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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Welcome back to the WP Minute today. Robby from Beaver Builder, a friend of mine. We go back decade plus when we used to be ⁓ competitors for like about five minutes. Just about five minutes. And then Robby did some wonderful things with Beaver Builder. Robby, excited to have you here.
Robby (00:19)
Hey, Matt. Thanks. I'm excited to be here.
Matt Medeiros (00:22)
Lots of folks want to know what's happening with Beaver Builder in AI stuff. I saw that you did have an email come out quite recently, probably right after, I think, pressconf, right? Or maybe right before pressconf, ⁓ talking about your efforts with AI. I want to get to that. I want to put you on the hot seat first, because I think you can take it. What happened with that other product we were building?
Robby (00:35)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (00:46)
The other one there. What was it? I thought it was a fascinating. It was like a manager add on system. Tell me about it. Assistant Pro. That's what it was, because I was thinking to myself this would tie in great with AI.
Robby (00:53)
Assistant Pro. ⁓ that's.
That's
the hot seat question. Okay, that's fair, yeah. Well, Assistant Pro is still up and running, live and well. It didn't, so let me tell you, the story, okay, the idea of the product was we had Beaver Builder, the page builder, and we wanted to create an adjacent brand that was ⁓ hosted space for page builder designs and templates. If you were building a page, the idea was you could like save it,
upload it to a cloud and then pull it down on your other sites. So you could reuse design assets and it would also make it a lot easier to work in like a staging development deployment workflow because you could be working on a page builder on your staging site and then easily sync up or down or left or right. And the reason we did it on the adjacent brand was because we thought at the time that that technology or that
know, process would work with other page builders, including Gutenberg, which was, know, or the block editor at the time was sort of, it was during that existential time, one of the other existential times that page builders have had. And we thought, well, let's build this under a separate brand. Let's make it like, you know, a beaver builder first experience, but then open it up to all the other, you know, builders and core WordPress.
So, okay, that's the backstory. Where it's been now, it's still humming along. I think if we were going to start over and do it again, we didn't get as much traction outside of our audience. We recently actually moved a lot of that functionality into Beaver Builder as a core feature. ⁓ We're calling it Beaver Builder Cloud that's powered by Assistant. But one of the hurdles was that we were asking people to install a separate plugin, the Assistant plugin.
and then set up a separate account over on Assistant Pro. There was a lot of hoops to jump through to get it all working. We've been trying to minimize those hoops. I still think it's a fantastic workflow, and a lot of people are using it, but yeah, was a hard story to tell.
Matt Medeiros (03:13)
Could have been like ⁓ recently I think in the news that I think it's the company Allbirds. I think they just got like acquired by like VC or something or some kind of like reshuffling of the paperwork of what Allbirds is and they went to like an AI company. You can still do that with a system pro. Like you could still have the chance to be like you know what, that's gonna be our AI bot moving forward if you wanted to. It'd be kind of interesting to see that. ⁓
Robby (03:19)
You
Matt Medeiros (03:37)
Obviously I want to dive in and the listeners want to dive into what's happening with Beaver Builder and AI, but I want to get your temperature around just WordPress in general. ⁓ Not to feed the machine, but man, I see ⁓ negative post after negative post about WordPress, right? And it's doom and gloom almost every other day.
My God, those articles or Facebook posts or Twitter threads go crazy. Like everyone loves a good I hate WordPress story. ⁓ Meanwhile, and this is my rant. Meanwhile, those same people are still profiting, profiting using WordPress, selling WordPress, still doing WordPress sites, but just banging this drum of like the days are done for WordPress. I won't.
go further into my sort of rant on that. But what's your temperature when you see, because I look at you as one of the level headed folks in our community. What's your take when you see those types of, you know, stances on WordPress? How does that make you feel and what's your reaction?
Robby (04:46)
not a fan of, I guess, similar to you, I think I understand that I like the term drama farming has become a thing and, you know, I guess I was gonna say for better or for worse, but it's not really for better in any way, but you know, like the social media algorithms really seem to reward that sort of controversial, ⁓ you know, that content that makes you feel strongly in some way and a lot of the times that way is like anger or frustration or...
⁓ You know posts out there, and I also see the occasional post Speaking around how like WordPress 7 has been exploring AI in a way that's been You know we haven't really seen from core before like the the pace at which they pivoted and are implementing the AI kind of infrastructure into the core software ⁓ Is impressive and it's sort of new for for core to be able to like you know pivot and act so ⁓
So, nimbly. ⁓ But yeah, those stories don't get the, you know, like hundreds of likes and dozens of replies, et cetera, et I think like zooming out, it's a really, I've been feeling like this is a super fun time to be in technology and in design and web design in particular. And a lot of the excitement I'm feeling around that is sort of adjacent to WordPress. And I think that...
as fast as WordPress is moving to kind of catch up. It's just not quite there as far as, know, vibe coding websites using codecs and Claude is super fun and all of a sudden you just have this, you know, page that's live and it's real and maybe it's pretty or maybe it's weird or funny. And that experience hasn't made it to WordPress yet, but I am excited that I think it's close and that's, you know, something we're working on trying to bring those two together as well.
Matt Medeiros (06:42)
I've been thinking about this on the way to the office today. was thinking about this question and this conversation. ⁓ WordPress and open, you and I have been around this long enough to know that you can't just chase every shiny object, especially, again, this is my opinion, but I'm really curious to see how you think about this.
Like you can't chase every shiny object in open source. I'm not trying to like frame it as like we have to have like this level of complacency with WordPress. Like we have to, we can't do what the big boys can do or like we can't have all that technology that you know a closed source, let's say like Webflow comes to mind because I know a lot of people are super up on Webflow as of like last year. ⁓ But there's like this level of
It's okay to have what we have because it is open source and we must do what we can the best that we can with what we have because there is a particular advantage of open source that these other players don't have. Sure, they might have awesome, sexy features. Sure, they might be the ones getting the billions of dollars of ⁓ infrastructure and investment and all this other stuff. But there's a feeling of open source when
When that thing fails, we're still here in the WordPress side. And it's so hard. And maybe I'm wrong for like feeling that way, but it's so hard for me to feel that way. But also look at all these other folks who are like, well, we got to compete with with this technology. We got to compete with those players. And I'm like, why? Why? We can still operate at a high level with what we have here. You're not going to get all the features you want.
I get it, but this open source ⁓ framework with air quotes that we have is very powerful that you might not be seeing. That's the way that I see this stuff. I don't know how you feel on that from like a competitive angle or do you feel like we're missing out on anything with this other closed source stuff?
Robby (08:59)
I love the open source kind of ethos. That's what drew me to WordPress. This idea of, one, okay, like the mission statement, democratized publishing. It's funny, we talk about this at conferences, how you look around the room and there's a lot more gray hair and not as many young folks around, but there was a time when we were all young and bright eyed and bushy tailed. And yeah, the WordPress, like,
Ty's publishing mission statement, that spoke to me. And this idea of building on the shoulders of giants and sharing what you've built so that the next person can come along and build on top of that. I grew up a little bit of a hippie kid and had long hair and went to music festivals. that approach to...
building and trying to have a business and create a lifestyle around something that wasn't just about, you know, shareholder returns and, you know, your monthly ARR, excuse me, annual ARR. Like that, that, that's what I loved and what drew me to WordPress in the first place. And
I think that's still alive and well in the WordPress community. I think a lot of people are feeling maybe disenfranchised or feeling like they don't have control over the bus or the train or whatever you want to call it. That has been frustrating for many, many years. As the direction changes in ways that maybe we're not all excited about, gets like the frustration grows and grows and ⁓ But still like...
Yeah, that idea that you're working on something that has some good beyond just what you're doing with WordPress or something open source for yourself and that you're able to share and kind of share and learn and then the community that is also drawn to that. ⁓ I'm still excited about it. I'm still proud to be in WordPress. I'm still looking forward to going to WordPress events. It's always fun when you see adjacent communities that...
give you that same sort of feeling inside. ⁓ OpenClaw, OpenClaw was this fantastic story around an open source project and just the rocket ship trajectory and all that. That was a super fun thing to follow and be a part of and had little reminders of that feeling we all had 20 years ago and Web 2.0 and WordPress was coming along and that sort of magic that you could work with and play with and tinker with.
Matt Medeiros (11:27)
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, there's there's something here. There's definitely a similarity between what I'm seeing with AI. You know, speaking of open claw and watching some of these technologies, I'm of the mindset that this stuff is going to get more expensive and we're already starting to see it. Right. You're starting to see it with the different, ⁓ you know,
management of your tokens, the rate limiting is the word I was looking for, like the rate limiting and spend on like Opus 4.7 versus 4.6. A lot of people are now like, I'm just gonna go 4.6. Probably just like you, I've been dabbling in much more open source models because I'm looking at this going, hey, we're gonna need open source in like five years time for AI for anyone to run this and be able to afford it because
The models are going to get pretty amazing in say five years, but they're going to be so damn expensive. ⁓ For the reason of they're going to get faster, they are going to get way better. And those companies are going to say, if you want this power, you're going to have to pay for it ⁓ to the point where you'll be considering, do I hire somebody for, let's say 100 grand to work on in the business, or do I spend 100 grand on this agent?
And the difference is, is I don't have to pay health insurance and they don't take a vacation. Right. Those will be serious things that people. But, you know, listen, as another aside, the insurance companies are going to screw this all up and you're to have to be paying insurance on your agents to to the point to the point where you're just be like, what the hell are we doing? We're back to hiring humans again. ⁓ Yeah. Liability. Right. Yes. Certainly. Liability for sure. ⁓ You know, so I think, you know, I'm looking for the.
Robby (13:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, liability.
Matt Medeiros (13:16)
the successes now early on and what's happening in open source land for AI. ⁓ Because I think we're going to need it. think open source is a necessity, not even a business plan anymore. ⁓ Like we're going to need open source in order to just survive. And I think people are going to change their tune on like what open source means in about five years. Your thoughts on the trend of open source in AI? ⁓
Robby (13:44)
You know, admittedly, I haven't tinkered with open source models all that much or local models. I have been suffering from this, you know, shared experience where the pace that everything is moving right now is so fast. And, you know, I'll go to bed one night thinking like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to do this. Like, I'm going to play with this. I haven't gotten to do this yet. I have this thing on my to-do list. And then I woke up and, ⁓
OpenAI announces their pet feature, and you can hatch a pet in codex, and you can give it a name. I was like, ⁓ there goes my day. ⁓ I haven't jumped on the Mac mini train yet. I have my old gaming rig down here with a graphics card. I know I could be playing around with some of the local models and throw it on the GPU. ⁓ That just has been one of those areas that I haven't had the time. I think that the...
Matt Medeiros (14:16)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robby (14:41)
the token demand that we're seeing right now. I've heard it put in a way that any company that is generating tokens, the demand is outpacing the supply. And the bottlenecks right now are compute. And then eventually it might be energy. The demand is just skyrocketing. again, it's wild. Another term I heard.
Matt Medeiros (15:03)
Yeah. Yeah.
Robby (15:05)
just today is like a once in a generation technology that's coming out right now and it feels like we're living through something. Something like that, know, short of like maybe the internet or like personal computing. I haven't experienced in my lifetime. So like to answer your question, yeah, I don't know. I think that like one of the areas I'm looking into that I haven't really had to before is routing. Like I've been running, so I've been running like the $20 codex a month.
subscription and then the $100 Claude and I switch off. I have my OpenClaude running through Codex. I mostly use Claude code for my coding projects. But then I've upgraded one and downgraded the other for a month. For the most part, yesterday was the night that Claude reset its weekly. So I was like, okay, let's load it up. Let's try and get as close to that 0 % usage as I can and maximize my tokens. What I'm curious to play with
you know, once that kind of subsidization, subsidization, sorry, I have baby brain. Once tokens being subsidized by VC, like once the cost starts to catch up with what we're actually paying, I'm curious to play with tools like OpenRouter or, you know, explore some of these ways to use different models for different tasks and not have your, you know, Opus 47 working on like, you know, copying files or,
just doing the kind of grunt work tasks, but I haven't gotten there yet.
Matt Medeiros (16:38)
You know, on the compute side, I started playing with some local models on a, so I have, tried out multiple computers. I have a Mac mini, which is my daily driver when I'm at my home office. And I have a, at the end of 2025, I bought a really powerful Lenovo laptop that has a 5090 graphics card in it.
Robby (17:06)
Heck
yeah.
Matt Medeiros (17:07)
64 gigs of RAM like it's made for gaming but I wanted it to test all like the all the local model stuff and a lot of the stuff with comfy UI if you ever did any kind of like image or video generation locally I really wanted to test that stuff out ⁓ but there's an app called LM studio which I think is LM studio AI or LM studio comm ⁓ one of the two you just find it it's sort of like you know it's a little app you download the app and you can run any local model inside the app the app just access your
as your interface. And I ran that on the Mac Mini, which is just the base Mac Mini 16 gigs of RAM. And I ran the same model on the Lenovo. And you can certainly see the jumps in performance, right? From this cheap $500 Mac Mini to a $3,000 laptop, it is night and day with how it performs. But then as soon as you try to do any kind of real compute intensive stuff,
even on the Lenovo, even on my powerful rig, it like slows to a crawl. And it's at that moment when I'm like, my God, we don't know. We don't realize the compute on the other end that we're that we're getting either subsidized or that we're paying for that when this thing is really ⁓ as autonomous and as powerful as it is, as it promises to be. This is where they get you because it's going to be something that you just can't run.
locally because you're just not going to have the power to do it. That's why I'm trying to look ahead to see how good are these local open source models because people are going to be able to afford it in the future and that's going to be a huge disconnect. I think we don't have to go too much further down that but I have witnessed that from like a hardware perspective and be like wow there's a big there's a big gap here that we just don't realize yet.
I do think it's interesting that WordPress is launching with 7.0 coming in two to three-ish weeks as the time that we're recording this. We'll be launching with a default connectors state. Was that a surprise to you on how they positioned AI, ⁓ their first sort of like foray into core with AI? Was that a surprise to you? Did you see it as an opportunity for Beaver Builder? ⁓ Unpack that for us.
Robby (19:31)
⁓ I wasn't surprised, but maybe that was just because I, maybe, know, especially when that announcement came out, I'm not sure if I really understood the sort of, like I have a better understanding now of the difference between the OAuth connections to your model provider versus the API approach. And I know that there was a lot of chat around, ⁓
having it be like sending people from Core WordPress to another company outside of automatic for a service or giving money away, or sending money away. I don't think that like...
Well, yeah, mean, OK, so maybe not to make it about what we're doing, but what we're doing over at Beaver Builder is, and I feel like this is kind like the more open source, like open way to do it, is like a bring your own key, bring your own connection. I mean, I don't think it would have landed well if WordPress or Automatic was to like, you know, bring AI into core, but like, hey, we're going to sell you the tokens. Like, you can get your token subscription through us. ⁓ yeah, being able to connect to your model of choice.
I think makes the most sense and it's also the most future proof in the sense that the models keep leapfrogging each other. The one that you want to use today might not be the one you want to use in the future. So yeah, no, I don't know. I guess I'm not surprised. It also feels like we're in this uncharted territory. I don't know. What do you think maybe the alternative could have been?
Matt Medeiros (21:10)
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there was an alternative. I think this is one of those moments where there really wasn't. I'll call it an out. There wasn't an out ⁓ for for WordPress or for automatic again, coming into the office today, thinking about asking you this question and. Had I been in your shoes, because God knows I would have said this if I ran Beaver Builder, I would have been like, hey man, we've all been.
WordPress has been dying for a better page building experience for years. Why didn't you put a Beaver Builder, you know, Elementor and, you know, Gutenberg like front and center when somebody logged in? Like, why not have that same opportunity? Because I saw, I see this as exactly as you said, this is the first time in 21 years or whatever it is that WordPress is at core, at a core experience saying, do you want this feature? You have to go buy this.
you have to go buy this API key. ⁓ And it's, that's the first time that you're gonna have a core experience when in order to experience something with WordPress, you gotta go buy it. And it's not from automatic, which is like to me is just like, I just sit around and I'm like, wow, this is an astonishing moment. No one's really saying anything because they probably just don't like think about it like I do. I'm like for, you and I know for 20 plus years, being in the WordPress repo, in the plugin repo,
Having those discussions of like, how do you get featured in the repo? What can go into your plugin to get monetized? Like, why can't we get this approved faster? Why can't I have a badge on my wordpress.org profile? Like, there's all of these things that you and I have seen for decades of like, we're trying to run a business here. Help us run a business here and we'll help the betterment of WordPress. Like, if you want to tax us with a marketplace fee, I'm sure you've had that discussion before.
tax us with a marketplace fee, let's just do it so that we can increase business. And this was like a moment for me, was like, wow, I can't believe out of everything that people have wanted, page builders, caching plugins, contact forms, e-commerce, the first thing we put in people's faces is this AI stuff, which is so uncharted and it's just moving so fast that I don't know what the repercussions are of this.
if this stuff doesn't work out. You know, ⁓ it's crazy, but exciting at the same time, I guess.
Robby (23:38)
Yeah, yeah, I'm an optimist. I'm always leaning into like, this is like the fun and exciting part of it and not trying to worry about, Yeah, it does sort of feel like we're grasping onto relevancy with our fingernails and just trying to hang on tight as the world, you know, spaceships off into the next universe. think.
Matt Medeiros (23:53)
Yeah.
Robby (24:03)
Yeah, think, know, like, I've been trying to like, to talk to my partner a little bit about this, she's not in technology, and ⁓ you know, she's sort of heard these rumblings of like, well, you know, is AI gonna be like, you know, are you guys still gonna have a business? it like, you know, like, what does WordPress look like in 10 years? And we are like, of at this point where, you know, like, WordPress is not going away. Like, there are going to be sites running WordPress probably into like, you know.
long after we're all gone. It seems like all these, short of a solar flare that wipes out all the technology kind of thing. There's gonna be some servers running WordPress in what, 100 years, 200 years? mean, like, 100 year domain and WordPress hosting product is out there. Yeah, it's a curious thing to think about. It's not going anywhere. Whether it becomes antiquated and obsolete, I guess, is the question. To speak to your comment of...
the model providers going into core, maybe that was an act of desperation in a sense. Maybe that is like, if that didn't happen, what does it look like?
Matt Medeiros (25:11)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, they definitely have had to do something. ⁓ I could have argued like some kind of experimental plug in. I think the biggest difference here is, I guess, for those who don't know the connectors, at least at the time of this recording, which is just a few weeks out from 7.0, they are just connectors for plugins. So theoretically, ⁓
⁓ Beaver Builder could ⁓ leverage the connectors inside of WordPress core. That way the end user of WordPress could just say, my Gemini key is placed here once and wherever I want to use my Gemini key across any of these plugins, as long as these plugins support it, the plugins can knock on the door and say, hey, Gemini key is here, use this Gemini key. That's it. That's the extent of it. So it's not like mind blowing, but it is literally the first step that that
WordPress has to do in order to enable this stuff. The more interesting part is how do they leverage ⁓ the abilities API, the abilities API to do things inside of WordPress. ⁓ So I guess I'll hand that over to you is like, what can people do with your take on AI with Beaver Builder? How are you thinking about customer has a cloud code or a customer has an API key?
What can they do with Beaver Builder and how are you thinking about those next steps when somebody enables AI in Beaver Builder?
Robby (26:41)
We're going, I guess, through a similar challenge of figuring out what we want that to look like. ⁓ The abilities API, the two approaches that we're taking that I think mirror what's going on in core right now is the MCP connector approach, where I'm running my agent of choice on my local machine, and I can connect up to my WordPress site and via this API.
⁓ for MCP integration connection, I can manipulate my site. can do all the, you know, adding posts. I can go through all my hundreds and hundreds or thousands and thousands of images that were, you know, like rescaled and resized eight different ways and identify which ones are actually being used and then finally clear that space out. Like, I could do my spring cleaning on my WordPress site that's been long overdue for decades ⁓ or then like maybe
more fun, can connect also to my analytics software and my e-commerce software. And I can do some really interesting analysis on large data sets of where real conversion is happening, what posts are maybe ⁓ low-hanging fruit in terms of, I can update this and get a little SEO boost, or more people are coming to this and converting than I thought. That stuff's exciting. But yeah, that requires maybe little bit more technical.
know how. It's interesting, okay, just a quick aside, it's interesting because like this idea of like, like someone who's not techie might not do this. But I feel like that paradigm's kind of shifting because now you have this like, you know, ultra smart assistant that can like help you go through all these things. ⁓ But anyways, back to the, yeah, back to that. So there's an MCP approach running locally, connecting to your site. And Beaver Builder AI. So we announced that we're releasing an AI.
integration and we kind of just put a teaser video out there because people were wondering and We've been talking about you know, maybe we'll do this. Maybe we won't we didn't really like say anything concrete about it until just a week or two ago ⁓ We are working on something. It is coming. It's gonna come out is like a early alpha Very very soon ⁓ our approach is we are gonna open up like an MCP ⁓ Connector in beaver builder
so that you can point your agent of choice at a Beaver Builder page or at your site running Beaver Builder. And then it can work within this guardrail of a design system to generate pages or update pages, build new content out. And then the other side of that is the in-product chat box. And that's where you need to have either your OAuth connector or your API key. that would probably be like, we're seeing this as two different people would appreciate this. like,
the key in the background or the OAuth in the background where you can just jump into a page, like say you build a site, you hand it off to your client, your client can jump in, talk to the chat bot and be like, hey, this picture's out of date, we wanna update this picture of our donut shop and update our copyright year. And that's the in-product chat box, you don't have to worry about connecting, setting up admin passwords, that kind of stuff, it's a little bit more streamlined. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (29:58)
Yeah,
yeah, the I'm interested to see.
You know, the the the challenge. Well, I'll be honest with you. So I'm interested to see the challenge that you you will have managing expectations from end users as they start to like deploy this stuff like, oh, you've given me this promise that AI is going to do all this stuff. And now you're having to sort of battle to ends. It's like, here's what you can. Here's what we've built in for abilities and Beaver Builder. And then.
You think you can do the whole world because you have you have your AI author, your API key connected to it. But there's like this fine balance of like what you can do in Beaver Builder, what you can do in WordPress and then shit you can't do so it doesn't all break. Right. And that's going to be the challenge in like I'm sure in the customer support. Have you thought about the experiences of these models and like recommending a top model? Do you see?
a world where like Beaver Builder has your own model that's great for just Beaver Builder or a trained model for Beaver Builder like experience like how do you start to break apart those different aspects?
Robby (31:21)
I hear you on the customer expectations part and I'm like, yeah, cautiously optimistic about it ⁓ because in our experience playing, really what we're trying to do is bridge the gap of what you can do locally, just using static HTML and talking to your agent about what you want ⁓ and being able to do that within the context of WordPress. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (31:24)
Yeah.
Robby (31:50)
I think one of the areas that I'm having a lot of fun learning about is setting up those guardrails or trying to break the models out of that generic box that they're trained on, all these enormous data sets. By default, we'll give you the median, the average ⁓ of what they've been trained on. get these like, purple, I guess, was the color, the default color that Tailwind launched with, or something like that.
So there's all these millions of tailwind sites out there just running the defaults and it's purple. So by default, if you ask an agent to build a website, it often comes up purple. So what we've been working on really hard, I guess, is this design system approach where you can define your brand, your colors, your typography. You set up these guardrails in place so that as you're building pages on a site,
they all feel like they're cohesive. That was something we kind of struggled with at first was just, know, ⁓ we were making these like one-off pages that looked really great, but when you were trying to generate a cohesive site, or even maybe more challenging, like working within an existing site, an existing art direction and brand, how do you like encapsulate that into something that you can give to an agent and that they can repeatably create content? ⁓ I'm excited with what we have on that front, like,
But that's kind of like, I think that's the area where if you can nail it, I think that's where it becomes practical and it kind of breaks out of this like, this is fun, I bought a domain five years ago, it's been sitting around and I just vibe coded a landing page for it finally to like, I manage 100 client sites and I need to, you know, make pages, make new designs, I need to like,
deal with the requests coming in and I need a agentic tool to assist me with that. I think that's where it becomes more outside of the kind of just fun hobbyist to more of professional tool.
Matt Medeiros (33:53)
Yeah, have you seen some of the work by I think his name is Andy or Andrew from miles miles AI. Like I know he's focused heavily on that design experience like when you're you know working with it. I did a video on it recently. You know you have four mockups. Here's the four mockups in there. You know they're great mockups. There are not what you get out of codecs when you go to codecs and say.
Robby (34:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (34:21)
build me an Astro site, you know, and it's just literally all the same, like the little pill call to action, and then, you know, H1 and then subheader and then it's just like, it's all the same. He's done a really, you know, good job. And I'm sure you all are eyeing that kind of experience as well, at least on the design front.
Robby (34:30)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think. ⁓
Yeah, kind of like, going back to like.
I always like, I love design, but I don't really consider myself as being like artistic or like talented in an artistic way. I wish I was like, and maybe I'm, you in the spectrum of it, I'm, you know, somewhere in the middle. ⁓ But like my approach to design was always like, just keep trying iterations on things until I feel like they look good. Like I feel like I have okay taste, but maybe not, you know, artistic talent. And so,
If you think of the AI models that can get you to 80%, maybe I lived in the 60 to 90 % range if I was gonna do it myself. Sometimes it was a little better than what you could do with an agent. Sometimes it wasn't. So yeah, love being able to spin up a page and have the aesthetics be at least as good most of the time as I would be able to do. I saw an interesting, I think it was a tweet from Mike over at Olly and...
he was announcing their AI integration. not to go too deep in on that, but what he said basically is like, I'm still a better designer than the computers. And I was like, heck yeah, like that's cool. We have customers that are better designers than the computers and we wanna empower them to like, know, build out their direction and their brands and their designs and then be able to like outsource the sort of grunt work of maybe building out pages.
But then we also have customers that maybe just want to go scale really quickly, do a bunch of different sites, and aren't really as passionate about the hands-on creativity. again, we're trying to tune this thing so that it will work for everyone, or at least those two kind of personas. ⁓ How it lands, guess, yeah, like I said, cautiously optimistic at this point.
Matt Medeiros (36:42)
Yeah,
it's a challenge. I see the design stuff. I think people have to always remember, if you look back through 2025 and you saw every week it was a new launch, a new model, a new thing that was just like, wow, this is getting better and better and it's getting faster and faster.
But 2026 not moving as fast anymore, right? Like a little bit of a slow down here and a little bit of confusion of like, okay, if I'm getting just a little point release of this model and this one's a little less chatty and it's just not getting the things done and we're starting to see this like, I just want to say maybe a little blip, maybe not call it a slow down, but a little blip. But I can tell you from the design front, ⁓
on let's say like image generation, you know, got pretty good in, you know, 2024, 2025. And now, like OpenAI just released their image too, you know, again, which does fantastic. I've actually always had great success with chat GPT image generation over any other, even like Nano Banana when everybody was going nuts for it.
I was still like doing really good with chat. But the issue is, it's not getting. I guess if you're looking from like a business perspective, like I want to make a YouTube thumbnail, I want to make a graphic for this announcement post. It's not ⁓ create. It's making the same thing slightly different, right? It's like a different, just a touch different, maybe a different color palette is a different font. But what I'm starting to see.
is not only am I seeing the same design from these images being produced, I'm starting to see the average person on, let's say Facebook, start to recognize it and start to call it out. In my local market, I see people, average Facebook people who are just like, ⁓ another AI-generated poster, another AI-generated ad, and the humans who are not,
analyzing this stuff like you and I, who are just passerbys, who are consuming this kind of content, are starting to point at it and go, I don't like this. Like you're not, like you know, I've never seen anyone ever comment on somebody's like flyer for an event that's happening or like an ad. Never have I seen anyone comment on design. But the AI stuff, I'm starting to see people go, you're using AI, no thank you. And that's kind of interesting to see this stuff, you know.
breaking down like that. you know, obviously it's, well, I say obviously, you assume it's going to get better, but at what cost, I guess, is the next step.
Robby (39:36)
Yes, I've heard similar ⁓ interesting thing I heard on a podcast recently. I didn't see the data to vouch for this for sure, but someone was talking about how they were testing. I think it was in the context of ads and ad copy ⁓ that image, excuse me, AI-generated imagery and copy was just, it was.
Performing like it's been on a decline like there was maybe a window there before people started to recognize that kind of a telltale signs It's like it's almost subconscious in a way to like now that we're taking in all of this AI generated content you sort of get a taste for it and you know that taste can be a little yucky At first it was like maybe kind of cool or at first didn't notice it But now yeah like the more it's being shoved down people's throats weird analogy, but ⁓ it's yeah tasting a little weird and That's showing up
I again, just the ever optimist, I'm excited that I feel like the floor is going to be raised when it comes to design, web design, flyer design. AI tools are going to bring the bar up a lot as far as, I'm sure you've had the experience. go to your favorite restaurant's website. You just want to check out the menu. You're on your phone. Maybe you're in the car. You're trying to see. And it's like, you know.
You can't find the menu button. You find the menu button, it loads up a PDF, and the PDF is all like, it's just like the experience of some of these awful websites that we've ⁓ dealt with. I feel like that era is kind of going away, where the baseline is gonna get better and better and better. But my hope is that we're not all gonna be put out of the job because the ceiling is gonna raise as well, and there's gonna be a newfound demand and a much higher value placed on genuine human creativity, the storytelling.
the artistic approach, the design. yeah, I'm excited to see over the next year and into the future what that looks like. The people or companies that are sort of breaking out of that box. It's sort of like a new type of creativity that I feel like is gonna sort of flourish. And maybe it's like AI assisted in a way.
⁓ But yeah, I don't think that all of us in the web space are gonna be put out of a job because agents are just gonna be building everyone's website. I think it's an evolution that we're getting to see.
Matt Medeiros (42:07)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. There'll be we'll see it much more at the assistant level. To me, it feels like, again, can never predict any of this stuff and can hard to predict like five, 10 years out. But it really seems like we're pretty safe for a little bit ⁓ because, yeah, I just I'm just looking at the pace of progress and ⁓
you know, a little bit of hope, a little optimism on that side to like, okay, I don't want to lose my job, but also, like just evaluating how this stuff is progressing and at what cost ⁓ is something that tells me like, okay, we're good for a little bit here, for sure. Robby, where can folks go to say thanks for doing the podcast? Where can they go to learn more about the stuff you have coming for AI and Beaver Builder? Where can they go to learn about Beaver Builder in general?
Robby (43:04)
Thanks, yeah. guess Twitter's kind of our default these days, ⁓ both personal and or on the Beaver Builder account, particularly for the AI product that we have coming out soon. If you're curious about what we're doing, ⁓ either our website or Twitter are gonna be the best place to learn about that.
Matt Medeiros (43:23)
Fantastic stuff. Beaver builder ⁓ WP beaver builder dot com. You can go there as well. Check out Beaver Builder, one of the tried and true tools for WordPress. I think you guys I've said this to you before, like do a fantastic job. And I think you know this part of the ethos part of the ingredients that make you all a great company is you're not sort of that flash in the pan. Find the latest in great. I hope this doesn't is not a.
you take this the wrong way, like you're not finding like the next shiny object and just slamming it into the product, right? There is a careful ⁓ approach that is that I really appreciate, ⁓ especially in the world of page builders, where it's just like people will leave the page builder to get that one little module that that next page builder promises. And you might not ship it day one, but you're going to ship it eventually.
and you're going to really listen to your customers. And I really appreciate ⁓ that about you and your company.
Robby (44:22)
Thanks so much, Matt. I agree with what you're saying there wholeheartedly.
Matt Medeiros (44:26)
All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to today's episode, the WP minute.com the WP minute.com slash subscribe.