Hey, Alex, welcome to the program.
Alex: Hey Matt, thank you for the opportunity, for the interview
So obviously AI and WordPress is super fascinating.
It's in the news and everyone's talking about it.
I, myself, struggle with really finding.
Uh, useful AI experience.
I use it for a little bit of research, a little bit of frameworking some
writing, transcribing, finding clips and stuff like that, but I don't find
it an integral part of at least the work that I do as a content publisher.
But how does.
WP turbo.dev integrate AI into the WordPress development landscape.
I can imagine that being even more intense to tackle.
Um, as a product maker yourself, like, how do I do this?
How do I get this in the hands of my customers?
How can they leverage it?
And then how can they benefit from it?
Once they, um, start to use it?
So big question, but what are the most significant benefits of this
integration for web developers?
Alex: first of all, it's, it's important to know that
WTurbo is still in its infancy.
our goal is to build a complete suite of tools for web developers and
agencies that makes it easy for them to manage their clients sites, fix basic
issues, and generate code snipets for simple tasks, and even more complex.
plugins later.
although some of our authors have been able to develop simple plugins
using the tool, it's still best for generating quick snipets to fix
basic problems or add basic features.
For example, if you want to add a setting page to your plugin quickly,
you can generate one in a few seconds.
using our AI or our specific generator, on the website.
. And then, we are going to explore more, complex, plugin generation, but it's going
to, it's going to, to be available, in the near future, but not, not right now.
but right now, the best part is that, is that we are going
to release a new version.
approximately next week, which will always have up to date knowledge of
the code and the documentation of WordPress and of, several popular
WordPress plugins, including, Elementor.
David, Gutenberg, gravity forms, and so on.
And that way, you can always rely on WP Turbo to give you the correct
code snippets for what you need
So walk us through what it's like to use WP turbo.
What kind of knowledge do I have to have?
Do I have to be a WordPress developer already and understand at least the FA
the fundamentals of WordPress development.
I'm not a developer.
I'm not an AI prompt engineer.
Do I need to be somewhere in the middle to use this?
You know, walk us through, what do you have to be a real beginner?
Is it made for beginners?
Where's it made for more advanced users?
Alex: We want WP Turbo to be accessible to as many developers
and website owners as possible.
Most of our users are actually website owners who want to quickly fix things
or add basic features to their WP site.
But, with our tool, you can ask good questions and you can
anything WordPress related.
Can I design WordPress websites with this?
Or is it strictly just WordPress development?
Alex: Right now.
We don't offer design rated generation, websites.
We have some ideas for the future, like maybe generating patterns, but,
we have to focus on our roadmap first.
So I've tried writing code with chat GPT before.
And really struggled with.
Creating anything valuable, right?
Anything that worked.
I tried to do a few things and it was okay.
And I wasn't doing anything really advanced.
How does your platform ensure that the website's being built with
AI meet a standard of, you know, WordPress, WordPress, coding standards.
Uh, good performance accessibility, SEO.
Right?
If, if code is.
Not fully optimized and slow loading, you know, impact site speed, et cetera.
So how do you sort of achieve a higher standard with WP turbo?
Alex: If you want to build a website that it's 100 percent optimized
for performance, accessibility, and SEO, definitely you need
to hire a team of web experts.
And if you try to do it yourself, as the average user, you only get to
maybe 30 percent of the way there.
When using a tool like Derivative Turbo, you can simply ask it to improve
the performance of your code or make it more accessible and SEO friendly.
And because the AI already knows the best practice in terms of performance, SEO.
accessibility and so on, it's likely that most of the time it
will follow those best practices.
And when it doesn't, you can just nudge it into that direction.
That's really important that you refined the prompt and interact with
AI in order to, to get better results.
So if you spend any time on, on Twitter or social media, there's
a lot of folks saying that AI is going to replace a bunch of jobs.
Uh, there it's been sort of.
Theory crafted that some big tech companies have let go of
staff because of AI, right.
And the efficiencies that they, that it brings to the organization.
And I think that's.
Efficiency is the key word to underline there.
I think that's where we'll see AI win out.
It's not that it, at least in the next, I don't know.
I have no idea, but in the next two to three years, I don't
think it's going to replace human thought creativity, exploration.
Discovery.
Uh, but that it is more efficient to maybe run something through AI
than it is to put humans in place.
And that might be some low-level stuff.
Might be some high level stuff.
Um, but.
Where do you see WP turbo, increasing efficiency for WordPress developers?
Alex: Our main developer uses WPTurbo all the time to generate
quick snippets, although we don't have quantifiable metrics, he seems
to have saved dozens of hours by quickly generating simple snippets
and asking questions to improve them.
it takes away the time it takes to search Google for the best way to do things
and takes out a lot of the guesswork.
We are still in the beginner stage of building our community.
so maybe one day we'll be able to do surveys and simple case studies to see
how much our tools have impacted the daily lives of developers with our tool.
But right now we don't have any data about this.
We are focused on, building the product first.
So one of the great things I think about.
Developing with AI for WordPress is you're going to onboard a whole bunch of.
Uh, new newbies.
Bring on people like me, who kind of have an idea of what they're looking for.
Kind of understand technology and I can use AI to leverage
and, and help me build code.
As great.
The bad thing is I don't know what I'm doing.
So how does WP turbo insulate.
Uh, one from insulate the developer and the greater web, the users
of their platform insulate them against security concerns.
Does.
Do you address security concerns at all through your tool?
Alex: If AI isn't a part of your development workflow, you are really
missing out on dozens of benefits.
Having an AI take a look at your code is like having a senior engineer double check
your code for errors and security issues.
We found that simply asking our AI to check your code for errors is good, is
good enough to find some basic errors.
So.
WPTO can also help you to find security issues in your code and
offer steps to mitigate those issues
Looking into the future.
How do you see AI evolving in the context of web development and WordPress and
what do you think or how do you think.
WP turbo plays a role in shaping that future.
Alex: like it or not, AI is here to stay, definitely, and it's only
going to get better every year.
At the repeatable, we want to stay ahead of the curve and offer the
best tools and features we can to the developers and website owners community
in order to work more efficiently.
The repeatable, we want to stay ahead of the curve and offer the
best tools and feature we can to do to the developer and website owners
in order to work more efficiently.
That's it.
Uh, what's new or exciting for your product in the coming months?
Anything you can share.
Alex: We are soon going to launch a new version of WPTurbo that will be
able to answer questions about anything related to WordPress development and
the most popular WordPress plugins, with up to date knowledge of the
ecosystem, as I was saying, before.
Also we are going to, to, to find a way to, to avoid many, AI, errors and
like in order to, to edit only parts of the code, because, when you ask.
The, the, the AI to, to refine the code, for example, it has to generate all the
code, from the, the start of the file.
And that's really not necessary.
And we are looking for ways to only edit some parts of the code.
And, also we are looking for ways to, take into account.
All the files that a project can manage and in order to get all the
context of the, of the plugin you are trying to generate or the team
you're trying to, to, to build in order to, to have better answers.
So, anyway, we are inviting our users.
To send, their feedback about what plugins they work with, what they would like
to us to integrate, in the repeatable.
And we do our best to add them to the repeatable a knowledge.
right now we are going to add, as I said to you before, elemental dv, Some other
page builder, like Bricks, Breakdance, some other plugins like Gravity Forms.
tell us what you need and we do our best to, to add them
to, to the repeatable AI next.
Okay.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
I was very happy to answer your questions and, I wish you
the best for the WP minutes.
Cheers.