What’s Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin

Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have Nick from Skyverge. Nick, how are you doing today?

Nik McLaughlin (00:04)
Hey, you’re doing good. Thanks, Brian.

Brian Coords (00:06)
Maybe for people who don’t know you or Skyverge, could you give like kind of a brief bio what you do, what you guys do over there?

Nik McLaughlin (00:13)
Yeah,

sure. Yeah, so I’m on the SkyVirge team at GoDaddy. but SkyVirge specifically is a, it’s focused on like WooCommerce extensions. So we have a suite of, I think still 40 is our count right now, of WooCommerce extensions. The biggest of those being like WooCommerce memberships. And then, you know, the list goes on from there. But yeah, so I’ve been with SkyVirge for about five years. We got acquired by GoDaddy within that.

time and I’ve been kind of coming up through the ranks there but most recently doing mostly like product and brand management so get to go on shows and do talks and also like figure out what we’re building and things like that.

Brian Coords (00:50)
Okay.

Nice, was

your background development though? Like did you work as a developer?

Nik McLaughlin (01:00)
It’s kind of mixed.

Yeah, so I started at Skyverge on the support team and

Brian Coords (01:05)
Okay.

Nik McLaughlin (01:05)
came up through that route and that’s always been kind of my primary focus. I think even like my engineering or product approach is very customer centric. But I did like get half of a computer science degree and you know, spent some time kind of embedded with our engineering team and stuff like that. So I kind of float around a lot, trying not to dilute my skills too much here, but also, you know, get the most out of perspective and customer insight and stuff like that constantly.

Brian Coords (01:17)
You

You

Nik McLaughlin (01:31)
way.

Brian Coords (01:32)
Nice.

I had a recent episode like late last year with Ian Meisner, who I think was at Skyverge, right?

Nik McLaughlin (01:37)
My old boss, yeah.

Brian Coords (01:39)
Yeah. He,

I was looking this morning and his was like the most listened to episode I’ve had in a long time or like just, you know, I haven’t, I’ve only been doing this like a year, but it was dramatically more. the topic of that one was like, check out optimizations for black Friday. So was like, okay, that’s like a, pretty clear, like, I can understand why that one got a lot of traffic more than the other ones, but I feel like this topic today will probably beat that one because this is really like the topic. Yeah. We, it’ll be a competition.

Nik McLaughlin (01:46)
next.

sure.

⁓

Yeah, yeah.

Don’t tell Ian.

Brian Coords (02:09)
And it’s really, we want to deep dive into like MCP, think specifically and WooCommerce MCP, because you’ve been doing a lot of cool stuff and it’s been fun like seeing a lot of that conversation in our community Slack. But I guess I wanted to start like a big picture. What is your, if you like take a step back and you just look at like 2026 AI hitting us as product people in the WordPress space, do you have like, what’s your like initial gut reaction to what’s happening?

Nik McLaughlin (02:37)
Gut reaction, I…

don’t know this is gut or if this is like a trained thing by this point. Like we’re far enough in it that maybe I’ve like calmed the nerves a little more, but I’m definitely like looking more for opportunities than I am for doomsday scenarios. I think, yeah, I don’t know. Like I said, I think some of that might just be like training of like, okay, I’ve got my head around enough of this to like start to see those things. But it’s really like kind of shifting that focus of like a lot of the big players

Brian Coords (02:44)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (03:05)
pieces I think are landing as far as like what this tech will do and how it’s going to be implemented and things like that. And now it’s more the time to actually build useful things with it. There’s still a lot of limitations I think on like what can be done there and how well these things actually work. So I mean that’s a lot of what I want to talk about too is like realistically what’s what are the challenges still in front of us. But I but I think the biggest encouragement I have from last year I think going into this year is

Brian Coords (03:10)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (03:33)
that because so much of this is still being developed or solidified that like it’s an opportunity to decide how this goes. Like we have a say in what gets developed and how these tools develop because it’s still in progress. Like based on what we build now, we kind of create demand for whatever comes next.

Brian Coords (03:42)
Hmm.

Yeah, and I, I mean, I definitely hit that roller coaster, like, or like pendulum of like existential dread to like, we’re in the like,

massive opportunity I think of like maybe cell phones and like mobile internet as like the last big thing that hit web development where it was like this is like a whole new Avenue of things that we get to imagine that we weren’t possible before and changed and it had plenty of other effects on Society and culture, of course, you know ⁓ But it definitely was like if you’re open to opportunity and you’re excited about it It’s kind of fun to get to see it happening in real time and not like I don’t know how old you are but like

Nik McLaughlin (04:20)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (04:31)
I remember early-ish internet, but not at the same level, but I feel like we get to see this at the really early stages, and we’re getting to see it from the ground up.

Nik McLaughlin (04:38)
Yeah

Yeah, I think like the mobile like cell phone change is like maybe the best comparison that i’ve come across as far as understanding like what kind of scale of change and

Some of the mechanics of how things are changing too, like it’s not so much, I mean, let’s see, like on the, the term AI is too big, right? Like, we all know this, so it’s like, I want to say like on the AI side, but it’s like, but that’s every thing that anybody’s talking about. So what does that mean? Like there’s a lot of stuff going on on the, what computers can do, like, oh wow, all these new like things that we never knew computers could do or something, which is, you know, sort of like the hardware of the mobile.

Brian Coords (05:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (05:21)
revolution, right? Of like, wow, can, you know, like, whatever, it’s got a GPS in it. And now everybody just has a GPS in their pocket or whatever, right? Like all these different pieces that we thought were that were really advanced tech at the time, you know, and now we’ve kind of become accustomed to. But I, I guess, yeah, I think there’s a lot more on the like, what are we going to do with it front right now? ⁓ That

Brian Coords (05:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (05:44)
that we have to kind of figure out like, okay, if this is a built-in that we like assume that these pieces of like that these features or something are possible, then.

then how does that change how we build everything else? Like not everything needs a chat bot on it, but I think like the shift there is maybe like instead of adding a chat bot to all of our apps, it’s like how do we build our apps for the chat bot? Like, and we’re not trying to…

Brian Coords (06:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (06:13)
pull all these features into the things that exist. It’s like, no, the things that we’re building are now going to appear in different ways. And again, that’s where I think like the mobile change is so good for web development. It’s like, yeah, we suddenly have to do responsive styling. And then that goes beyond just like some CSS to move some divs around, but actually like rethinking that user interface and rethinking what interaction looks like. ⁓ I’m such a huge like hover effect person. love anytime a website has hover effects and I just have never

Brian Coords (06:35)
Yeah.

haha

Nik McLaughlin (06:42)
found it. I know there’s ways but like I’ve never really gotten a good mobile hover experience that I like. Stuff like that and it’s like okay this is like a little like interaction thing that we’re used to that’s now gonna look kind of different because of those sort of bigger technological changes.

Brian Coords (06:48)
Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, I was talking to somebody on a different podcast and they were, it was, it was about like WooCommerce and, and, know, the WordPress and WooCommerce, the admin UI is a little, you know, dated, like it’s been there a while. It’s, it’s tried and true, I guess is like a positive way to say it. but one of the things that changed my mindset was the MCP approach where I was like, I’m not even like, I’m doing things with my WooCommerce store without even literally

Nik McLaughlin (07:15)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (07:27)
looking at any of the user like I have no user interface. The user interface is literally just me talking to something and things are happening and it’s like such a foundational shift that it’s hard to wrap our head around but maybe you can kind of break down like if somebody is like I keep hearing MCP I keep hearing these kinds of concepts what’s your maybe like quick explanation of like what it literally is or you know what it doesn’t have be super technical but like what exactly are we talking about when we say MCP?

Nik McLaughlin (07:33)
Right.

Yeah,

yeah, I think like the the short version of like what is MCP is probably like MCP is the open standard for how LLMs can do things so LLM is maybe you know in the jargony side of things but like it’s how AI does things I bristle a lot at the terminology but

Brian Coords (08:14)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (08:18)
But yeah, it’s like you have your chatbot that people are familiar with. I was just talking to my hairstylist the other day about chat, his experience with chat GPT and how funny he interacts with that. Anyways, so like people broadly know about it is the point, right? So then to go from there to like, what is MCP? MCP is like how you can actually do things in that experience beyond just getting a, know, text in, text out response.

Brian Coords (08:31)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (08:42)
And because it’s an open standard, it’s also beyond any specific API integration that had to be built. ⁓

Brian Coords (08:49)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (08:50)
So to get the next level of that, I think the next level up explanation is that MCP enables all of the apps to interop between each other in one interface. So that’s where you get into the real magic of it is it’s embedded in your client, like your chat client that you’re talking with, that maybe has all this extra context about either what you or what project you’re working on or whatever it is.

Brian Coords (09:03)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (09:18)
trying to do and it takes that

and adds in these tools that let it do things from other services. So you can now connect that to not just a project that you’re working on, but, this thing’s hosted on GitHub and they have an MCP server and I got the, we’re both at companies that are using management software and stuff, so I had to update the ticket in Jira and they have an MCP and all this stuff and you can do all of that from a single interface. Really similar to like you were saying with Woo in the WordPress.

Brian Coords (09:43)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (09:52)
admin, you don’t really have to click around on all of the different places. You can just type out what you want and see that happen. And the MCP server, the MCP protocol really is the thing that allows that whole actual interactivity to happen between the application, whether that’s WooCommerce or any other huge list of them, and the LLM that’s deciding what tools to use and things like that.

Brian Coords (10:17)
Yeah, and I think what’s cool about it, like you were saying, like it’s a protocol that kind of now that it’s getting supported by all these different things, it kind of like abstracts it all into one spot. Like, do we think like one day we’re going to have a chat bot that’s like WordPress has its own chat in the side that you chat with? Maybe, maybe you’ll just open chat GPT and it’ll connect your WordPress. But in either case, like

If we can have an abstracted tool, then hopefully like we don’t need to build each of those use cases and sit around and wait for them. Hopefully this interactivity layer, you know, done through MCP can hopefully unlock. I’m hoping like all of those things to just show up faster. And it’s like, Claude now supports it and chatgp now supports it. And if we see other, you know, chat come out, I use Gemini a lot. It’s just going to make that kind of like transition a lot easier, but

In like practical terms, what are some of the things you’ve tried with MCP on WooCommerce and how good has it gotten for you? like, how reliable has it been for you? Like, what are some specifics?

Nik McLaughlin (11:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it’s definitely like…

I think mixed results at this point, like, but that’s also maybe because I’m pushing the edges a lot more. So then like trying to establish a solid base or something where somebody who’s like maybe more on the agency side or something where they’re like, you know, really trying to figure out how they’re to roll this out either for their own use or for their clients might be trying to really establish a core base. like, I’m getting to play off in the weeds a little more. So I don’t know if my experience is necessarily like representative of.

Brian Coords (11:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (11:48)
all of what’s possible with the tech. But yeah, I’ve definitely hit some mixed results. Some of the specifics, I mean, the basics are a lot of store management stuff, like we said, like being able to, anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do through a chat bot instead. ⁓ So I’ve hooked up local WooCommerce sites to Cursor, to VS Code.

Brian Coords (12:04)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (12:11)
The docs have a whole bunch of stuff about setting up through Claude, so that’s kind a well-worn path as well.

Yeah, so like wherever your kind of chat client lives and then within that context being able to ask about the latest orders on your site or make product changes and stuff like that, right? Or check inventory levels and doing all of that in like a natural language way where you just, just like you would ask somebody normally, you know, like you don’t have to find the right words for it. You don’t have to find the right menu for it. You can just have the thought basically.

Brian Coords (12:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (12:45)
You know verbalize the thought and then you’re kind of good and you can kind of get the the LLM does the magic of turning that into Tool calls to get all the information, right? So Yeah, it’s been a lot of a lot of those basic pieces I’ve I’ve played around mostly with like the Maybe like the implementation or like the technical side of that of like, okay Can I do this like one? Special interest of mine is with like running LLM models or

language models locally. So like not relying on a cloud provider at all, but just having my own machine that runs. And I’m doing this like on a laptop. You know, I’m not like, I don’t have a special server hiding in the back or something that has, know.

Brian Coords (13:13)
Okay.

⁓

huh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (13:26)
teraflops of GPUs or whatever sitting in it. I’m just like, I’ve got my MacBook Air. Because I’m interested in the real world use cases of if a merchant wants to interact with this tool on their site, there’s going to be some real limitations around being able to send that data off to a cloud provider or whatever. So I played around a lot with that. And that’s where I’ve definitely seen a lot of maybe more of the limitations, both on the

Brian Coords (13:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (13:51)
Technological side, as far as like what a small model that can run on my laptop is capable of right now, there’s a lot of room for improvement there and improvements are happening there. And then…

Brian Coords (13:58)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (14:03)
Also on the kind of integration layer, guess, where depending on exactly how you set that up, it can be very difficult to get running in the first place. I had a blog post about this maybe a month or two ago now, just about just walking through how I set it up. And I thought, oh yeah, this just be a quick couple line explainer. And it ended up being like, I don’t know, a thousand words or more of getting all of the pieces in place, because I realized how many

Brian Coords (14:12)
Yeah.

you

Nik McLaughlin (14:33)
assumptions

I was making about other things that I’d already had running on my machine or something that’s like, right. Well, yeah, you have to have that too. And then you have to download this model and then you have to know where to find a model in the first place. So there’s a lot of pieces to tie together. so I think the, addition to just like the model’s getting more powerful, I think the, biggest like next piece for making a lot of this like more user friendly is, and just usable in general is.

Brian Coords (14:37)
yeah yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (15:00)
making it easier to get started, like making the setup a breeze. And there’s a lot of ways to simplify that, but yeah, I think that’s gonna be a big next step for 2026, right?

Brian Coords (15:13)
I think it’s nice that it’s hard right now, because it’s also a little dangerous. Like it’s a little dangerous to connect AI to say like a live WooCommerce store or something that important, but it’s weird because normally this stuff comes to like developers first and we get to like explore it for a long time before like the, you know, the normal people are aware of a technology, but this…

Nik McLaughlin (15:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (15:35)
AI is very different. Like you said, like your hairstylist, like my wife, everybody I know, like they’re using like the consumer apps, like chat GPT and like, like they’re, they’re like not that far behind. And some of them in some ways are like almost like better at it in weird ways. Cause they’re just, they’re not as technical. it’s like, they’re almost like, it makes more sense to them. So it’s kind of weird cause it does feel like.

Nik McLaughlin (15:43)
Right.

Mmm, sure.

Brian Coords (15:56)
like, it’s so hard and stuff, but it’s like, well, maybe we need like that heavy barrier to entry until it’s like this safe, reliable thing. Because I have to assume there’s probably some amount of danger letting, you know, a non-deterministic like agent just like mess around with your stuff. Like there has to be some issues there.

Nik McLaughlin (16:11)
Yeah, right. mean,

I yeah, right like it’s built into the anything you can do in the WP admin you can do via chat bot, right? like so it’s like and and then maybe I guess like the added layer of understanding of like MCP is the layer for the

Brian Coords (16:19)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (16:28)
language model to interact with your app, not for you to interact with your app, right? So you’re talking to the LLM. The LLM then decides what tools to use, right? So you can guide it. And that’s actually part of the setup trouble right now is sometimes you have to tell it how to use the MCP server or what tool to use or what schema or something. obviously, that’s not how we want these things to work. But.

Brian Coords (16:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. Yes.

Nik McLaughlin (16:52)
by building that abstraction layer all the way to the point of just natural language, like you do open up a lot of kind of in between of, you know, where…

Problems can arise in either interpretation of what you wanted Or like just flat out just execution. That’s just like you said non-deterministic. Like you just don’t know for sure what’s gonna happen I think mcp builds a lot more determinism back into the system by like you get to the server developer gets to codify What happens when the tool gets called and set a schema and permissions and like elicitations so like how to get more information

Brian Coords (17:23)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (17:29)
before you do something or in order to carry out a task. So there’s a little more process there. It’s like the API analogy kind of carries over in that sense that you’re sort of defining an interaction.

Brian Coords (17:30)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (17:42)
a little bit more than just like, we’ll see what the, know, like just pointing the LLM at a browser and seeing what buttons it clicks is like a whole other level of who knows what’s gonna happen. So MCP at least like standardizes some of that from the developer side, but yeah, there’s definitely like, we’re still throwing an LLM in the middle of it.

Brian Coords (17:48)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I definitely have that issue maybe yesterday where I was working on something and I’m like, here’s the GitHub PR. Here’s the link to the peer. Here’s the PR ID. Like just use the tool, use the MCP to get the PR. And it just, I don’t know what it’s like some days you’re like, it’s right on it. And then some days it’s like, I don’t know how to talk to GitHub. I don’t know how to look on the, and you’re like, they’re like, maybe paste it in for me. Like, come on. But

Nik McLaughlin (18:20)
Right? Or like,

you can do this by sending this command. I’m like, what am I doing here? If this is a rapper telling me how to use my terminal, we’ve gotten off base somewhere. Yeah.

Brian Coords (18:24)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean

When I was like a freelancer and I was doing like freelance development, I hit a point where I was like a little bit too busy. And I remember I had one project where there was a lot of just like spreadsheets and it used to like, it was a lot of manual, just like clean up this spreadsheet before you do a thing. And I like went on, I don’t know, upwork or something. And I hired some person that was like maybe like temp minimum wage or something like that. And I’d always be sending instructions like here, here’s all the spreadsheets. Can you like, just do this manual work for me? Just like that. And it’s like.

to now where I’m working on a WooCommerce store and I’ll be like product export all my products as a CSV, drop it in, tell the AI exactly the tweaks that I want and then import it back in. it’s like, it’s about as good as when I used to email it to somebody that was like, you know, a college student or whatever. And it’s kind of crazy that it is like this little assistant and you’re like,

Nik McLaughlin (19:18)
Right.

Brian Coords (19:25)
Okay, do I want to give them full WordPress admin access? Do I want to give them, it’s, you’re just having the same conversation in your head of what are the boundaries and what are the like, like security controls that I’m going to put on this person, you know?

Nik McLaughlin (19:29)
Right, yeah.

Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say is like that’s a really good analogy for how to think about access and stuff like that, right? It’s like we’ve always known to think about like systems access and stuff like that with people and and I think the the challenge with like AI tools and with MCP in particular and just like agentic behavior, I guess even more generally Which is not necessarily MCP. But anyhow, is that like that becomes the trade-off right is like

Brian Coords (20:00)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (20:07)
you’re limiting the benefit that you get from this tool by telling it what it can’t do or by preventing it from accessing certain things. I don’t see that as a problem. I think that’s good that we’re able to do that and there’s still enough to gain on the other side of it. Like you said, like…

Brian Coords (20:22)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (20:28)
I don’t know like maybe you had to correct this college kids spreadsheets every once in a while and you didn’t want to give him access to everything so you still have to do some pieces manually and you still have to send the email back and forth but like It was still saving you time and it was still worth your money to have somebody doing that I think we’re gonna see the same sort of trade-offs here where maybe it’s not as completely like you know hundred percent this is all I ever do I don’t have to touch my store and AI just handles my whole store for me, but I think we’ll find the

Brian Coords (20:43)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (20:57)
where we can lean into that and the places where we lean out of that and still benefit a lot from it.

Brian Coords (21:04)
Yeah, and

the AI doesn’t disappear for a week to not answer your emails. So there’s that extra benefit too. ⁓ One of the things you were talking about, like local models, I think one thing that’s tough with e-commerce is the amount of like really, I wanna say.

Nik McLaughlin (21:08)
Right, yeah, it’s… yeah.

Brian Coords (21:20)
private data, there’s a lot of kind of, I don’t know, you have all this customer information, you have all of their order history, you’re not, not like you have like their credit card number, but you definitely have like payment information. Um, you know, there’s a lot of privacy concerns about it. Do you think that’s going to affect how, how much access we can open up to a store, you know, connecting a store to some LLM, like does a local model help mitigate that in any way or.

Nik McLaughlin (21:32)
Right.

Yeah,

well, mean, so the idea with the local model, like specifically where local is, is maybe a question right now, like of like, we’ll see where we end up with this. But the idea basically there is just that the data doesn’t go anywhere else. That the, I’m spacing on the term right now.

thing that the LLM does to give it meaning. Not embedding, what’s the other word? my God, anyhow. Inference, yes, thank you. Yeah, the inference all happens on your machine or on a server that you control, depending on, again, where exactly local ends up living. But yeah, so in that sense, the data doesn’t have to, you.

Brian Coords (22:11)
There’s like inference or, okay.

Nik McLaughlin (22:27)
You control where the data goes, I guess is what I’ll say. Like it can, it might go to a different machine or something, but you, by opening it up to opening up the MCP or just the store in general to integrate with a local model, which they can do currently, by the way. ⁓ but like that, that does give you that extra layer of control over, okay, where is my data being processed? and then, a local model that isn’t connected back to a cloud provider isn’t like sending your data.

Brian Coords (22:42)
Hmm

Nik McLaughlin (22:55)
anywhere like it’s it’s literally just doing the inference it’s reading and assigning meaning and then spitting out whatever its response is whether that’s a tool call or a language response or a big long chain of thought thing or whatever you know like it’s just doing that piece all on your machine so that’s why that’s why I think that

Brian Coords (23:00)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (23:12)
local model advancement is going to be such a huge piece of specifically like e-commerce, LLM usage. I think it’s especially in the Woo context where folks are kind of have an expectation of owning their data and owning everything already to begin with. They might be self-hosting their e-commerce store just from the outset. They definitely don’t want to then hook that up to, you know, a chat GPT that’s like maybe they’re like

Brian Coords (23:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (23:39)
I don’t know like just send sends data across the Atlantic and then you know like it’s processed on somebody else’s server and who knows what they’re Tracking in their analytics on that data, and you know there’s so many unknowns there that

Brian Coords (23:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (23:52)
I don’t know, we can get as many good promises as you want from a cloud provider. At the end of the day, we’re seeing with Google Analytics and pushback on that in the last year or two. It’s just a matter of you have to be doing things locally for it to be considered privacy conscious or secure or however you want to frame it. There’s a lot of benefits to that. The other side is that you also get like,

you also reduce that lag time, right? So there’s actually like performance benefits here too, right? So that’s why I’m kind of bullish on local models is they have benefits outside of the regulation around.

Brian Coords (24:23)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (24:30)
How the tech is used they have there’s benefits just on the purely on the technical side So the fact that both of those are pointing in the same way has me thinking that like, okay, this is gonna be a real solution the main limitation right now is really just like that the that the local the smaller models that you can run locally are Not as powerful, right? That’s it and and they’re and they’re not

Brian Coords (24:52)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (24:56)
I don’t know, they’re still getting better, I guess. It’s not like they’re plateaued at a low level. It’s like they’re just eight months behind or whatever, which in AI terms is five years or something. But they’re still progressing and there’s still progress to be made there, both in terms of…

Brian Coords (25:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (25:15)
what the models themselves are capable of. I guess there’s maybe a few factors here. What the models themselves are capable of, the sort of training and tuning we can offer around those to apply them more specifically to a task and hardware side of things, like how the systems that we have are being built to support these. I don’t wanna be quoted publicly as saying that like a AI on your machine is the software.

Brian Coords (25:32)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (25:45)
to all privacy concerns. think like Microsoft Recall is a really good example of where that’s very much not the case, right? And so I don’t want to be too like blindly optimistic about that, but I think there’s a version of that that does, you know, like keep you in control of where your data runs, doesn’t create a backup of everything that somebody, if somebody gets access to it, they have every, all that information anyways.

Brian Coords (25:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (26:12)
There’s a version of that that runs in a privacy and security minded way that I think will unlock a lot of the potential here.

Brian Coords (26:21)
Yeah. And I mean, in terms of like what a local model can do or it like a really terrible metaphor, like analogy is like when you think of when we used to have flip phones and then if somebody would have said like one day you’re going to be able to fully stream a 4k Lord of the Rings while you’re standing in line at the grocery store to your phone, like you’d been like, no, there’s no way that much data is just going to like, you know, but it, but like now that’s completely normal. And I’m sure that like, these are solvable problems that like we’re clear.

seeing the benefits but I think there is like a trade-off where

The benefit you have with like cloud stuff is number one with e-commerce, it’s a lot of information sometimes. So like I’ve done things like, hey, pull up my store and give me this information. And one, if the MCP doesn’t return, sometimes it’s like, all right, I’m just going to pull every record you have and try to figure it out. And you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. There are filter, like you can filter this query first before you do it. ⁓ but even still, it’s just a lot of information. And so do you have

Nik McLaughlin (27:00)
Yeah.

Right, right, yeah.

Brian Coords (27:20)
Are there issues with like just the sheer volume of, of context that sometimes ends up happening with MCP where you’re like, it’s just like, now this is just too much information. Like.

Nik McLaughlin (27:30)
Yeah, absolutely. mean,

I think like even

MCP itself like just the pieces of exposing the tools and how they’re used and what the input and output schemas are like Even that can eat up a lot of context, right? So I think there’s still optimization happening on that front both and like from the protocol layer like just MCP broadly like how do we approach this better but then also like in implementations of that like a lot of folks just kind of ported rest API’s in this sort of initial wave because that’s the thing that makes the most

that’s like the closest to what you’re trying to do with MCP. But the pieces there that are actually needed and how we handle like the agent discovering what tools are available and stuff, that can eat up a lot of your context window being kind of the limitation that we have now, right? Like the bottleneck there. ⁓ So just the tooling can eat up a lot of that, let alone then like you said, like…

Brian Coords (28:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (28:23)
the tool, like either the wrong tool being used or the tool being designed in a way that just like pulls a whole ton of info down and then you have to figure out like how to parse through that, like that eats up, you know, that much more both context and like processing power and all that, right? So, yeah.

Brian Coords (28:41)
Yeah, that was something

that I remember somebody asked James LaPage who does like runs the AI stuff at automatic and they asked him about that. And he had said that he thinks that’s something that the clients are gonna solve. And I did see recently that I think Claude now has like a tool search or something like where it’s kind of like, it’s gonna stop exposing, it’s not gonna expose every single tool or it’s gonna, once you have a certain amount of tools, it’s gonna like.

Nik McLaughlin (29:04)
Right. ⁓

Brian Coords (29:06)
take some of its own time to figure out the proper tools. And so it’s like, there are all these problems and they also all seem like they will be solvable eventually. But if you had to pick, if a year from now we wanted WooCommerce MCP to be a thing that people are using and enjoying, what do you think are the top priorities? And it could even be WordPress in general, because it does run on the WordPress stuff. But like,

Nik McLaughlin (29:23)
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Brian Coords (29:33)
What do you think are the top priorities that should be worked on?

Nik McLaughlin (29:36)
Ooh, yeah, give me a wish list. This is good. think, man, I think the implementation steps, like I said, are pretty high on the list of getting it, and some of this is…

like what we should be working on and just like what needs to happen in the ecosystem like more broadly, right? Like I don’t think anybody who necessarily needs to solve for this or even like at the WordPress level, like MCP clients being more like consumer friendly, right? Will be a huge part of this story, right? Like once…

Brian Coords (29:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (30:05)
once that becomes a more common thing that folks can interact with. To your point, like it’s maybe not a bad thing that we don’t just have everybody trying to run these servers on their own right now, but I think that’s gonna be a big part of it is like the client experience being better. Within the Woo and WordPress sphere, I think the setup for that is the big thing of like making it like completely dead simple to set these things up and get them running within whatever client you have no matter what.

Brian Coords (30:31)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (30:31)
and not being tied to certain implementations or certain integration patterns or something like that, but really just being able to like, ideally, guess, like flip a switch on your site and then like, you just, it’s just available, right? So I think that’s going to be a big step is like getting it to where we’re no longer, you know, copy pasting, JSON.

Brian Coords (30:52)
Yeah

Nik McLaughlin (30:53)
like

that to hook these up which is like not a huge barrier when I want to dive into some weird technical rabbit hole but like is absolutely a barrier for broad adoption. ⁓

Brian Coords (31:03)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (31:04)
So I think that’s part of it. The other piece then is both, I guess, like twofold. It’s like getting the, tailoring the tooling to be more efficient or something, right? Like I said, like with the local model use case, like I’ve been really limited by.

Brian Coords (31:14)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (31:20)
just the tooling itself by like, you know, the LLM can, or the SLM, small language model in that case, like can really only handle so much context. And so it gets slammed by, you know, maybe a couple dozen tools all at once. And then it’s sort of spent in terms of what it can really do. ⁓ So getting that fine tuned, but I think with that comes like a…

Brian Coords (31:37)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (31:42)
exploration of like the use cases and better understanding of the actual use cases here and shaping that around you know what folks are going to be trying to do with this and that one might be more down the line like I said I think there’s some

more just like of like initial barriers to overcome, I guess, before we get to that. But I think keeping that long term in mind is important as we’re setting this stuff up. It’s still like the time we want to have that in mind and not just be making it technically possible. I think we’ve kind of hit that marker of like, great, this is a thing that is possible. So we made the thing, it works. Now it’s like make it right is kind of the next step of like make it do the things in the way that we expect.

Brian Coords (32:01)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (32:24)
expect and be able to do the kind of things that we expect. So I feel like that’s more the direction that comes next. It’s a little bit more on the fine tuning, but it’s still kind of early days, I think.

Brian Coords (32:35)
Yeah, and

I’m like, I’m not the most technical person, but from what I understand the way that WordPress ended up going, it’s like, you have an MCP endpoint, but you don’t really have like an MCP server particularly. So you load this kind of local proxy thing that runs and it’s, you know, there’s a couple extra steps and work, you know, if you were Shopify, you could just throw a bunch of compute at everything. like, you just have the resources you have, you host everything. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (32:58)
Right.

It’s all on your servers. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Coords (33:03)
With WordPress where you have people on $5 a month hosting plans and all these sorts of things, I think it’s just a bigger issue in general. It’s even beyond AI, even some of the other features like the block editor and collaboration, all these things that are just like, they just require more. They just require a lot more. And it’ll be interesting to see like.

Nik McLaughlin (33:21)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (33:23)
with WordPress, it’s like there’s never one way to do something. It’s like some hosting companies will have a way to do it. we both work for hosting companies. that both are trying to figure their offer for it. And then there’s the core itself. And then there’s gonna be some people that are gonna try to launch plugins or little cloud layers and things. So it’s gonna be, I feel like it’s gonna be messy for a while before it’s clean, probably. ⁓

Nik McLaughlin (33:45)
Yeah. I

would even…

Question if it’s gonna get too clean like that Maybe it’s bad news to a lot of people But I I think like there’s value in being I was having a conversation with some folks about this at a meetup this last week There’s value in having these integration layers or these Integration abilities at different layers I guess like to being being able to kind of compose the stack in the way that makes sense for your solutions Or for you for what you need out of it, you know people are the meat about that somebody was talking about

Brian Coords (33:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (34:17)
like N8n as this like open source sort of workflow automation tool. It’s kind of a new age Zapier, right? Or something like that. That’s just like, okay, how can I get all these services to kind of piece together? And they were saying that like, well, maybe that’s the way it goes instead of MCP. And I mean, I think that’s kind of a false comparison anyways. That was the main thing that I talked to him about was like, yeah, there’s actually like, MCP is being used in that case, right? Like it’s not, they’re not, it’s not a

Brian Coords (34:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (34:44)
dichotomy or exclusive or anything like that, but also like the idea that they had of like, well, maybe I have this other tool that’s external to even my chat bot that I’m managing all of this workflow through is like, yes, there’s tons of value in still having these other layers where you can manage things, whether that’s, back to the WordPress context, whether that’s like, you know, a plugin that handles something or your host handling something or WordPress or Woo or, know, like,

Brian Coords (35:09)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (35:11)
I think there’s value in having some options there as maybe discouraging as that is.

It’s maybe a two parter that like, there’s a, there’s enough going on in AI that we don’t want there to be more options. We’re all like dying for there to be one clear answer here. So like, can stop learning all the other things for a little bit. but also like, also there’s a, I just think a lot of the discussion around it is very like totalizing or something. There’s not, that’s not the right word maybe, but, it’s very much like this is either going to completely.

Brian Coords (35:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, seriously. Changing tools every week, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (35:44)
take over everything and be the only tool that ever matters or I don’t need to think about it. And I just don’t think that that’s the case with, that’s just not how tech works at all. So I don’t think that’s gonna be the case here either. I think there’s gonna be different degrees of things that find kind of their niche for this, that, or the other. There will be some underlying pieces, like the idea of an LLM.

Brian Coords (35:49)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (36:06)
is going away or is going to diminish in its importance, maybe. But I would put MCP in a similar category where I’m like…

Brian Coords (36:08)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (36:13)
The ability to have an open standard to allow an LLM to interact with an app is not gonna go away. And everybody in the field is getting behind MCP. Even OpenAI has whatever 800 million, 900 million users, they could have built their own thing and built their own sandbox and left everybody else out of it. But them getting behind MCP and the agentic AI foundation, the open standard way of

Brian Coords (36:20)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (36:43)
doing things, it’s like, okay, this is clearly where everything’s gonna go, where everybody’s investing right now. So that’s another piece where would say I don’t think this goes away. But does it become the one tool that we use to do everything? Probably not. I think there’s lots of ways that we can build stuff.

Brian Coords (36:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, and there’ll be like lessons learned from it that might apply to other things. Like sometimes you just have to go through stuff and some protocols disappear. know, WordPress has a bunch of these like protocols like Adam and pings and all, know, all these things that are like in there that don’t stick around. And then there’s RSS that’s like stuck around forever. And it’s just the value of a, of a good, well-adopted protocol. And like, I feel like the, the other piece that’s really has to get solved here is it.

Nik McLaughlin (37:17)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (37:28)
For an MCP like WooCommerce MCP to make a lot of sense, like yes, one, can save you a lot of time. And I think that that’s somewhat valuable, but I also think there’s a lot of people, in open source where like they sometimes don’t value their time as like they’re willing to put in the time if it saves them money, you know what I Like they’re, willing to do things themselves and stuff, but there has to be some other benefit. so like there will have to be like, you know, this actually improves, you know, whether it’s like

Nik McLaughlin (37:43)
Mm. Right, right.

Brian Coords (37:55)
it leaks off into like the marketing or like other places where optimist optimizer. So like it has to be more than just, it’s a slightly faster way to do a thing. And so it’ll be interesting to see once it starts touching, like, you know, especially, mean, you know, WooCommerce, it’s never just WooCommerce. It’s WooCommerce and five other things that all have to work together, the inventory and the shipping and the, like the marketing automations and the whatever. it’s like, so it’ll be interesting to see if like,

Nik McLaughlin (38:13)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (38:21)
if there’s a way where it starts optimizing all of those things and does it because with MCP it’s like, they all just adopted this. We don’t have to worry about, go build me this integration and so on and that sort of thing. Nope.

Nik McLaughlin (38:32)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, think that’s that’s where, like woo and WordPress and like MCP kind of become a really good match for each other in that they’re both like these platforms that are enabling a lot of all these different pieces of integration to come together, to get a single thing done, right. Or to, to kind of build into a single platform. yeah, I think like the idea of like being able to use a single

Brian Coords (38:43)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (39:00)
MCP client to work on your WooCommerce site that can also in the same chat context interact with MailChimp you know activity that you need to do for your marketing or whatever right like I think those use cases are so aligned that this tech makes a lot of sense to the the Woo Merchant or developer who

Brian Coords (39:09)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (39:19)
is currently having to interact with all those services separately themselves. now can, or future state will be able to kind of have a layer over the top of that where they can interact.

with them and kind of more in one place, which is for a lot of folks that is the woo admin right now, right? Like it is like the place where all those pieces come together in a lot of ways. So I think, yeah, having a different way to interact with those is going to be a really good fit for the kinds of things that merchants are having to deal with.

Brian Coords (39:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing where all of this goes. I think maybe, well, I could keep going forever, but maybe we should wrap up and you can give me like, give everyone like the call to action of like, are you posting about any of this stuff or talking about this in certain places or where are you kind of going to like share? Cause I feel like you’re one of the people I see the most kind of like exploring the fringes.

Nik McLaughlin (39:57)
Yeah, yeah.

Alright.

Yeah,

yeah, I’ve really tried to throw myself out there this last year. Yeah, so I, let’s see, I got maybe like three places. So I’m on Twitter probably the most as far as just like posting, throwing things out there, what I’m working on, thoughts about things that are going on or whatever, right? So that’s probably the easiest. I’m on, in the WooCommerce community Slack.

Give that one a shout out. I think that’s just like a really key place to be in terms of both the community around and also interfacing with folks like yourself at Automatic who are either building these things or know the people who are. I can’t say how many times I ping you in that Slack just to talk to somebody else. Brian’s here. ⁓

Brian Coords (40:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, give me the person who knows. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (40:55)
Yeah,

yeah, Brian’s here and knows who I need to talk to, so we’ll start there. for other folks who like, you know, maybe don’t know all the ins and outs of things, it’s good place to start and to figure things out. And I’m there jabbing about whatever I’m working on as well. Yeah, I think those are the main ones. And then, know, Skyverge, company, skyverge.com, got

a shout out for us there as far as like the actual you know things I’m getting paid to build or whatever right.

Brian Coords (41:23)
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, and in the Woo Marketplace, think, right? You guys are sky-verging there too. Awesome. All right, well thanks, Nick. I really appreciate this. I hope people maybe came away with the amount of understanding that anybody can have at this stage of it, you know? And I think just like, just the optimism and like enthusiasm for like, let’s just get excited about something new, you know?

Nik McLaughlin (41:29)
Yes, yeah, yeah, we are entirely WooMarketplace ⁓

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think excitement and also like, you know, kind of navigating the way forward, figuring out like what are these pieces that are kind of coming together? I think there’s a lot to be excited about and a lot of work to be done. So, you know, that’s the invitation, I guess, is to engage in both of those. Yeah, thanks Brian.

Brian Coords (42:02)
Yeah.

Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out today,