In this conversation, Nick Diego discusses his role in product marketing for WordPress Studio, a local development tool for WordPress. He explains the unique features of Studio, its benefits for both beginners and developers, and the importance of community engagement and feedback. The discussion also covers challenges related to migration and database compatibility, the introduction of blueprints for enhanced development efficiency, and the potential role of AI in future developments. Nick emphasizes the need for user feedback to guide the product’s evolution and encourages contributions to the open-source project.
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Chapters
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Nick Diego and WordPress Studio
01:56 Understanding WordPress Studio’s Purpose and Features
05:43 Local Development Tools: Studio vs. Competitors
09:04 Target Audience: Beginners vs. Developers
12:56 Community Engagement and Feedback
16:27 Blueprints: Enhancing Development Efficiency
20:14 The Role of AI in Studio Development
25:50 Contributing to Open Source: Encouragement and Insights
Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome, today we have Nick Diego, former developer advocate, product marketing for WordPress Studio. How do you introduce yourself these days? How do you say what you do?
Nick Diego (00:12)
Well, I was a developer advocate working on WordPress and then now I’m focusing on most of my time on studio doing product marketing for studio and other developer oriented projects on WordPress.com.
Brian Coords (00:24)
Yeah, I mean, for somebody who made really great WordPress products and plugins, know that Mike McAllister and I are cheerleading you on Twitter constantly about them. It definitely makes sense. I guess we should just say, what is Studio? How do you describe it to people if they’re not familiar with WordPress Studio?
Nick Diego (00:32)
Yeah, exactly.
I think the best way to describe it is a local development tool. It’s kind of growing into much more than that, but it’s a way to develop or build things locally with WordPress.
Brian Coords (00:49)
Okay, when you say much more than that, what, like, are there things you’re thinking about or can talk about or?
Nick Diego (00:54)
Yeah. I I don’t know. I don’t love the term like local development, especially in this age of AI. Cause I feel like development is kind of, can sometimes be a little bit gatekeep-y. Like I can build things with just telling AI to build it for me. know? So I think that like, it’s a great way to build websites, build plug, build with WordPress locally. You don’t always have to be writing code.
to use it, I guess, is basically the thing. It’s really a way to build with WordPress locally, however you want to do that, whether it’s with code or with some AI help or just in the UI of WordPress building out a site.
Brian Coords (01:31)
Yeah, how do you think about that? Like, I mean, first of all, there’s, there’s a lot of local development tools for WordPress. there’s everything from spin it up yourself with scripts and commands to different, more self-contained products. Most of them seem to be tied to specific hosting companies and sort of that. do you know why studio, what was the, the real reason to say like WordPress.com needs its own dedicated local development tool?
Nick Diego (01:56)
I mean, I think that there’s a benefit for hosts to have their own tool. I mean, in Studio, you can push up your local project to WordPress.com hosting. We also support Pressable. one of the, I don’t know, interesting things about Studio is it’s very closely tied to WordPress Playground. So under the hood, what’s actually spinning up your local site is Playground CLI. So it’s unique in that way where it’s…
playground powered local development tool. But again, I mean, I think that there’s a big benefit for hosts to have their own local development tool because it gives users kind of that easy direct path to pushing their site to something live.
Brian Coords (02:39)
Yeah, and I guess one difference, actually I don’t know if this is a difference from all of them, but it is open source, right? So anybody can submit a pull request, file an issue, have a discussion. Do you get community contributions on it?
Nick Diego (02:46)
Yeah.
We do some, it’s something that I really want to see more, know, coming from the WordPress project in Gutenberg, where we get like a bajillion issues and stuff like that. That’s actually an area where I think that I’d like to see more engagement from the community because I have actually my own, I mean, you can fork studio and have your own instance, you know, if you want, turn it different colors, whatever you want to do, which I think is pretty cool. and it works great. And I do want to stress, I mean, this sounds very like I’m
marketing and shilling this project product, but you don’t need to use WordPress.com. Like you don’t even need to log into WordPress.com. You can use it without logging into anything completely for free. And honestly, you know, that’s primarily how I use it, building plugins and themes. Like I do have a site on WordPress.com, but most of the time it’s just local. You know, I don’t, it’s just a local development tool. But yeah, I think that it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting project and that’s kind of why.
Brian Coords (03:26)
Yeah.
Nick Diego (03:50)
I started working on it as a developer advocate and playing around with Studio became my own personal local development tool of choice. And then I just really loved it. Like I really loved like the simplicity of it and how closely it’s connected with Playground. It’s just interesting to see how that’s all evolved over time.
Brian Coords (04:05)
Yeah, I like that the UI of it is, I mean, I don’t know if it’s literally the WordPress components or if it just looks like it, but is it like literally the React like package of that’s used in core? Okay. Yeah, I feel like it has like a nice thing. Like I…
Nick Diego (04:11)
It is.
Not 100%, but a lot of them are.
Brian Coords (04:21)
I recently saw Chris Coyer from CSS Tricks posted, I think just in the last week, that he had tried Studio in the past and it had like some rough edges, so he’s still not using it, but he said, I’m filing it away that I’m gonna try it again. And I would say like, I tried it in the past and struggle with it, but in probably the last two months maybe, it’s become my go-to. have like…
maybe one site that I still use like herd and like a custom thing. And there’s really no reason for it. I could just migrate it. It’s just like a laziness factor. But like when I need like a, all right, I just want to test out this plugin. I want to test out, you know, somebody came out with something. I want to try it. Um, if it’s put, I can do playground for a lot of things of like, just need to try something in the UI, pull up a playground site. have some like blueprints and stuff. Let’s talk about for that. But like, I feel like studio has crossed the line of like,
Nick Diego (05:01)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (05:12)
think you can mostly just use it. I don’t feel like those rough edges are showstoppers anymore.
Nick Diego (05:17)
I do think that there are some areas that to go with Studio. I think because it’s built on Playground, there are some kind of quirks of how Playground works that you may not get in other local dev tools that are maybe built on Docker or whatever. But that’s actually one of the things I really like about the kind of the inner connectivity of Playground and Studio.
is that the Playground team is super gung-ho about making that tool the best it possibly can be. So any improvement to Playground gets funneled into the next release of Studio. So it’s two separate teams, but they’re working very closely together. So there are areas that, you know, features that Studio and Playground, you know, don’t currently support. XDbug is one that’s kind of like in the works, but…
We need that for playground and it’s going to be added to studio. So I think that there’s like this nice synergy between both. But if you’re like a
hardcore developer using something like herd or, know, yeah, studio might not cover all your bases, but for most things, I would say 80, 90 % of things studio can get you there.
Brian Coords (06:27)
Yeah, I would say I had a few issues with WooCommerce, because WooCommerce is a bit of a beast, you know, when you load it. It’s a huge ecosystem and plugin, and I filed issues. I mean, guess I have the advantage of we work at the same company as the people leading it, so maybe I got a little more priority. But it was like a day or two, and they were like, yeah, we fixed that in Playground, and it’ll make its way there. It’s now hit the point. I think WooCommerce was one of the stress tests
Nick Diego (06:42)
Yeah, exactly.
Brian Coords (06:54)
on it and now I’ve hit the point where I use woo pretty regularly I sync stuff depressible back and forth pretty regularly and so far minus you know if you like normal bugs and stuff it’s it’s been pretty reliable to just pop it open and use it it’s it’s gotten really good
Nick Diego (07:10)
Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things that we actually talked with the team about the last few weeks is WooCommerce is a great proxy for complicated plugins. You know, it can work with WooCommerce, then we’re pretty sure it can work with other things. But the other plan was to kind of periodically stress test, just go to the repo and just find like the most used plugins and just like stress test them all. They’ve done a lot of that, but like that’s something that kind of like as a passive project as you move forward.
just to make sure that people who are using the most common plugins, can easily just, if they’re using something else, migrate to Studio and everything just works. yeah, WooCommerce was a big one to make sure that everything is top-notch.
Brian Coords (07:49)
When you’re thinking about it from the marketing perspective, how do you differentiate between a beginner tool? Because it’s very user friendly, but it’s a bit limited. you said, the Playground instance makes some things not match a live environment. There’s some differences there. But I think for the vast majority of WordPress sites, they probably don’t care, and it’s probably not a deal breaker. But when you’re thinking about features and prioritizing and stuff, are you thinking
about developers? you thinking most about builders? Like how do you weigh the benefits of each?
Nick Diego (08:19)
I think right now, the focus is primarily on builders. I say that with a, you know, with an asterisk, I think that it’s definitely a local development tool, but I think if you’re going to be building a theme, a plugin, even a site for a client, more, I mean, almost all the time studios going to meet your needs. Now, if you’re, there are definitely some more technical
use cases that you might run into some issues, but you’re probably already using a more sophisticated local development tool. And Studio, I’d love for Studio to get there, but I think that there’s also a huge amount of users out in the world that would benefit for something like Local to build their site locally and then push it live or build their first block plugin or, you know,
experiment with an extension plugin for a feature that they need on their personal site. I think that there’s a huge group of potential users and existing users that meet that need. And we want to make sure that the speed at which they can create a local site, get their content in there, push it live if they so choose, is the best experience possible and also the easiest, really delightful experience.
I love it if, you know, sophisticated developers choose Studio in the long run and, you know, submit their issues for things that aren’t supported. But I think that they’re a bit of a smaller group and they already have tools that they love and, you know, it’s going to be hard getting them off their favorite tool anyways.
Brian Coords (09:45)
Do you guys promote it? Like I could imagine that automatic has its automatic for agencies program, which I’ve like dug into recently. We’re doing like an event with them and actually we’ve done a couple of events with them. And I met a bunch of people at WordCamp US who were like, we’re an automatic for agencies and it’s actually really good. There’s a bunch of like benefits to it. And it really is that audience of like people building, you know, small to medium sites, building a lot of them, all that sort of stuff. Are there like discovery ways so that like
Nick Diego (09:51)
You know?
Brian Coords (10:15)
Like that audience is aware of it and they’re paying attention to it and like leaned into it.
Nick Diego (10:20)
That’s an audience that we’re very keen on focusing. I mean, we do share information around release information to the A4A group, but that is kind of like that small to mid-sized agency that is a big target area that we want to kind of take advantage of because there’s a lot of great insights in those small to mid-sized agencies that can help inform the product. So you mentioned about GitHub before and getting issues. Like right now, I think that studios and
great place. But the big thing we need right now is user feedback on where to go next. What additional things do you need that would push you over the edge to start using Studio? And that agency group is a big cohort that we’re focused on.
Brian Coords (11:03)
Yeah, I have a few issues in there. You can definitely feel free to prioritize that. Actually, you guys got the one recently was the selective sync where you if you’re syncing from press below.com, like before it was like, do you want your files or database? But now it’s like, like, because I want to be like, don’t sync this plugin or this plugin or this plugin, because I’m working on those locally and stuff. And now that’s all there. That was
Nick Diego (11:07)
Yeah.
Thanks.
Brian Coords (11:23)
I would say one of the more important features for me, but I know that a lot of people want to see sync to other hosting companies. to me personally, like my personal opinion is like every hosting company has their own, like that’s just a normal thing. It’s not unusual, but I think that wordpress.com
generally has sort of a higher standard that people expect. Like it has to be free, it has to be available, it has to be this, all these sort of things that like, I don’t think other hosting companies have to deal with as like an expectation for free software at a level that it is. like, how do you think about like it’s open source, but how do you think about like extensibility, like people building plugins for it or building add-ons to it or something like that? Do you think that would ever be in the roadmap?
Nick Diego (11:56)
Mm-hmm.
I think that right now, mean, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of requests for, you know, connecting to other hosts. Right now the, there’s so much on the roadmap that that’s just not currently a priority. We’ve also had some, you know, feedback around building extensions for studio. Again, that’s not on the immediate roadmap, but the one thing that is very important to
the team to open source to anything is being able to take your content wherever you want. And so going back to the conversation around like making sure studio works with like all the, you know, top plugins in the world. Some of those are import export, you know, migration plugins. And so I think a first step would be to make sure that you can get content in and out of studio really well in all kind of the normal.
formats that people are familiar with. The import-export works great right now. It’s pretty robust, but I think that there’s probably work that can be done there to make it even more robust. I think that’s probably where we would start, the team would start first and that sort of thing.
Brian Coords (13:10)
Yeah, because from what I understand, it’s kind of based on Jetpack. And so if you had a self-hosted WordPress site, not on .com, not on Impressible, but you had that premium Jetpack backups feature, could you import that? Okay.
Nick Diego (13:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
That’s really seamless and easy. There are a lot of other popular migration plugins that are not as easily supported.
Brian Coords (13:33)
Yeah, because a lot of the errors that I would get when I would do imports and stuff, it was around the database. Obviously, because there’s this… You probably could explain it better than me, but the SQL to SQLite compatibility layer and stuff, that has probably, at least from the outside, looks like a major pain point. Is that one of the biggest hurdles to get over? Yeah.
Nick Diego (13:38)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly. Yeah.
I’m not a database person, but that is one of the unique aspects
of studios that uses SQLite as opposed to some other SQL database full on. Again, I’m clearly making it clear that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that is an area that has been identified as a sticking point for some users who are trying to migrate things.
Brian Coords (14:12)
Yeah, I would love to see SQLite like more, like from what I understand it’s just like more of a flat file than like a server hosted database and stuff and like, I don’t know, probably 80 % of WordPress websites would be more than capable, like my own blog would be more than capable running on a SQLite database. Maybe not now because I put Jetpack on it, but like in the past, you know, it was that sort of thing.
Nick Diego (14:18)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (14:34)
I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like the way that they’re approaching it coming through this direction where it’s like full compatibility backwards will end up maybe paying off and it’ll make the concept of a SQLite based WordPress, which I know like even Matt Mullenweg’s kind of promoted, maybe be a possibility. I don’t know.
Nick Diego (14:51)
It’s really interesting and I think that I’m going to go back to this, the fact that Studio is tied so closely to Playground, which is tied so closely to SQLite, and there’s like a nice synergy there that as the technology continues to improve, they all kind of improve. And it’s an exciting area. I mean, I’m not the one doing it, but I know for the engineers involved, it is an exciting area to be working on.
Brian Coords (15:12)
One of the new features, and it was one that we talked about just at work and how it would go is blueprints. And there’s the concept of playground blueprints, which I use a lot, where I have blueprints for like, give me the WooCommerce, like a development version with a bunch of fake data in it, and I spin it up on playground if I wanna test something, something like that. What was the process of thinking about how you would do blueprints, are just JSON files?
into studio where it’s like I need a UI I need to like a user experience I need something like cohesive and then also like the blueprints have to look good too you know it was like that process like
Nick Diego (15:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so as we’re talking, blueprints have just been released in Studio in 1.6.0. Blueprints are interesting because I think there are other local development tools and the term blueprints kind of used across all the tools.
In other, in other tools, a blueprint’s basically like a clone of a website or like a scaffold, which is the whole site. And then you like copy it as a starting point and then you build from there. side note, duplicating sites and studios, another minor thing that we’re focusing on trying to add to the, add to the app. But yeah, I mean, that’d be fantastic.
Brian Coords (16:24)
Yes, please. I needed
that one,
Nick Diego (16:27)
Yeah, but that would essentially
accomplish that, you know, copying a site as a scaffold and then starting a new site from there. Blueprints are different. Like you said, they’re just a JSON file. And they originated from Playground. The idea came from Playground. And you may have already used blueprints out in the world. You know, we have a blueprint to test the local, sorry, the most recent WordPress release. So 6.9 is coming out soon. There’ll be a testing blueprint that you can spin up.
It is a bit, if you’ve ever looked at a blueprint, the JSON, it’s complicated how they’re all spec’d out. And so that’s an thing that we have not fully solved yet, but in the UI.
Brian Coords (16:58)
Yeah.
Nick Diego (17:06)
We’re providing three starter blueprints. There’s a quick start, a development oriented one, then one designed for WooCommerce. They’re super basic. They’re nothing crazy, but they just spin you up a site with a bunch of pre-installed plugins, some site settings, and maybe some constants like turn on WPD debug, that sort of thing. And they’re just a good starting point where you don’t have to go out and install those plugins yourself and kind of go do all that stuff.
You can also do custom blueprints. I think that that’s where, I mean, the starter blueprints are great. We needed to have a UI where people could pick from something and start instead of starting from scratch. And I think that we’ll continue to develop that over time with additional, you know, the starter, there’s a library of blueprints that you can pick from. But the custom blueprints are what, you know, at you and I are the most excited about, right? I have my own custom blueprints that I, you know, I set my name, I set my admin color, I set all my favorite plugins.
They can pull from the repo or GitHub or wherever. You can do a lot with blueprints. And you can just spin up anything. And I think that that’s the most exciting part about it. Going back to your question about UI, we still have work to do in terms of helping people build blueprints. Right now you cannot export a site you’ve already created as a blueprint. But I think in future releases we’re going to explore how can we help people who are maybe not familiar with blueprints, help them
Brian Coords (18:17)
Hmm.
Nick Diego (18:25)
create them more easily. I found AI is really good for it because you can just like go into any AI, pass in the playground docs and say, make me a blueprint that does XYZ. But it is a bit of a hurdle for maybe non-developers to build blueprints, but it really opens a door for a lot in the future.
Brian Coords (18:43)
Yeah, one of the key things I like about a blueprint versus like the template site approach is, because I’ve had plenty of like, in the agency world, you have your template and stuff. And the fun thing is that every time you spin up a new site, you have like 50 plugins out of date, because you made the template site two months ago or two years ago, and you got to go update all the plugins and all this sort of stuff. And like with a blueprint, it’s like, no, no, no, this is like fresh. Like it tells you the plugins, but it’s going to get the latest version of everything. And then there’s that extra layer of like, use like run these WPC
Nick Diego (18:58)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (19:13)
I commands when you start up the site, import this content, generate this data, that sort of stuff. All of that stuff makes it so much more powerful. But yeah, could imagine eventually what would be really cool is the way that I can one click open a Playground blueprint in Playground.com, it would be great to click and now open that in Studio. And now I have that whole thing on my local environment or something like that. just here’s a link to a WordPress site, but it actually loads on your machine and does all this stuff.
Nick Diego (19:14)
yeah.
Brian Coords (19:43)
there’s a lot of potential value around blueprints. So I’m glad it’s at least in there.
Nick Diego (19:48)
Yeah,
absolutely. think this initial release was just to get the functionality in there. I’m going to go behind the scenes a little bit, but this release was particularly challenging. Anybody who’s looked at the release cadence has noticed that this release took a long time. The reason was it wasn’t just blueprints that was added. The entire underlying architecture of Studio was basically changed. It went from being powered by WP Now, which was a tool built
a few years ago, again, playground based, but a little bit different. And then now it’s running Playground CLI, which is what’s powering Playground. So that’s the new thing. And that sets the stage for a ton of exciting stuff in the future. Because Blueprints themselves, right now we’re on Blueprints V1, there is a Blueprints V2 that is in the works that makes Blueprints even more powerful. So…
converting to WP now to WP CLI sets a stage so that Studio can support V2 whenever V2 is ready. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff with blueprints. This is kind of just the first stop.
Brian Coords (20:48)
Yeah, we had a, in Woo, we had like a blueprint export tool that they built. And like immediately I was like, no, no, no, this needs to be in WordPress. But it was, I think the hard part was understanding that like blueprints don’t seem to be great for like too much content, because it can get really slow. Maybe like the first time, but like if you’re using a blueprint repeatedly and you want to migrate a bunch of content, but it’s really good for like settings, plugins, and themes. And there’s like a difference between.
Nick Diego (20:56)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (21:15)
like filling up a site with a ton of content, which I don’t think blueprints really solve. And I don’t know if V2 will look at that, but like spinning up a site with just like the settings, everything that you need. Does V2 touch content at all, or is that still kind of?
Nick Diego (21:30)
You know, I admittedly have not dived too far into V2 yet. But the, like your point about content because for example, there’s the, what is it? The smooth, smooth generator plugin. So that’s a plugin for WooCommerce that lets you generate custom data. So in the blueprint for WooCommerce, it installs that plugin. It doesn’t do the content part of it, but you can run that from the plugin. So I think that.
Brian Coords (21:40)
the smooth generator at woo. Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Diego (21:54)
I like to envision blueprints as like just a workflow tool. Like it’s a way for you just to, if you’re building the same site to kind of site over and over and over again, you just create a work, create a blueprint for it. And it just like massively speeds up your workflow. So, but that’s why I think it’s so interesting from like an agency perspective. Like if you’re, you know, you have your own custom plugins, you always are installing on every single agency site, turn it into a blueprint, pull them all in very quick and easy.
Brian Coords (22:21)
The last kind of like area I wanted to dive into is AI, because, you of course you have to. There’s like two sides of it. I guess the first side is that you have like the first side is the user side of it where you have an assistant AI inside of it. Do you, I find like I don’t often use it because I have AI where I’m working in my code or where, you know, and I don’t use it. Do you guys track like, does that being used? Do you think like that’s something you’ll like dig into and it would be like kind of a like, you know,
Nick Diego (22:25)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (22:50)
Cloud code for WordPress or something? Or do you think developers just want the AI in their VS code or wherever they’re working?
Nick Diego (22:57)
It’s a question. I think that the AI inside the studio right now is pretty basic. Basically, it just runs WPCLI commands and can generate, give you some answers on things.
It’s an area where, I mean, it was built a while ago, you know, earlier in this year. So it’s in terms of like the AI lifespan. That’s like a decade ago. Um, but I think that there’s a lot of opportunity inside a studio in the future when it comes to AI. So there have been explorations at automatic outs and we’re person.com outside of studio, uh, Telex. I’m sure you’ve tried out Telex, um, which are really interesting and there’s nothing.
technically stopping those tools from coming into Studio in the future. I’m not saying that they are, but I’m saying from a technical standpoint, you could imagine a world where you have an AI chap inside a studio that says, start me up a site. I want the site to include WooCommerce and make sure my name is set to Nick Diego and make sure the admin color is modern. And it just agentically does it all for you. I think that would be a really cool thing.
give me a bunch of sample content for my WooCommerce site. Who knows? I fully see that in the future of Studio. It’s not currently being worked on. A lot of the experiments are taking place outside of Studio, but there’s no reason they can’t come in in the future.
Brian Coords (24:19)
And on the flip side in terms of developers using AI, do you have a sense of how much… So a few weeks ago we had an internal hackathon day and I spent most of the day just making AI generated images and wasting time and getting distracted. But you built a right click context menu dropdown for Studio. I’m pretty certain you used AI to get through that process. Yeah. How much do you think AI has informed the development
Nick Diego (24:43)
yeah.
Brian Coords (24:48)
process of Studio? Like are developers using it? Are there like layers of it? Checks? Like we use CodeRabbit for PR checks, things like that. Like how much is that in the process?
Nick Diego (24:59)
I, any product, well, I shouldn’t say any, but most products these days are leveraging AI pretty heavily. And I think that to, to that end, the progress has been made in a product like studio in the last like even six months is exponential to where it was in the past. And I think a lot of that is due to the developers leveraging AI. The little thingy I built, it’s currently I’ve passed off that pull request to an, to a actual developer.
polish up and get it into the app. But yeah, I mean, I just basically vibe coded a feature of Studio that will eventually be in the app with a little bit of fine tuning. But I did that in an hour and a half during a hackathon. So I think that that kind of thing, we’re gonna see it, you’re gonna see it in every app out in the ecosystem, but just this kind of exponential kind of growth and how these apps evolve. It’s kind of crazy. I do wanna go back to your point about developers.
using AI, like I personally, I’m using cloud code. I’m using cursor. I think that if you’re developing something, often you’re just going to be using those types of tools rather than something in studio. So the way I look at studio is how can it help you set up a site easier that, know, like managing setting, you know, to me, that’s really exciting to like having, instead of having to like, change my permalinks and do all this stuff. Like just tell AI to do it. And it can just do it.
I think that would be really cool. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.
Brian Coords (26:23)
Yeah, because for me, a local development tool, I kind of want to turn it on when I start and start a site. And then I’m hopefully not looking at it unless it had some debug logs or something or an MCP or some other cool thing. But most of time, it’s like, I want to spin up a site. So that seems like the most valuable place to focus on AI. Help me spin up what I want. Help me build the new thing I want. And then if I am a developer, I’ll go to my tools after this.
Nick Diego (26:50)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (26:50)
when you submit a PR that you vibe coded, like I think I have like imposter syndrome, like I’m afraid to be like, hey, I prototyped this thing, which is dumb because internally I watch people do it all the time from other teams. I’ve I’ve coded this thing and maybe it’ll work, maybe it doesn’t, but it proves the concept. And now all that the grownups take over. ⁓
Nick Diego (27:03)
yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (27:11)
that actually know how to code, you feel confident that people are okay to throw a VibeCoded prototype at an open source project generally?
Nick Diego (27:21)
Yeah, there was a, well, I won’t get into it. There was some discussion online around like how you, how you contribute to open source projects recently. And I am of the opinion that obviously you want to do good work in whatever you’re contributing, whether it’s just a documentation update, or maybe it’s actual live code. But I think if you’re putting some, I mean, it doesn’t matter how you got there. If what you put together is.
Cause most projects, including studio, they have a bunch of, you know, checks like linting checks and you know, code checks or whatever. As long you make sure you’re passing all of those and you built something you think is providing real value to the user base of studio, please submit an EPR. It doesn’t matter how it got there. You know, you think it’s a valuable improvement. It might, doesn’t mean it’s going to be accepted, but please submit it. It’s all open source. Like that’s what this is all about. So.
Brian Coords (28:15)
Awesome, well you heard it from Nick, throw your vibe-coded slop at him and he’ll triage it for you. Yeah, thanks for breaking down Studio with me. Where do people go to get Studio to follow it? I don’t know if you have like a developer blog or like a place on .com’s developer blog or something like that, where do people kind of just like track the progress of it?
Nick Diego (28:18)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so we have, if you go to WordPress.Studio, it’s a cool URL, but sometimes people don’t realize that that’s an actual URL. But if you go to WordPress.Studio, it will take you to the landing page about Studio. There’s documentation that has the change log and the roadmap and everything there. You can also go to the WordPress.com slash blog. That’s where we blog about. That’s where any like release, big release will be posted. So that’s the spot there. And then,
If you follow WordPress.Studio, you’ll find the GitHub repository. So if you have an issue, please post an issue. We also enabled the discussions tabs if you an idea or you just want to rant about something about Studio, that’s a place for that as well. But GitHub is really kind of, trying to make that kind of a source of truth for issues, discussion around Studio. It is an open source project and we want to try to…
know, encourage and foster kind of a community around it.
Brian Coords (29:28)
Awesome. for hanging out today,
Nick Diego (29:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Have a one.
Welcome, today we have Nick Diego, former developer advocate, product marketing for WordPress Studio. How do you introduce yourself these days? How do you say what you do?
Nick Diego (00:12)
Well, I was a developer advocate working on WordPress and then now I’m focusing on most of my time on studio doing product marketing for studio and other developer oriented projects on WordPress.com.
Brian Coords (00:24)
Yeah, I mean, for somebody who made really great WordPress products and plugins, know that Mike McAllister and I are cheerleading you on Twitter constantly about them. It definitely makes sense. I guess we should just say, what is Studio? How do you describe it to people if they’re not familiar with WordPress Studio?
Nick Diego (00:32)
Yeah, exactly.
I think the best way to describe it is a local development tool. It’s kind of growing into much more than that, but it’s a way to develop or build things locally with WordPress.
Brian Coords (00:49)
Okay, when you say much more than that, what, like, are there things you’re thinking about or can talk about or?
Nick Diego (00:54)
Yeah. I I don’t know. I don’t love the term like local development, especially in this age of AI. Cause I feel like development is kind of, can sometimes be a little bit gatekeep-y. Like I can build things with just telling AI to build it for me. know? So I think that like, it’s a great way to build websites, build plug, build with WordPress locally. You don’t always have to be writing code.
to use it, I guess, is basically the thing. It’s really a way to build with WordPress locally, however you want to do that, whether it’s with code or with some AI help or just in the UI of WordPress building out a site.
Brian Coords (01:31)
Yeah, how do you think about that? Like, I mean, first of all, there’s, there’s a lot of local development tools for WordPress. there’s everything from spin it up yourself with scripts and commands to different, more self-contained products. Most of them seem to be tied to specific hosting companies and sort of that. do you know why studio, what was the, the real reason to say like WordPress.com needs its own dedicated local development tool?
Nick Diego (01:56)
I mean, I think that there’s a benefit for hosts to have their own tool. I mean, in Studio, you can push up your local project to WordPress.com hosting. We also support Pressable. one of the, I don’t know, interesting things about Studio is it’s very closely tied to WordPress Playground. So under the hood, what’s actually spinning up your local site is Playground CLI. So it’s unique in that way where it’s…
playground powered local development tool. But again, I mean, I think that there’s a big benefit for hosts to have their own local development tool because it gives users kind of that easy direct path to pushing their site to something live.
Brian Coords (02:39)
Yeah, and I guess one difference, actually I don’t know if this is a difference from all of them, but it is open source, right? So anybody can submit a pull request, file an issue, have a discussion. Do you get community contributions on it?
Nick Diego (02:46)
Yeah.
We do some, it’s something that I really want to see more, know, coming from the WordPress project in Gutenberg, where we get like a bajillion issues and stuff like that. That’s actually an area where I think that I’d like to see more engagement from the community because I have actually my own, I mean, you can fork studio and have your own instance, you know, if you want, turn it different colors, whatever you want to do, which I think is pretty cool. and it works great. And I do want to stress, I mean, this sounds very like I’m
marketing and shilling this project product, but you don’t need to use WordPress.com. Like you don’t even need to log into WordPress.com. You can use it without logging into anything completely for free. And honestly, you know, that’s primarily how I use it, building plugins and themes. Like I do have a site on WordPress.com, but most of the time it’s just local. You know, I don’t, it’s just a local development tool. But yeah, I think that it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting project and that’s kind of why.
Brian Coords (03:26)
Yeah.
Nick Diego (03:50)
I started working on it as a developer advocate and playing around with Studio became my own personal local development tool of choice. And then I just really loved it. Like I really loved like the simplicity of it and how closely it’s connected with Playground. It’s just interesting to see how that’s all evolved over time.
Brian Coords (04:05)
Yeah, I like that the UI of it is, I mean, I don’t know if it’s literally the WordPress components or if it just looks like it, but is it like literally the React like package of that’s used in core? Okay. Yeah, I feel like it has like a nice thing. Like I…
Nick Diego (04:11)
It is.
Not 100%, but a lot of them are.
Brian Coords (04:21)
I recently saw Chris Coyer from CSS Tricks posted, I think just in the last week, that he had tried Studio in the past and it had like some rough edges, so he’s still not using it, but he said, I’m filing it away that I’m gonna try it again. And I would say like, I tried it in the past and struggle with it, but in probably the last two months maybe, it’s become my go-to. have like…
maybe one site that I still use like herd and like a custom thing. And there’s really no reason for it. I could just migrate it. It’s just like a laziness factor. But like when I need like a, all right, I just want to test out this plugin. I want to test out, you know, somebody came out with something. I want to try it. Um, if it’s put, I can do playground for a lot of things of like, just need to try something in the UI, pull up a playground site. have some like blueprints and stuff. Let’s talk about for that. But like, I feel like studio has crossed the line of like,
Nick Diego (05:01)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (05:12)
think you can mostly just use it. I don’t feel like those rough edges are showstoppers anymore.
Nick Diego (05:17)
I do think that there are some areas that to go with Studio. I think because it’s built on Playground, there are some kind of quirks of how Playground works that you may not get in other local dev tools that are maybe built on Docker or whatever. But that’s actually one of the things I really like about the kind of the inner connectivity of Playground and Studio.
is that the Playground team is super gung-ho about making that tool the best it possibly can be. So any improvement to Playground gets funneled into the next release of Studio. So it’s two separate teams, but they’re working very closely together. So there are areas that, you know, features that Studio and Playground, you know, don’t currently support. XDbug is one that’s kind of like in the works, but…
We need that for playground and it’s going to be added to studio. So I think that there’s like this nice synergy between both. But if you’re like a
hardcore developer using something like herd or, know, yeah, studio might not cover all your bases, but for most things, I would say 80, 90 % of things studio can get you there.
Brian Coords (06:27)
Yeah, I would say I had a few issues with WooCommerce, because WooCommerce is a bit of a beast, you know, when you load it. It’s a huge ecosystem and plugin, and I filed issues. I mean, guess I have the advantage of we work at the same company as the people leading it, so maybe I got a little more priority. But it was like a day or two, and they were like, yeah, we fixed that in Playground, and it’ll make its way there. It’s now hit the point. I think WooCommerce was one of the stress tests
Nick Diego (06:42)
Yeah, exactly.
Brian Coords (06:54)
on it and now I’ve hit the point where I use woo pretty regularly I sync stuff depressible back and forth pretty regularly and so far minus you know if you like normal bugs and stuff it’s it’s been pretty reliable to just pop it open and use it it’s it’s gotten really good
Nick Diego (07:10)
Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things that we actually talked with the team about the last few weeks is WooCommerce is a great proxy for complicated plugins. You know, it can work with WooCommerce, then we’re pretty sure it can work with other things. But the other plan was to kind of periodically stress test, just go to the repo and just find like the most used plugins and just like stress test them all. They’ve done a lot of that, but like that’s something that kind of like as a passive project as you move forward.
just to make sure that people who are using the most common plugins, can easily just, if they’re using something else, migrate to Studio and everything just works. yeah, WooCommerce was a big one to make sure that everything is top-notch.
Brian Coords (07:49)
When you’re thinking about it from the marketing perspective, how do you differentiate between a beginner tool? Because it’s very user friendly, but it’s a bit limited. you said, the Playground instance makes some things not match a live environment. There’s some differences there. But I think for the vast majority of WordPress sites, they probably don’t care, and it’s probably not a deal breaker. But when you’re thinking about features and prioritizing and stuff, are you thinking
about developers? you thinking most about builders? Like how do you weigh the benefits of each?
Nick Diego (08:19)
I think right now, the focus is primarily on builders. I say that with a, you know, with an asterisk, I think that it’s definitely a local development tool, but I think if you’re going to be building a theme, a plugin, even a site for a client, more, I mean, almost all the time studios going to meet your needs. Now, if you’re, there are definitely some more technical
use cases that you might run into some issues, but you’re probably already using a more sophisticated local development tool. And Studio, I’d love for Studio to get there, but I think that there’s also a huge amount of users out in the world that would benefit for something like Local to build their site locally and then push it live or build their first block plugin or, you know,
experiment with an extension plugin for a feature that they need on their personal site. I think that there’s a huge group of potential users and existing users that meet that need. And we want to make sure that the speed at which they can create a local site, get their content in there, push it live if they so choose, is the best experience possible and also the easiest, really delightful experience.
I love it if, you know, sophisticated developers choose Studio in the long run and, you know, submit their issues for things that aren’t supported. But I think that they’re a bit of a smaller group and they already have tools that they love and, you know, it’s going to be hard getting them off their favorite tool anyways.
Brian Coords (09:45)
Do you guys promote it? Like I could imagine that automatic has its automatic for agencies program, which I’ve like dug into recently. We’re doing like an event with them and actually we’ve done a couple of events with them. And I met a bunch of people at WordCamp US who were like, we’re an automatic for agencies and it’s actually really good. There’s a bunch of like benefits to it. And it really is that audience of like people building, you know, small to medium sites, building a lot of them, all that sort of stuff. Are there like discovery ways so that like
Nick Diego (09:51)
You know?
Brian Coords (10:15)
Like that audience is aware of it and they’re paying attention to it and like leaned into it.
Nick Diego (10:20)
That’s an audience that we’re very keen on focusing. I mean, we do share information around release information to the A4A group, but that is kind of like that small to mid-sized agency that is a big target area that we want to kind of take advantage of because there’s a lot of great insights in those small to mid-sized agencies that can help inform the product. So you mentioned about GitHub before and getting issues. Like right now, I think that studios and
great place. But the big thing we need right now is user feedback on where to go next. What additional things do you need that would push you over the edge to start using Studio? And that agency group is a big cohort that we’re focused on.
Brian Coords (11:03)
Yeah, I have a few issues in there. You can definitely feel free to prioritize that. Actually, you guys got the one recently was the selective sync where you if you’re syncing from press below.com, like before it was like, do you want your files or database? But now it’s like, like, because I want to be like, don’t sync this plugin or this plugin or this plugin, because I’m working on those locally and stuff. And now that’s all there. That was
Nick Diego (11:07)
Yeah.
Thanks.
Brian Coords (11:23)
I would say one of the more important features for me, but I know that a lot of people want to see sync to other hosting companies. to me personally, like my personal opinion is like every hosting company has their own, like that’s just a normal thing. It’s not unusual, but I think that wordpress.com
generally has sort of a higher standard that people expect. Like it has to be free, it has to be available, it has to be this, all these sort of things that like, I don’t think other hosting companies have to deal with as like an expectation for free software at a level that it is. like, how do you think about like it’s open source, but how do you think about like extensibility, like people building plugins for it or building add-ons to it or something like that? Do you think that would ever be in the roadmap?
Nick Diego (11:56)
Mm-hmm.
I think that right now, mean, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of requests for, you know, connecting to other hosts. Right now the, there’s so much on the roadmap that that’s just not currently a priority. We’ve also had some, you know, feedback around building extensions for studio. Again, that’s not on the immediate roadmap, but the one thing that is very important to
the team to open source to anything is being able to take your content wherever you want. And so going back to the conversation around like making sure studio works with like all the, you know, top plugins in the world. Some of those are import export, you know, migration plugins. And so I think a first step would be to make sure that you can get content in and out of studio really well in all kind of the normal.
formats that people are familiar with. The import-export works great right now. It’s pretty robust, but I think that there’s probably work that can be done there to make it even more robust. I think that’s probably where we would start, the team would start first and that sort of thing.
Brian Coords (13:10)
Yeah, because from what I understand, it’s kind of based on Jetpack. And so if you had a self-hosted WordPress site, not on .com, not on Impressible, but you had that premium Jetpack backups feature, could you import that? Okay.
Nick Diego (13:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
That’s really seamless and easy. There are a lot of other popular migration plugins that are not as easily supported.
Brian Coords (13:33)
Yeah, because a lot of the errors that I would get when I would do imports and stuff, it was around the database. Obviously, because there’s this… You probably could explain it better than me, but the SQL to SQLite compatibility layer and stuff, that has probably, at least from the outside, looks like a major pain point. Is that one of the biggest hurdles to get over? Yeah.
Nick Diego (13:38)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly. Yeah.
I’m not a database person, but that is one of the unique aspects
of studios that uses SQLite as opposed to some other SQL database full on. Again, I’m clearly making it clear that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that is an area that has been identified as a sticking point for some users who are trying to migrate things.
Brian Coords (14:12)
Yeah, I would love to see SQLite like more, like from what I understand it’s just like more of a flat file than like a server hosted database and stuff and like, I don’t know, probably 80 % of WordPress websites would be more than capable, like my own blog would be more than capable running on a SQLite database. Maybe not now because I put Jetpack on it, but like in the past, you know, it was that sort of thing.
Nick Diego (14:18)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Coords (14:34)
I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like the way that they’re approaching it coming through this direction where it’s like full compatibility backwards will end up maybe paying off and it’ll make the concept of a SQLite based WordPress, which I know like even Matt Mullenweg’s kind of promoted, maybe be a possibility. I don’t know.
Nick Diego (14:51)
It’s really interesting and I think that I’m going to go back to this, the fact that Studio is tied so closely to Playground, which is tied so closely to SQLite, and there’s like a nice synergy there that as the technology continues to improve, they all kind of improve. And it’s an exciting area. I mean, I’m not the one doing it, but I know for the engineers involved, it is an exciting area to be working on.
Brian Coords (15:12)
One of the new features, and it was one that we talked about just at work and how it would go is blueprints. And there’s the concept of playground blueprints, which I use a lot, where I have blueprints for like, give me the WooCommerce, like a development version with a bunch of fake data in it, and I spin it up on playground if I wanna test something, something like that. What was the process of thinking about how you would do blueprints, are just JSON files?
into studio where it’s like I need a UI I need to like a user experience I need something like cohesive and then also like the blueprints have to look good too you know it was like that process like
Nick Diego (15:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so as we’re talking, blueprints have just been released in Studio in 1.6.0. Blueprints are interesting because I think there are other local development tools and the term blueprints kind of used across all the tools.
In other, in other tools, a blueprint’s basically like a clone of a website or like a scaffold, which is the whole site. And then you like copy it as a starting point and then you build from there. side note, duplicating sites and studios, another minor thing that we’re focusing on trying to add to the, add to the app. But yeah, I mean, that’d be fantastic.
Brian Coords (16:24)
Yes, please. I needed
that one,
Nick Diego (16:27)
Yeah, but that would essentially
accomplish that, you know, copying a site as a scaffold and then starting a new site from there. Blueprints are different. Like you said, they’re just a JSON file. And they originated from Playground. The idea came from Playground. And you may have already used blueprints out in the world. You know, we have a blueprint to test the local, sorry, the most recent WordPress release. So 6.9 is coming out soon. There’ll be a testing blueprint that you can spin up.
It is a bit, if you’ve ever looked at a blueprint, the JSON, it’s complicated how they’re all spec’d out. And so that’s an thing that we have not fully solved yet, but in the UI.
Brian Coords (16:58)
Yeah.
Nick Diego (17:06)
We’re providing three starter blueprints. There’s a quick start, a development oriented one, then one designed for WooCommerce. They’re super basic. They’re nothing crazy, but they just spin you up a site with a bunch of pre-installed plugins, some site settings, and maybe some constants like turn on WPD debug, that sort of thing. And they’re just a good starting point where you don’t have to go out and install those plugins yourself and kind of go do all that stuff.
You can also do custom blueprints. I think that that’s where, I mean, the starter blueprints are great. We needed to have a UI where people could pick from something and start instead of starting from scratch. And I think that we’ll continue to develop that over time with additional, you know, the starter, there’s a library of blueprints that you can pick from. But the custom blueprints are what, you know, at you and I are the most excited about, right? I have my own custom blueprints that I, you know, I set my name, I set my admin color, I set all my favorite plugins.
They can pull from the repo or GitHub or wherever. You can do a lot with blueprints. And you can just spin up anything. And I think that that’s the most exciting part about it. Going back to your question about UI, we still have work to do in terms of helping people build blueprints. Right now you cannot export a site you’ve already created as a blueprint. But I think in future releases we’re going to explore how can we help people who are maybe not familiar with blueprints, help them
Brian Coords (18:17)
Hmm.
Nick Diego (18:25)
create them more easily. I found AI is really good for it because you can just like go into any AI, pass in the playground docs and say, make me a blueprint that does XYZ. But it is a bit of a hurdle for maybe non-developers to build blueprints, but it really opens a door for a lot in the future.
Brian Coords (18:43)
Yeah, one of the key things I like about a blueprint versus like the template site approach is, because I’ve had plenty of like, in the agency world, you have your template and stuff. And the fun thing is that every time you spin up a new site, you have like 50 plugins out of date, because you made the template site two months ago or two years ago, and you got to go update all the plugins and all this sort of stuff. And like with a blueprint, it’s like, no, no, no, this is like fresh. Like it tells you the plugins, but it’s going to get the latest version of everything. And then there’s that extra layer of like, use like run these WPC
Nick Diego (18:58)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (19:13)
I commands when you start up the site, import this content, generate this data, that sort of stuff. All of that stuff makes it so much more powerful. But yeah, could imagine eventually what would be really cool is the way that I can one click open a Playground blueprint in Playground.com, it would be great to click and now open that in Studio. And now I have that whole thing on my local environment or something like that. just here’s a link to a WordPress site, but it actually loads on your machine and does all this stuff.
Nick Diego (19:14)
yeah.
Brian Coords (19:43)
there’s a lot of potential value around blueprints. So I’m glad it’s at least in there.
Nick Diego (19:48)
Yeah,
absolutely. think this initial release was just to get the functionality in there. I’m going to go behind the scenes a little bit, but this release was particularly challenging. Anybody who’s looked at the release cadence has noticed that this release took a long time. The reason was it wasn’t just blueprints that was added. The entire underlying architecture of Studio was basically changed. It went from being powered by WP Now, which was a tool built
a few years ago, again, playground based, but a little bit different. And then now it’s running Playground CLI, which is what’s powering Playground. So that’s the new thing. And that sets the stage for a ton of exciting stuff in the future. Because Blueprints themselves, right now we’re on Blueprints V1, there is a Blueprints V2 that is in the works that makes Blueprints even more powerful. So…
converting to WP now to WP CLI sets a stage so that Studio can support V2 whenever V2 is ready. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff with blueprints. This is kind of just the first stop.
Brian Coords (20:48)
Yeah, we had a, in Woo, we had like a blueprint export tool that they built. And like immediately I was like, no, no, no, this needs to be in WordPress. But it was, I think the hard part was understanding that like blueprints don’t seem to be great for like too much content, because it can get really slow. Maybe like the first time, but like if you’re using a blueprint repeatedly and you want to migrate a bunch of content, but it’s really good for like settings, plugins, and themes. And there’s like a difference between.
Nick Diego (20:56)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (21:15)
like filling up a site with a ton of content, which I don’t think blueprints really solve. And I don’t know if V2 will look at that, but like spinning up a site with just like the settings, everything that you need. Does V2 touch content at all, or is that still kind of?
Nick Diego (21:30)
You know, I admittedly have not dived too far into V2 yet. But the, like your point about content because for example, there’s the, what is it? The smooth, smooth generator plugin. So that’s a plugin for WooCommerce that lets you generate custom data. So in the blueprint for WooCommerce, it installs that plugin. It doesn’t do the content part of it, but you can run that from the plugin. So I think that.
Brian Coords (21:40)
the smooth generator at woo. Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Diego (21:54)
I like to envision blueprints as like just a workflow tool. Like it’s a way for you just to, if you’re building the same site to kind of site over and over and over again, you just create a work, create a blueprint for it. And it just like massively speeds up your workflow. So, but that’s why I think it’s so interesting from like an agency perspective. Like if you’re, you know, you have your own custom plugins, you always are installing on every single agency site, turn it into a blueprint, pull them all in very quick and easy.
Brian Coords (22:21)
The last kind of like area I wanted to dive into is AI, because, you of course you have to. There’s like two sides of it. I guess the first side is that you have like the first side is the user side of it where you have an assistant AI inside of it. Do you, I find like I don’t often use it because I have AI where I’m working in my code or where, you know, and I don’t use it. Do you guys track like, does that being used? Do you think like that’s something you’ll like dig into and it would be like kind of a like, you know,
Nick Diego (22:25)
Yeah.
Brian Coords (22:50)
Cloud code for WordPress or something? Or do you think developers just want the AI in their VS code or wherever they’re working?
Nick Diego (22:57)
It’s a question. I think that the AI inside the studio right now is pretty basic. Basically, it just runs WPCLI commands and can generate, give you some answers on things.
It’s an area where, I mean, it was built a while ago, you know, earlier in this year. So it’s in terms of like the AI lifespan. That’s like a decade ago. Um, but I think that there’s a lot of opportunity inside a studio in the future when it comes to AI. So there have been explorations at automatic outs and we’re person.com outside of studio, uh, Telex. I’m sure you’ve tried out Telex, um, which are really interesting and there’s nothing.
technically stopping those tools from coming into Studio in the future. I’m not saying that they are, but I’m saying from a technical standpoint, you could imagine a world where you have an AI chap inside a studio that says, start me up a site. I want the site to include WooCommerce and make sure my name is set to Nick Diego and make sure the admin color is modern. And it just agentically does it all for you. I think that would be a really cool thing.
give me a bunch of sample content for my WooCommerce site. Who knows? I fully see that in the future of Studio. It’s not currently being worked on. A lot of the experiments are taking place outside of Studio, but there’s no reason they can’t come in in the future.
Brian Coords (24:19)
And on the flip side in terms of developers using AI, do you have a sense of how much… So a few weeks ago we had an internal hackathon day and I spent most of the day just making AI generated images and wasting time and getting distracted. But you built a right click context menu dropdown for Studio. I’m pretty certain you used AI to get through that process. Yeah. How much do you think AI has informed the development
Nick Diego (24:43)
yeah.
Brian Coords (24:48)
process of Studio? Like are developers using it? Are there like layers of it? Checks? Like we use CodeRabbit for PR checks, things like that. Like how much is that in the process?
Nick Diego (24:59)
I, any product, well, I shouldn’t say any, but most products these days are leveraging AI pretty heavily. And I think that to, to that end, the progress has been made in a product like studio in the last like even six months is exponential to where it was in the past. And I think a lot of that is due to the developers leveraging AI. The little thingy I built, it’s currently I’ve passed off that pull request to an, to a actual developer.
polish up and get it into the app. But yeah, I mean, I just basically vibe coded a feature of Studio that will eventually be in the app with a little bit of fine tuning. But I did that in an hour and a half during a hackathon. So I think that that kind of thing, we’re gonna see it, you’re gonna see it in every app out in the ecosystem, but just this kind of exponential kind of growth and how these apps evolve. It’s kind of crazy. I do wanna go back to your point about developers.
using AI, like I personally, I’m using cloud code. I’m using cursor. I think that if you’re developing something, often you’re just going to be using those types of tools rather than something in studio. So the way I look at studio is how can it help you set up a site easier that, know, like managing setting, you know, to me, that’s really exciting to like having, instead of having to like, change my permalinks and do all this stuff. Like just tell AI to do it. And it can just do it.
I think that would be really cool. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.
Brian Coords (26:23)
Yeah, because for me, a local development tool, I kind of want to turn it on when I start and start a site. And then I’m hopefully not looking at it unless it had some debug logs or something or an MCP or some other cool thing. But most of time, it’s like, I want to spin up a site. So that seems like the most valuable place to focus on AI. Help me spin up what I want. Help me build the new thing I want. And then if I am a developer, I’ll go to my tools after this.
Nick Diego (26:50)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (26:50)
when you submit a PR that you vibe coded, like I think I have like imposter syndrome, like I’m afraid to be like, hey, I prototyped this thing, which is dumb because internally I watch people do it all the time from other teams. I’ve I’ve coded this thing and maybe it’ll work, maybe it doesn’t, but it proves the concept. And now all that the grownups take over. ⁓
Nick Diego (27:03)
yeah.
Yeah.
Brian Coords (27:11)
that actually know how to code, you feel confident that people are okay to throw a VibeCoded prototype at an open source project generally?
Nick Diego (27:21)
Yeah, there was a, well, I won’t get into it. There was some discussion online around like how you, how you contribute to open source projects recently. And I am of the opinion that obviously you want to do good work in whatever you’re contributing, whether it’s just a documentation update, or maybe it’s actual live code. But I think if you’re putting some, I mean, it doesn’t matter how you got there. If what you put together is.
Cause most projects, including studio, they have a bunch of, you know, checks like linting checks and you know, code checks or whatever. As long you make sure you’re passing all of those and you built something you think is providing real value to the user base of studio, please submit an EPR. It doesn’t matter how it got there. You know, you think it’s a valuable improvement. It might, doesn’t mean it’s going to be accepted, but please submit it. It’s all open source. Like that’s what this is all about. So.
Brian Coords (28:15)
Awesome, well you heard it from Nick, throw your vibe-coded slop at him and he’ll triage it for you. Yeah, thanks for breaking down Studio with me. Where do people go to get Studio to follow it? I don’t know if you have like a developer blog or like a place on .com’s developer blog or something like that, where do people kind of just like track the progress of it?
Nick Diego (28:18)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so we have, if you go to WordPress.Studio, it’s a cool URL, but sometimes people don’t realize that that’s an actual URL. But if you go to WordPress.Studio, it will take you to the landing page about Studio. There’s documentation that has the change log and the roadmap and everything there. You can also go to the WordPress.com slash blog. That’s where we blog about. That’s where any like release, big release will be posted. So that’s the spot there. And then,
If you follow WordPress.Studio, you’ll find the GitHub repository. So if you have an issue, please post an issue. We also enabled the discussions tabs if you an idea or you just want to rant about something about Studio, that’s a place for that as well. But GitHub is really kind of, trying to make that kind of a source of truth for issues, discussion around Studio. It is an open source project and we want to try to…
know, encourage and foster kind of a community around it.
Brian Coords (29:28)
Awesome. for hanging out today,
Nick Diego (29:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Have a one.