stakes are low, a hobbyist or somebody is gonna mess around with this stuff. But when the stakes are like high and your boss is like, we need this, you’re like, no, I’m gonna go pay for the trusted software so that if it breaks, that’s who you yell at. You yell at the support person on the software. You don’t yell at me because I said, I’ll build it with AI for you. I kind of agree with you. I also think, like you said, there’s still just a decent amount of knowledge. Like you said,
with Laravel, I’m gonna bring in this package to start the Stripe stuff. I’m not gonna write it from scratch. And a lot of times, like I wanna make a custom block. If I start from scratch and let the AI do it, it goes wild. But if I start and I go, I know there’s a package that I start and it scaffolds it and it puts you on the right path, then I let the AI come in. So you still have to babysit it, you still have to do it. I don’t, yeah, it’s hard because I don’t think I would have predicted we’d have even made it to here. So I feel bad.
making any prediction because I was wrong. When I first saw chat GPT, I did not have like a reaction like that. I was like, nah, this looks dumb. So I didn’t see it. It took me a while to get it, you know? And so it’s hard to predict, but I do think, you you use the car example and I use the taxes example where I’m like, no, I’m still going to pay my accountant to do taxes. Like I’m not, that’s too high stakes for me. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to go to jail. So I will, I’ll pay the expert, you know?
Jonathan Jernigan (30:33)
Right.
Definitely.
Yeah. And I think the expert comment reminds me something else I wanted to just briefly discuss was like the idea that WordPress versus Laravel actually had like a scaffold of a blog post I was going to write. And, we already discussed sort of the primary two things I wanted to mention, like that sort of WordPress relies on everything as a post and then
Laravel has that like MVC framework and then just talking about, Laravel models versus like WordPress post relationships. We already kind of touched on those two things, but then the last point I had, which I didn’t really write anything out for was just like the idea that Laravel versus WordPress, like Laravel has extreme clarity on who it’s for. There’s just like no mistaking who a Laravel, who it’s like going after. And you don’t have that same clarity.
Brian (31:09)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (31:29)
in WordPress and even like I made a video recently talking about responding, you know, to some other videos you included, like the idea that if you go look at a Squarespace or a Wix, like you can, you can immediately glean who this is for. and I would, I would argue that WordPress.org specifically doesn’t have that same clarity. And that’s something that, it would be nice for us as, as WordPressers to, to dial in over the neck. It’s going to take years for that to really develop and come together, but the
There’s no mistaking when you go to Laravel, it’s like, okay, this is for developers. Like if you can’t read this first little code snippet that they put, you know, 30 % down the page, like you’re done. So that was another key thing that.
Brian (32:04)
Yeah.
Yeah,
WordPress has been the like anybody can build anything platform, like the low code, anybody can build anything platform. And like it had its 20 year run of doing that. And like, it seems like that’s not where it’s not gonna make sense to like think that that’s gonna continue. And it like got us to where we were. And I agree with you. I think the downside is that if you asked 10 people, all right.
we’re going to narrow WordPress’s focus to like the one thing it’s really good at and the one user that it’s really meant for. And you ask 10 people, they’re all going to give you 10 different options and they’re all going to disagree. And they’re all going to say, no, no. WordPress is meant for, you know, this person that WordPress has meant for marketing agencies. WordPress is meant for news publishing rooms. Like WordPress has meant for Elementor, you know. So I think that’s going to be tough, but I ultimately agree with you. think like you can’t be everything for everyone. And like we need to see.
WordPress tighten its narrow focus a little bit and just know that hey, you know what people aren’t building these things they’re over building them with Laravel and that’s fine and you know, there’s things that WordPress is really good for and let’s keep focusing on those and not get distracted. I think that’s fine.
Jonathan Jernigan (33:18)
Yeah. And I mean, even still like having gone down this, this, path of building this Laravel app that I’m super proud of, honestly, like it works really well. There’s just a little bit more I want to do before I fully launch it. Like I still am building client sites in WordPress and my personal site is built in WordPress on generate blocks. So there’s still, there’s still a massively abundant use case for, for WordPress and for people who are like me reasonably technical, but
not going to really get in there and write every ounce of code. And it still just has, of course, such an abundant ecosystem of plugins that nothing else comes close. And so it still has so much validity. But it would probably be even better if we had clarity on who specifically we’re after. And there still can be those DIY tinkerers, just like me. I am that DIY tinkerer in the Laravel side.
Brian (34:09)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:09)
And there are those
people in WordPress too. So it doesn’t, doesn’t mean that you have to exclude people.
Brian (34:16)
Thanks for chatting through this. I feel like we could go on forever about this process. We’ll have to do another one. There’s a lot of other topics that I think we should talk about, but where can people go to find you, find your courses, find your content, find all of your generate block stuff and everything else.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:30)
Yeah, so my website is just my name, JonathanJernigan.com. There’s a little thingy right there. And then on also YouTube, it’s just my name again, Jonathan Jernigan on YouTube.
Brian (34:42)
Dude, thanks for hanging out.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:44)
Yeah, pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Welcome to Webmasters. Today I got Jonathan. Jonathan, it’s so good to see you again. Welcome to the show.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:04)
Thanks so much, glad to be here. I was wondering, do I get a cool wizard pin or badge? Do I get any kind of award? I want something like your logo.
Brian (00:13)
I’ve been experimenting with setting up like a WooCommerce drop shipping thing where you can do like t-shirts and stuff like that. And so I want to make merch, even though I know like not only will I not sell like basically any of it, but also with drop shipping, it’s like you make like 50 cents for a shirt or something like that. But I am doing it. So a pin, that’s a good idea. I wanna do like punk like pins and stickers, like, you know, something cool.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:37)
Dude,
I have a whole sticker board right there that’s all WordPress stuff, I need it.
Brian (00:41)
Nice, okay, I’m gonna do it. Because I have one laptop too that I’ve sticker bombed. I’m a big sticker and pin fan, so yeah, that’s a good idea.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:48)
Well, your logo’s sweet,
so glad to be here though. Thanks for having me.
Brian (00:51)
Yeah, why don’t you give us like the one second, you know, bio of how people might know you.
Jonathan Jernigan (00:56)
Sure, I create content on YouTube around WordPress and I have done it for coming up on 10 years now. I’ve been doing WordPress for over 10 years and then on YouTube making WordPress content since 2018.
Brian (01:08)
And I think of you, I guess mostly around generate press and generate blocks, but I mean, how much do you think is generate press content versus just WordPress content in general?
Jonathan Jernigan (01:19)
Yeah, I mean, over the years it’s shifted from oxygen builder to kind of dabbled in some like agencies to kind of topics like pricing and clients and stuff. But in more recent years, it’s mostly around generate press and generate blocks because that’s what I personally build with for the most part. And then also, you know, for, all kinds of client work over the last three or four years, it’s been in generate press. and then that’s what I teach courses on as well.
Brian (01:43)
Yeah, that’s right. So you have, um, like premium courses for people who are getting into it. It’s funny because when you start out on WordPress, you’re kind of like, you’re kind of wearing all these hats. It’s marketing. It’s like building your business. It’s freelancing. It’s the actual code. Like you have to learn like 50 things and then like narrowing down your voice on YouTube to like, no, no, no, I’m just going to talk about these things. Mostly, uh, did that take a long time to kind of find like your groove?
Jonathan Jernigan (02:09)
It actually wasn’t, it took me longer in my actual business to hone in on what that was than it was on YouTube because when I first started creating videos on YouTube it was only Oxygen Builder content because it was like for me this level up as a, I’ll still call myself a non-developer where like suddenly it’s like I don’t even know how to write a CSS class by hand but suddenly I had a class attached to three buttons and I could style all of them at once. Like I felt this
Brian (02:20)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (02:37)
just super power unlocked. And so I wanted to make that kind of content on YouTube to help other people. then you just experience this natural progression as a inching closer to what you might call a real developer with suddenly you’re like, whoa, I can drop a WordPress function in this little box and it does cool stuff. It was like these revelations that I just kept having. inside my agency, was like chaos of like,
Brian (02:39)
Mm-hmm.
Haha.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:04)
Early on I was doing social media and graphic design and websites and all this stuff, but on YouTube I was only Oxygen Builder. So thankfully over the years I’ve managed to really hone in just on one kind of focus for both the business and the YouTube.
Brian (03:06)
Hmm.
Yeah, that’s like a normal starting place in WordPress where you’re like, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll make your like annual report PDF for you that I have no business making at all. All those sorts of things. It’s totally normal. It’s funny too, because we’re not even going to talk about WordPress today. So we both both work on WordPress primarily, but I think I know I have like a little side love like all WordPress developers do for Laravel. And you told me you were just like messing around with a little Laravel on the side. So.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:25)
Exactly.
Brian (03:42)
think it’s just gonna be fun to talk about that. Maybe you can give me how did Laravel get on your radar and what made you think I’m gonna try a non-WordPress approach to something.
Jonathan Jernigan (03:53)
Yeah, it’s actually interesting. I don’t really even know how Laravel came onto my radar. I’ve known the name for a long time, but never really knew what it actually was. And then if you go to the website now, they just redesigned it, I think like two weeks ago or something. But prior to that, if you went to Laravel.com, it just said like the artisan framework for PHP lovers, know, something like that. And I was just like, I don’t know what this is. Like I’m out, see ya. And…
Brian (04:07)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (04:17)
So I had this, my love outside of WordPress in terms of passions is cars, automotive, tinkering, engine builds, and all that kind of stuff, racing, all those kinds of things that I absolutely love. So I’ve had this idea in mind for a long time and never really was able to pull it off in WordPress. The idea is it’s just a simple little tracking app that will tell you like, hey, your oil change is due and…
Brian (04:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (04:44)
2,500 miles or next month, know, just like essentially a tool for DIY car people like myself to like get service reminders and go log your own service history. Yeah, you could do it in a sheet, but it’s not really like, you know, that’s not interesting or cool. The catch though was that I tried it in WordPress multiple times. I mean, like I said, I’ve been in WordPress 10 years. So like I have a super deep understanding of custom fields and CPTs, relationships and.
Brian (04:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (05:12)
All those kinds of things that, you know, talking about like leveling up and feeling like these superpowers, like you discover ACF and it opens this whole new door and then like you discover relationship fields and it just continues. But with this car project, it was like, well, you have like sort of like a multi sort of like inception tier of relationships where it’s like you have like your, you know, kind of your base like index of vehicles.
Brian (05:20)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (05:40)
Then inside of that, you have service records. Then below that you have notifications. And then there’s like, you know, another tier of, of like data. So suddenly you have four layers of relationships and WordPress really falls apart in that, that kind of instance. So that’s, that’s where I went looking.
Brian (05:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it’s a-
Yeah, and I’ve had that same thing where you’re like, could build this with WordPress. I think from like the first like 10 to 15 years of WordPress, it was like, I will build this in WordPress. And I think we all start there. And you’re like, it’s all just content, right? I’ll make a post type for this and a post type for that. And I’ll string them together. you know, all maybe I edit it in WordPress. Maybe it’s on the front end. It’s kind of weird disjointed thing. I, it’s like recently there’s like a dividing line where you’re like, you know.
WordPress is really great at content management and like publishing. And it’s kind of leaning more into that with the block editor and stuff and all those things where you’re like, I can kind of do it with WordPress and get a bunch of plugins on there and stuff. feels like Laravel is the go-to thing, mainly because it’s probably PHP and like, you know, WordPress developers, we all love PHP. It’s very, I think it’s the easiest of languages. It’s very like, you know, this line happens, then this line happens, and then this line happens. And I can just do whatever I want.
Not like JavaScript. and so, I mean, it kind of makes sense. So did you, did you just go to Laravel.com and just like start following instructions?
Jonathan Jernigan (07:03)
Yeah, so I just, I just had attempted this so many times in WordPress that I came to the conclusion like, I don’t think I’m going to be able to pull this off. I had tried like with, well, you know, to your point about like, I’ll build anything in WordPress. It was like, I knew how from a, from a foundation’s perspective to do it with a CPT, ACF, a form plugin, some front end, you know, hooks and filters. But even then you’re still like piece milling all this stuff together. It’s not really designed to do what it was I was trying to do.
Brian (07:25)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (07:32)
So I just went hunting and actually now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I went to chat GPT and I described all of what I had attempted to do and the overall idea and I said WordPress doesn’t feel like a good fit. What would you recommend? And I had a couple different suggestions, but the only one I’d ever heard of was Laravel. So I was like, okay, well, let’s give it a go. So I just fired up a simple little Vulture server and it’s got like the Laravel package, you know, on there.
Brian (07:58)
Hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (08:00)
and just started noodling with it, just as in SSH into this server, just like doing stuff, just again, feeling like a wizard, just like typing in like, CD slash my Laravel app, and you’re just like, whoa, this is so cool. But yeah, to your point, because it’s PHP based, even for someone like me that’s a pretty rudimentary coder, it feels familiar, because PHP is similar enough across both Laravel and WordPress that you can…
Brian (08:11)
huh.
Jonathan Jernigan (08:25)
You can noodle around in it and get some stuff done pretty quickly. And then because, you know, something like Claude is so good at, at writing that kind of thing, like you’re not asking it to create custom JavaScript. It’s like PHP that’s been out there for 10 plus years all over the place. I was able to get something working really quickly. So it just became exciting. And now I’m so deep into this thing that it’s going to be a Laravel app. That’s for sure.
Brian (08:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And there’s something to be said about like PHP where I just write the PHP. I reload the page, the PHP runs, and now I can decide, did I do a good job? Did I do a bad job? And if it doesn’t work, guess what? You’re going to know, cause there’s going be a massive error on the screen and it’s going to just like shut down. It’s like, Nope, giant error. You made up something in JavaScript. You’re kind of like, I don’t know. Is it working? It seems like it’s loading, but then like this isn’t happening. And there’s this.
weird asynchronous stuff and everything. And so in that sense, it’s easier, but Laravel’s PHP compared to WordPress’s PHP, that’s very different, right? I mean, they’re using like namespaces and a lot more objects and a lot more like dependencies and like extending classes and all these sorts of things. How was it looking at that PHP the first time from like the WordPress background?
Jonathan Jernigan (09:41)
it’s definitely scary for sure. mean, for someone like me who, if you asked me to write this, like no AI assistant, I just straight up couldn’t do it. So, you know, it’s definitely a bit scary, but it’s not, it’s not like when you, when you understand like the, at first it’s just the opening PHP tag, then a namespace, then some of those use statements. Then, then it starts to get familiar because you’re like, okay. There’s just a function and it’s doing some stuff inside of it.
And like from that point, it’s pretty straightforward. It starts to feel familiar enough. and you know, Laravel has a totally different, you know this, but I would assume they’re people listening that never have used it or messed with that at all. Laravel has a totally different structure. And so you have kind of this like their, their frameworks, that MVC model view controller setup, which certainly you know more about than me, but it’s like kind of all the like under the hood stuff happens over there.
And then you have these like blade files, which are the templates. And that’s where it feels really familiar. Cause that’s just HTML mixed in with what I would refer to as like their dynamic data. They’re like carbon tags or these like predefined like tags that you can drop in that do cool stuff, like add things together or like access data from your database or you all these kinds of things. It’s like, it’s like working in WordPress where
Brian (10:34)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (10:59)
you go into a generate blocks and you click the button that says insert the post title here. Like it’s the same idea. So once I get out of the like super nuts and bolts controller model kind of thing, it feels really familiar and I can really like work with it there.
Brian (11:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and there’s even versions of WordPress, like Bedrock is a popular one, where they move all the files around in WordPress to give you, and it’s like, here’s your blade components for your front end of your WordPress site, and here’s the WordPress app, and they try to do that, break it apart and stuff, and it’s like, WordPress is just so weird. WordPress just does, they call it the WordPress way, it doesn’t follow any conventions, it lives in its own universe.
Jonathan Jernigan (11:40)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (11:40)
puts things in weird places. So it’s like, it’s never really a good matchup, but if you’re learning like the underlying fundamentals of PHP and you know, basic, you know, loops and template syntax and all this sort of stuff, like it, it generally works pretty well. When, when you did it, did it want you to do a certain, like there’s, so like Laravel has like flavors almost like.
Here’s Laravel with React on the front end. Here’s Laravel with Vue on the front end. Here’s Livewire, which is like its own kind of weird PHP JavaScript thing. Did it give you like a specific thing or do you think it was a very vanilla like just Laravel, some blade templates, nothing too crazy?
Jonathan Jernigan (12:19)
Yeah, yeah, that’s, it’s actually something I knew coming into it was that I didn’t want any of that complexity. specifically was, was coming into it with the idea that like, I want this to be as close to just native PHP, Laravel, you know, HTML as possible. and then the, like when you go through that initial Laravel setup, it does ask you, says, what, package do you want on top of it? React, Alpine, Livewire, and so on. And I, initially just didn’t have that.
Brian (12:44)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (12:47)
But there was a lot of like interactivity stuff, especially on the front end of like drop downs that, you know, you want to drop down that doesn’t look ugly or like has a search field. Suddenly you got to incorporate JS. So I actually went the route of much, much later. I went the route of adding in the Alpine JS, the package that they include. And, it’s definitely gotten a bit out of hand with some of the stuff that just, mean, like you said, you know, one.
Brian (13:05)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (13:13)
stray comma and then Alpine and the whole page is broken. it doesn’t correlate like PHP does where it’s like, okay, well this part works and this part’s broken. So I can go look in my code and it’s like right there. The JS, it’s like, oh, it was the very first comma and the whole second half of your page is broken. So that feels scary to me because I have to rely on AI for all of the JS piece. But my goal was to keep it as simple as possible and not have React and all that stuff.
Brian (13:16)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, I’ve done a few different versions of Laravel and I always come back to like, just want the like very basic vanilla Laravel Alpine I really like. And there’s one, think it’s Alpine like Ajax or something that can do a little bit of like submit a form and it doesn’t reload the whole page. But like when you see that compared to like what’s happening, I don’t know in the block editor in WordPress where it’s like things are so interactive and I click here and I add a block mode. Like I get why that’s all JavaScript. Like I get why you need react or some crazy thing.
for this, like, if you don’t have to deal with all that and you’re like, just know exactly what I want to make and I’m going to make it and it’s this, that’s pretty good. How did, how much, so how, what was your AI workflow? So you used Claude, like would you copy and paste back and forth or how are you doing that?
Jonathan Jernigan (14:27)
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, it was like as rudimentary as it could get. I’ve been working on this since December and it’s now early March, so a good couple of months, and with two new babies at home. So you can imagine, it’s not been a consistent three months of work, it’s been heavily segmented times. initially, Claude, prior to its current 3.7 sonnet iteration,
Brian (14:45)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (14:54)
it was on their 3.5, I think it was called, and you could add project knowledge. And it was basically just like a text field. So I would go through manually and I would copy in VS code, I would say, copy relative URL, put that as the name of the file in Claude, then drop all the contents of that file in. And I would just do that over and over and over. So there would be 30, 40 files sometimes. But it was able to then just analyze those
Brian (14:57)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (15:22)
project knowledge files and I would just ask it questions. And then as things started to get more complex, it wasn’t quite as good as looking at all of the files kind of together so that it had the whole picture. And then I would run into issues of like, well, then it made breaking changes like two hours ago and now I don’t have any like recourse unless I manually saved stuff, which I started doing. I would like.
Brian (15:36)
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Jonathan Jernigan (15:49)
download the whole thing and save it again separately. But now it’s way easier because Claude can connect to a GitHub repo. So that was all new to me. Like I can set up a GitHub repo and now I’m working with branches and doing all that kind of stuff, which is, I feel like a big boy, which is cool. But Claude can connect to that GitHub repo. So all I have to do is just push the changes and it’s got a fresh
Brian (15:58)
Mmm.
You
Jonathan Jernigan (16:14)
you know, set of information to work with. So the workflow at first was super, super rudimentary, time consuming, but it worked. And now they just made it even easier by honestly pure chance.
Brian (16:26)
And have you tried any of the like cursor or windsurf or any of these like, like VS code versions that are more or like cope, get up, copilot or any of that stuff or was clodged kind of like your go-to.
Jonathan Jernigan (16:37)
Yeah, I did try, both, tried both copilot and cursor, but I found it to be too steep of a learning curve initially for me to want to pursue them because the, was already like, we, before we started, we had talked about like building something like this. It’s easy to get 80 % of the way. And then that final 20 % becomes really hard. And that’s kind of where I’m at now. So like products like cursor and stuff really weren’t that helpful because it wasn’t able to do like the meat and potatoes. It was more like.
Now I need to work on the super fine, intricate details of how this thing works and how these individual pieces connect. So I didn’t find it to be that helpful. But I was researching over this weekend about Claude code, the thing where it runs in your terminal. And that has me interested. I might give that a go.
Brian (17:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I, it’s like, I feel like I cannot keep up with the innovations. It’s like the models. Yeah. There’s like new model every few months and it’s great and whatever, but it’s more of like them realizing like, well, how, what’s the best like user interface or user experience or product like design around the models where, you know, you can do it like cursor and then cursor changed where it used to have like multiple tabs of like chat versus agent and composer.
Now they’ve like figured out the better way to do that. And then it’s like, well, now there’s this other one and it does it this way. And now Claude code, if it’s like, I haven’t even had time to look at it. it’s pretty wild. Do you, do you try, like, do you try to keep up with it do you just try to like, like, like not spend too much time working on the tooling and actually like, keep like moving progress on your actual project.
Jonathan Jernigan (18:09)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. mean, I think my philosophy just in general in my business, YouTube content, like the courses, everything it’s like keeping it as simple as possible while still being effective and making forward progress. So, you know, like I, I definitely hold myself to a decent quality standard. So, you know, I’m, balancing that of like as simple as possible while still having a good output, but like I already had with the VS code, like I already had.
a remote SSH extension, because I switch back and forth between my laptop and my desktop all the time, so I didn’t want it to be locally on my desktop, and so I had it just living in this server. And that way I had this remote SSH extension in VS Code, then there’s the terminal thing on the bottom, so it was already all these side bars, and I don’t know what you call it, bottom bar, and then there was the code, and then you add in cursor, and it just became this like,
Brian (18:39)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (19:03)
So honestly, I just stripped that back down and I think I signed up for cursor and in like 24 hours I had canceled my trial because it’s like, I’m not gonna bother with this.
Brian (19:11)
Yeah.
Yeah. And it’s like at a certain point you like, you just have to focus in on whatever’s, if it’s moving you forward, you know, like that’s kind of the main goal. And so it can be fun to like, there’s definitely a room for people who their job is trial the tools, make content about it, show everybody all that stuff. And like, I’m glad those people are doing that and that exists. But then there’s like, at end of the day, you’re like, I got to like make the thing. I got to like learn the stuff. Do you feel like.
your knowledge is growing as you’re using the AI? it’s not like, like is your brain, is your brain absorbing information and you’re leveling up your skills still the same way you felt like you were leveling up when you were, you know, cracking open WordPress and stuff like that? Like, you, do you feel like you’re gaining knowledge?
Jonathan Jernigan (19:58)
Yeah, I mean, certainly in the context of like how the individual pieces of a Laravel site work together. Like if you rewind the clock 90 days ago and asked me to explain what the MVC framework is, I’m like, I don’t know. Now I could be like, well, it’s like, I think the controller does the, you know, like I could at least like fumble my way through it. But then on the, on the blade, like template side of Laravel, I’m much more comfortable in that now. Like I’ve become familiar with the
Brian (20:16)
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (20:25)
the carbon syntax and like it’s mostly HTML and I understand how these pieces are fitting together, creating like something else that’s really cool is the function. Maybe it’s not specific to Laravel, but what they call partials. You can have like little components that are separate that you can bring in anywhere around the site. Kind of, guess it’d be like a reusable pattern in WordPress. Similar idea.
Brian (20:30)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Like we have template parts and things that used to exist, like not as robust as, all the little blade partials and like the little props you can pass them and stuff. Oh yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (20:57)
Yeah.
So I would say my knowledge is definitely increasing, you know, going back to like the fact that there’s Alpine JS in the app, like that’s, that’s pretty scary. Cause it’s like, I’d have to like call you be like, can I pay you to come help me? You know, like, I don’t know what’s going wrong here. if there was no AI tool suddenly, for example. but it’s really cool because it’s forced me to, to learn a Git based workflow, which for somebody like me, that’s for eight years built.
Brian (21:19)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (21:23)
client websites, you don’t really need a Git workflow for like a, you know, a standard kind of small business site, even for some of the more complex, like membership dashboard stuff that I’ve done for clients. It’s like, I mean, I’m a solo dev. I don’t really need a Git workflow, but for something like this, especially when you have this like rogue AI agent helping you off to the side, it is helpful. And it’s something that is like transposable too. You know, you don’t, I can take that knowledge and apply it somewhere else inside
high calendar or whatever that before it would have been this just like black hole for me.
Brian (21:56)
Yeah. And I mean, people have always asked like, when is version control and get important? And I’ve always said like, one is like, yeah, if you’re worried about like rolling things back, things are high stakes website, but the other real reason is collaboration. If you’re collaborating with other developers, that’s when version control like saves your butt. And it’s kind of interesting. I never thought about it, but like now you are, you, you have a second developer now working on the project. Cause the AI is this other person that you’re collaborating with. So it makes a lot of sense that version control would be one of those things.
The other thing I’ve seen with Laravel that kind of like was intense the first time I dealt with it. But then I realized like this is why people like it is that Laravel has all these other things that you might need if you’re building an app. So like recurring jobs or like a queue where you can stack up intensive tasks and it can work its way through them and like other integrations and stuff like that. Have you messed with any of the like crazy heavy packages or brought in any additional like has it been like
All right, now you need to bring in, you know, workers or whatever, and, know, any of this other stuff. Have you, have you crossed that threshold?
Jonathan Jernigan (23:00)
The only little bit of that that I’ve had any reason to explore so far is their notifications and their queuing system. Because the whole idea of this app is that it reminds you on like a time-based interval. So sometimes you could have, I mean theoretically, because it’s still like kind of in production right now, but theoretically you could have, you know, a thousand notifications that need to go out at 9 a.m. on Tuesday and doing all that once is going to just obliterate your server. So yeah, that queuing system would be cool.
And then, you know, other things that I anticipate needing to use in the future is like there’s already like kind of a pre-built sort of stripe setup. Like it already has an authentication package like WordPress. there’s user logins, password resets, all that stuff that you just drop in with one command. And then same thing with the stripe setup. It’s like it does 80 % of the heavy lifting of like a stripe integration into the site. That’s just like a drop in package. So that stuff is really cool, but
for the most part it’s just been kind of the core Laravel for, you know, right now because this app is very basic.
Brian (24:02)
Do you feel like you’re seeing anything in here where you’re like, I’m gonna take this knowledge or this experience back to my WordPress work and let it, it like, some skill you learned or even just some like mindset thing that you’ve seen where you’re like, I’m gonna apply this back to WordPress now that I’ve like experienced this.
Jonathan Jernigan (24:17)
I think it will not so much be learnings that I would take back to WordPress, but cases where I might identify a project or something that somebody is talking about would be a better fit in the Lyravel kind of universe. So that’s definitely something that I’ve been kind of identifying. There’s a project that actually was the reason we built PyCalendar. And that in hindsight would have been for this particular client.
that gave us the idea for PyCalendar, it would have been abundantly easier, like ridiculously more easy to do it in Laravel than it would have been in WordPress. So I think I would have a better gauge for like, you know, this should be in WordPress and this should be in Laravel in the future. So I don’t anticipate building that much in Laravel, but I do welcome the opportunity if something were to come up that would be low stakes. Like if I was going to be working with somebody, would have to be like,
Brian (25:09)
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (25:12)
a fun project like this. couldn’t be building real, like, you know, paid sites by any stretch.
Brian (25:17)
Yeah. Well, one of the things like, so you were on a podcast with Matt Maderas recently. I think you were on the gravity forms podcast, right? And one of the things I’ve been me, Matt and I go back and forth sometimes on blue sky. like jive each other a little bit and stuff. Cause he’s got lean so far into AI. and I mean, I think a lot of us have, but it’s, we just like to joke around about it, but it’s the, idea that you’re a very technical person. Yeah. Maybe you’re not like.
A trained developer. mean, I’m not either. I, know, I, I went through the whole journey of breaking apart WordPress sites and having no, you know, I, studied English in college. So, know, I’m not technically trained on this either, but like you go through the journey, but I think there’s a technical mindset that a lot of people have where they can learn technology. can break things apart. They’re comfortable on a computer. They’re comfortable with just the paradigms of interacting with, you know, robots and computers, but like mass mobility, all these things. And the conversation is like, do you think.
seeing what AI can do now compared to what it was doing two years ago already, do you think that non-technical people will ever get to a place where they’re like, you know, I’m going to use AI to build my to-do list shopping app because I don’t like any of the ones out there. I’m going to use AI to build my, you know, family chat app to plan our, you know, Disneyland vacation or whatever. Do you think you’ll, we’ll see that like just if you were to throw the prediction out there or do think it’s always going to be a bit of a
technical hobbyist kind of thing to build your own little software.
Jonathan Jernigan (26:47)
It’s a great question. think based on the changes that we’ve seen, like for example, with when chat GBT first launched in what was that? 2022? Like it was immediately a revelation for me. was like, holy crap. Like I can do some things now just immediately that I never could before, partly because I just, I never had any interest in learning a JavaScript or like deeply, deeply learning like
Brian (26:57)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (27:15)
how would I create a complex WordPress function to do multiple things in one pass? Like it just wasn’t something that I was super interested in, but it giving me the ability to then made me think, well, what if I play with this and see, you know, kind of what it can do. So if I look at some of the things I accomplished in late 2022, now we’re in early 2025, the jumps have been nice, but I wouldn’t say that it’s been revolutionary. Like it’s not…
Brian (27:19)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (27:42)
so much easier now than it was back then, relatively speaking, because you still have to have an understanding. You want to build a Laravel site. Well, there’s all this pre-AI stuff that you still have to do. Where are you going to host it? Is it going to be local? Is it going to be online? Where’s your domain registered? There’s all kinds of questions you have to answer before you even get to that development space. And AI could help you through it, but I think most people are going to shut down when they realize like,
Brian (27:42)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (28:10)
There’s a whole lot of pre stuff and like we’ve already said, these AI tools are really good at getting you 80 % of the way, but that final 20 % where like experience and real knowledge really matter, it kind of falls apart exactly like I just knew from experience in WordPress. I don’t want anything to do with React in this this Laravel project. And I avoided that. And I think, you know, to my own
Brian (28:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (28:38)
future self-benefit. So do I think that it will ever get to that point? Certainly a possibility, but if I had to put money on one way the other, like absolutely right now, I think I would say no, I don’t think it’s gonna get to that point. Kinda like, sorry I was just gonna say like as an analogy, like yeah, absolutely you could go do something to your car’s engine, but like should you?
Brian (29:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jonathan Jernigan (29:02)
Probably not. Do you want to be messing with your, it’s not quite the same, do you want to be messing with your family’s safety as you’re driving down the highway because you didn’t put one of the bolts in properly? It’s not the same thing, but you could make that analogous to user data. Do you want to accidentally expose all these people’s private information? Yeah, I don’t think so.
Brian (29:14)
No it-
Yeah, I’ve kind of the same way, like when the stakes are low, a hobbyist or somebody is gonna mess around with this stuff. But when the stakes are like high and your boss is like, we need this, you’re like, no, I’m gonna go pay for the trusted software so that if it breaks, that’s who you yell at. You yell at the support person on the software. You don’t yell at me because I said, I’ll build it with AI for you. I kind of agree with you. I also think, like you said, there’s still just a decent amount of knowledge. Like you said,
with Laravel, I’m gonna bring in this package to start the Stripe stuff. I’m not gonna write it from scratch. And a lot of times, like I wanna make a custom block. If I start from scratch and let the AI do it, it goes wild. But if I start and I go, I know there’s a package that I start and it scaffolds it and it puts you on the right path, then I let the AI come in. So you still have to babysit it, you still have to do it. I don’t, yeah, it’s hard because I don’t think I would have predicted we’d have even made it to here. So I feel bad.
making any prediction because I was wrong. When I first saw chat GPT, I did not have like a reaction like that. I was like, nah, this looks dumb. So I didn’t see it. It took me a while to get it, you know? And so it’s hard to predict, but I do think, you you use the car example and I use the taxes example where I’m like, no, I’m still going to pay my accountant to do taxes. Like I’m not, that’s too high stakes for me. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to go to jail. So I will, I’ll pay the expert, you know?
Jonathan Jernigan (30:33)
Right.
Definitely.
Yeah. And I think the expert comment reminds me something else I wanted to just briefly discuss was like the idea that WordPress versus Laravel actually had like a scaffold of a blog post I was going to write. And, we already discussed sort of the primary two things I wanted to mention, like that sort of WordPress relies on everything as a post and then
Laravel has that like MVC framework and then just talking about, Laravel models versus like WordPress post relationships. We already kind of touched on those two things, but then the last point I had, which I didn’t really write anything out for was just like the idea that Laravel versus WordPress, like Laravel has extreme clarity on who it’s for. There’s just like no mistaking who a Laravel, who it’s like going after. And you don’t have that same clarity.
Brian (31:09)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (31:29)
in WordPress and even like I made a video recently talking about responding, you know, to some other videos you included, like the idea that if you go look at a Squarespace or a Wix, like you can, you can immediately glean who this is for. and I would, I would argue that WordPress.org specifically doesn’t have that same clarity. And that’s something that, it would be nice for us as, as WordPressers to, to dial in over the neck. It’s going to take years for that to really develop and come together, but the
There’s no mistaking when you go to Laravel, it’s like, okay, this is for developers. Like if you can’t read this first little code snippet that they put, you know, 30 % down the page, like you’re done. So that was another key thing that.
Brian (32:04)
Yeah.
Yeah,
WordPress has been the like anybody can build anything platform, like the low code, anybody can build anything platform. And like it had its 20 year run of doing that. And like, it seems like that’s not where it’s not gonna make sense to like think that that’s gonna continue. And it like got us to where we were. And I agree with you. I think the downside is that if you asked 10 people, all right.
we’re going to narrow WordPress’s focus to like the one thing it’s really good at and the one user that it’s really meant for. And you ask 10 people, they’re all going to give you 10 different options and they’re all going to disagree. And they’re all going to say, no, no. WordPress is meant for, you know, this person that WordPress has meant for marketing agencies. WordPress is meant for news publishing rooms. Like WordPress has meant for Elementor, you know. So I think that’s going to be tough, but I ultimately agree with you. think like you can’t be everything for everyone. And like we need to see.
WordPress tighten its narrow focus a little bit and just know that hey, you know what people aren’t building these things they’re over building them with Laravel and that’s fine and you know, there’s things that WordPress is really good for and let’s keep focusing on those and not get distracted. I think that’s fine.
Jonathan Jernigan (33:18)
Yeah. And I mean, even still like having gone down this, this, path of building this Laravel app that I’m super proud of, honestly, like it works really well. There’s just a little bit more I want to do before I fully launch it. Like I still am building client sites in WordPress and my personal site is built in WordPress on generate blocks. So there’s still, there’s still a massively abundant use case for, for WordPress and for people who are like me reasonably technical, but
not going to really get in there and write every ounce of code. And it still just has, of course, such an abundant ecosystem of plugins that nothing else comes close. And so it still has so much validity. But it would probably be even better if we had clarity on who specifically we’re after. And there still can be those DIY tinkerers, just like me. I am that DIY tinkerer in the Laravel side.
Brian (34:09)
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:09)
And there are those
people in WordPress too. So it doesn’t, doesn’t mean that you have to exclude people.
Brian (34:16)
Thanks for chatting through this. I feel like we could go on forever about this process. We’ll have to do another one. There’s a lot of other topics that I think we should talk about, but where can people go to find you, find your courses, find your content, find all of your generate block stuff and everything else.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:30)
Yeah, so my website is just my name, JonathanJernigan.com. There’s a little thingy right there. And then on also YouTube, it’s just my name again, Jonathan Jernigan on YouTube.
Brian (34:42)
Dude, thanks for hanging out.
Jonathan Jernigan (34:44)
Yeah, pleasure. Thanks for having me.