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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack:
"Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment of my interview with Brad Williams. Brad is the partner and co-founder of Web Dev Studios. Now to hear the entire interview, check out our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit us over at thewpminute.com for details and to become a member. Thanks and we'll see you next time."
Brad Williams:
"This is a great way to test it, right? Especially the developers have it build a set a plugin with the settings page. And that was how I generally will test AI code to see what it does, because if you've done any development WordPress and plugins and setting pages, there's about 50 different ways you can do this. Right. There is like one recommended way, which is use the settings API and."
"A lot of the responses and things that would come back from ChatGPT, from Gemini, other things would be the old way. It would be either using the, you know, add settings, you know, update setting or update options. think it is functions like the direct functions that work with settings, blah, blah, blah. Rather than the settings API, which does all the escaping, all the sanitizing, does all that for you, right? Where this other method does not. So if you're not including that extra stuff, now you're, you know, potentially compromised. So test it out, give it something that you know what it should do."
"You know what the right answer is and tell it like test these things out and see if it comes back wrong. Maybe this isn't the tour. Maybe it's the prompt or the way that you set it, right? Like making sure that you're really instructive. That's the cool thing about cursor and some of these other platforms. You can kind of give it like a, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like an instruction file."
"And it's basically setting the stage for this bot so it understands what it is and how it needs to work. And it's like saying, you're a, you know, an expert level WordPress developer. You follow the WordPress coding standards linked to the standards. You follow these PHP standards linked to this, you you give it these instructions so it knows who it is and how it needs to act the standards it needs to follow. And then it really tightens up what it's doing right now. It knows I'm an expert level WordPress. I'm going to follow all these standards, right? Here's the whole documentation I can go off of, know, so it"
"It gets super sharp once you start feeding it those rules rather than just saying, code me something and chat GPT and it's like, okay, and it spits out something completely wrong. So always trust but verify, but I like to challenge it sometimes when I know what the answer should be, see what it comes back with. It's interesting."
Eric Karkovack:
"Yeah. Yeah, I've taken to running anything I generate through plugin check, which is what the official plugin repository uses to search to check against security and best practices and things like that. And I'm always amazed at how many things come out unescaped. know, so that's kind of like, you know, the process of kind of going through that and just verifying that, okay."
"Now I can look at this and say, okay, this isn't secure. I've got to fix this. Don't go straight to production, please. Just check it first, put it on a staging site, and then see what it does."
Brad Williams:
"Always. Trust me, verify, right?"
"Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. Trust, but verify, you know, make sure what it's producing. Always. Yeah. Never do it directly in product. Always dev, always staging, working local environments. You know, these systems are smart and they can learn, right? Like, so they can learn over time. They can understand your team's processes, your processes, your coding, your own coding standards, right? It doesn't just have to follow WordPress. You might have your own tweak on those standards and you just feed it all that right. And train it to be your coding assistant, your"
"You know, we all what we call the rubber duck, right? Like you have that rubber duck when I got AI, you can rubber duck with AI say something's not right here. I'm not quite sure. You know what's going on? What do you think? And it's pretty wild. It's fun, though. It's just a new way of coding. You know what I think people you honestly you need to get on board or you're to get passed at this point from from development again. It's not there to replace you. But if you're not using these tools to help accelerate what you're doing and do some more routine monotonous stuff, all your all your peers are right. So it's going to catch up to you at some point."
Eric Karkovack:
"Yeah, and you're pretty happy with the time you save, think, too. I mean, it has made my day a lot easier, I know that. So it's something that, like I said, every level should probably be digging into this deeply now."
Brad Williams:
"Yeah, yeah, I mean, we have to talk about the marketing angle of it, right? Like all the emails we get now, like it's even more and there's there's they're getting so specific, like, hey, I saw you worked on this project at that, but like it's just scraping your LinkedIn and auto like it. But they're getting smarter, right? They're getting smarter and what they say to try to get you to interact. Like, wait, how did you know that? You know, it's all coming through these AI systems, you know, and that's that they're just getting smarter because they can figure out the data and what you want to read or what you want to see."