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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.
August Member Meetup
===
Eric Karkovack : [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the WPMinutes August 2026 member meetup. I'm Eric Karkovack, joined by my friend Matt Medeiros, and our special guest this week is Patrick from GridPane. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick Gallagher: Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate you.
Eric Karkovack : Yeah. So, uh, we're gonna be talking about, uh, the pros and cons, the, uh, good, bad, and the ugly of, of vibe coding your own plugins, apps, uh, all that good stuff, and Patrick's got a, uh, a slide deck he's gonna show us in a minute.
But- ... before we get to that, before we get to that- Yeah ... I do wanna just thank all of our, uh, pillar sponsors, including GridPane, uh, Pressable, JetHost, WP Engine, hosting.com, 20i, and Weglot. We thank all of these great sponsors for, uh, helping us do what we do at the WPMinute, because we can't function without [00:01:00] their help.
So, thank you to Patrick, uh, for being a sponsor and for being here today. Um, what do you have for us?
Patrick Gallagher: Uh, yeah. So I, I had some ideas that I, that I wanted to share, um, but I thought it would be useful to demonstrate, um, to anybody that, uh, has potentially been living under a rock for a while, um, just how powerful all of these things are.
So, uh, let me see. Let me share my screen here. How do I do that? I've never done this. Whereby. Oh, here we go. Got it. Um, continue with screen share. Okay. There we go. So, um, so yeah. So if you're-- Okay, we can see this? Excellent. So, um, for, uh, again, just a quick little catch up, um, for anybody who hasn't been, been paying attention to these things.
This entire fourteen slide slide deck, [00:02:00] um, was one single prompt inside of Claude Design. Um, so if you've heard of Anthropic and Claude, um, you'll, you'll know that, um, that these things are getting pretty good. It's actually-- In my opinion, design is the one area that's, that's by far the weakest, um, you know, computer use capability that all of these AI systems have now.
They've gotten incredibly good at code of, you know, um, almost every programming language. Uh, and, and so I literally said, "Hey, I've got to give a presentation in thirty minutes. Um, make me a slide deck. Grab my logo from gridpain.com. Um, you know, I wanna talk about, uh, benchmarks on, you know, on artificial analysis.
Uh, wanna talk, you know, about these different topics. It's about hallucinations." Um, this guy, you know, I, I literally said, "Jeffrey, Jeffrey [00:03:00] Emanuel, um, has some pretty good stuff. He had something about what's the most accretive thing that you can add," and it literally went and found his exact post about this and made this whole slide, right?
And so, um, uh, so we can run through these things, but, but the long and short of it is, is that, um, you can get an enormous amount of stuff done very, very, um, quickly, uh, with You know, any, any one of these. Obviously, I use Claude, um, Anthropic for, for this presentation. Um, but I have accounts with Google and OpenAI and Grok, and I, I use all of them.
Um, I use all of these tools interchangeably. Um, and so certainly I can talk about what my, what my favorites for different use cases. Um, but for just a bit of background, um, and I, I think I texted you about this, Matt. Um, I actually-- I graduated from high school in nineteen ninety-eight, and I went [00:04:00] into computer science to study artificial intelligence.
Um, I just got there twenty-five years too early. Yeah. Like, none of this stuff was possible. None of this stuff even remotely existed, um, when I, when I went into school to actually start, start studying this stuff. Um, and it's really only gotten interesting, um, literally in the last two years. Um, you know, everybody's, you know, everybody knows about ChatGPT, um, and that's-- they started getting s- you know, pretty popular, I guess, in twenty two, twenty-three.
Um, but it was actually late twenty twenty-four, um, December, I, I remember the date exactly, um, that, uh, OpenAI released 01 Pro. That was the first, uh, open... Or that was the first, uh, reasoning model, AI reasoning model, um, that ever existed. And crucially, what that unlocked for all of us is before that [00:05:00] moment, before 01 Pro, you could hand an AI a question and say, "Hey, what's the answer to this?"
And it would just make stuff up, right? And, and that's literally what it's doing. Like the, like the way all of this stuff works is, um, is just a really complex, uh, uh, linear algebra equation. Um, and it's just guessing what to say next. Um, but before 01 Pro, um, it would just guess, and it wouldn't actually look at its answer, right?
And so it would just puke out an answer, and it wouldn't actually look at that answer and go, "Wait, does that even make sense? Is that even remotely accurate?" Um, and so something that my-- I've got, I've got three daughters. My, my middle kiddo, we would do-- we would hand it these, they're known as constraint satisfaction problems.
And so the most famous constraint satisfaction problem is the Einstein riddle or the zebra riddle, which, um, is basically [00:06:00] it's like, you know, Glenn doesn't live in the blue house, and he smokes Dunhills, but he doesn't like dogs, right? And there's all these constraints, and the, the punchline of the zebra riddle is, is who owns the zebra.
And so basically, you, you All of these data points of this guy smokes this brand, he drinks this thing, he lives two houses down from this guy. And so you have the colors of the houses, the, the animals, the drinks, the cigarettes that they smoke, and you have to figure out where all of these things exist, and then you have to, the-- you have to figure out who owns the zebra, right?
And so we would h- we would take-- we would hand these constraint satisfaction problems to the AI models, and they would just poke out the most ridiculous nonsense answers ever. Um, and it, and it would just be like, you know, literally the very first constraint would be, you know, Matt doesn't live in Michigan.
And it would go, "Oh, okay, great. Matt lives in Michigan." And it's like, "No, it-- we literally said Matt doesn't live in [00:07:00] Michigan." And it's like, "Oh, you're right. Yeah, he lives in Michigan." Because it wouldn't check its own answer, right? And so starting with 01 Pro, it would act said and revise what it said and keep going back to the drawing board over and over and over again.
And so I remember it was December 23rd, um, and my, you know, the new model comes out, and it was like, "Oh, okay." And I'm up in my daughter Dessa's room, and I take a picture of the Which is the constraints. And then I take a picture of the second page, which is like the, the answer key so that you can plug in, you know, who goes where.
And, and I hit enter, and seven minutes later I got the answer, right? And so it-- for the very first time, it was like, "Oh, shit!" Like, we've got something now, right? We've got something, we've got something real on our hands. And, and obviously things have advanced very, very quickly from then, um, to the degree [00:08:00] now where you can literally just say, "Hey, make me a slide, you know, make me a slide deck."
And it goes and it grabs my logo. I said that I wanted to talk about, you know, the benchmark treadmill, um, which, uh, if, if any of you have been following any of these things, this, uh, this is definitely the go-to, uh, site, um, that, that you can check out. It's artificialanalysis.ai. Um, this is a site that I go to, uh, probably five times a week easily, just to see if there's been any movement basically in this chart.
And so what these guys are doing at Artificial Analysis is they're just building more-- ever more complex, um, benchmarks for how we can actually test how good these models are relative to what we want them to accomplish. And so you can see this chart. This chart is literally less than twenty-four hours old.
Um, you've got Claude Opus Five at sixty-three. [00:09:00] And so basically what they're saying is is that, you know, based upon what they think is important, the, the state-of-the-art of the best AI right now is roughly sixty-three percent of the way to AGI, right? Like artificial general intelligence. Um, I think depending upon which metric, um, you care about, um, we're already past that.
Um, certainly if you're looking at programming, like compu-- you know, making software, um, every single model that exists right now from any lab and literally models that you could run on your own computer in your own house, um, they are better at programming than any human alive. Um, and, and you can look at people like Linus Torvalds, um, who created Linux, um, and he's like, "You know, is AI better than every programmer I know?
Mm, maybe not." But anybody that says that this is not useful is completely full of shit, right? They are fooling themselves. And [00:10:00] so the reason that I added this particular slide, it's kinda hard to, to see, but the, the highlighted bullet point here is, um, Quinn three point eight, twenty-seven billion parameters scoring fifty-two.
That's the orange line right here in the middle. Um, this is a model that For roughly, call it less than five thousand dollars in, in hardware, um, you can run this model in your own home. Okay? And, uh, and it's right there neck and neck with GPT 5.6 Luna and obviously, you know, uh, God, Opus and Fable are better than this model, but you need a whole data center to be able to run those models, right?
You need millions and millions of dollars to be able to run anything on the far left-hand side. And this model that just came out a couple of days ago, right here in the middle, you can run for five thousand bucks in your own home. Okay? And what's not actually shown on this slide, because it wouldn't, it wouldn't [00:11:00] show up, um, is 01 Pro would be somewhere over here in the twenties.
Okay? And so that model, which was literally the watershed light bulb moment for me, um, two years ago, it wouldn't even show on this chart at all. Yeah. Um, and you can now run a model that's materially better than that on consumer hardware, right? And so this is something that I think that certainly every business should know about.
Um, that not only is there enormous capability out there, but you don't have to give your data to Google. You don't have to give your data to OpenAI. You don't have to give your data to Anthropic. Um, and you shouldn't. Yeah. Like, this is another thing that people aren't quite figuring out is that, um, we are the product at this point, just like with Facebook, just like with anything else.
Um, arguably- It's the same
Eric Karkovack : cycle, isn't it?
Patrick Gallagher: E-e-exactly. Like, like I shouldn't be paying two hundred dollars a seat for all of my employees. They should be paying me two hundred dollars. They should be [00:12:00] paying me two thousand dollars a seat because I have very intelligent people who know their, their knowled- their, their, um, their space very, very well.
Um, and every prompt, every iteration of things that we feed into the models, it makes these models better, right? Um, and, and this is true across every industry. My wife's a physician. There's a company called OpenEvidence, I think, and their entire business model is it's free for the doctors to use, and there's advertisers that pay to, to show up.
But really, you know, my wife should be paid thousands of dollars a month for just the literal questions that she's asking, you know, because she ha- she has what, what I consider to be the most important, uh, intelligence, which is actual intelligence, right? Everybody's hyped out of their minds about AI, and it's like, at the end of the day, I can tell you for a fact, no matter how good these models are, um, they are nowhere near as [00:13:00] good as having access to actual intelligence.
Um, to be able to talk to people that have actually built things, people that understand things, people that are scientists, doc- Whatever, you name it. Um, that's the-- that's what you really wanna focus on, is getting yourself around, um, actual intelligence if you can. You know, if you're lucky, um, you'll, you'll be able to connect with people who, who deeply understand a space, um, because they're gonna be the ones that actually, um, really create the next unlocks, right?
And the most intelligent people that I know are using AI, and every single one of them is using it slightly differently. Um, they're, they're down a different rabbit hole, and so, um, you wanna surround yourself with as much of that as, as possible. Um, there, there's easy ways to do that. You can literally just go follow guys like Jeffrey Emanuel, uh, on X, right?
So, um, I think that the m-- the highest leverage thing that I'm doing that's sort of [00:14:00] me pissing away time is, is literally just trying to find the people that are doing things on the cutting edge in whatever it is that's interesting to me, um, and just follow them and see what they're doing, right? And so this one single prompt, what's the single smartest and most radically innovative and creative and useful and compelling addition you can make to add to the plan at this point?
This is a really good prompt, right? This is just one little box that you can check to add a little bit more flavor to anything that you're working on, right? Um, and so I highly recommend that. Uh, specifically to WordPress, this is, this is kind of scary. So forty-three percent of the internet runs on WordPress.
Um, very, very little of all of the code that makes up WordPress is actually part of the training corpus that's in all of these large language models. Um, and if you want, I can tell you how I know this to be a fact. Um, but it turn, but it turns out that, that, [00:15:00] um, if you go to Claude or you go to any one of these models and you say, "Hey, make me a website," you go to, you go to Replit or, um, Lovable and you say, "Make me a website," zero percent of the time they will start with WordPress.
They do not start with WordPress. They start with Next.js. They start with React. They start with, they start with things that are not PHP, yeah? Um, and, and this is sort of good, sort of bad. Like, um, I think-- I mean, actually, what, what's you guys' sense on, on this? Like, y-you probably talk to a lot more WordPress product owners than me.
Um, how, how deep down the rabbit hole would you say a lot of them have gone in this context?
Eric Karkovack : That's a good one. You know, I, I have never thought of it that way, but I also didn't assume that it would use WordPress unless I specifically asked. Um, you know, I-- maybe, I don't know, Matt, what do you, what you think, but maybe it's, it's the dependencies of WordPress.
[00:16:00] Um, you know, if you're using Next.js or something like that, you're just kind of using that one package, right? And, and you're not- Yeah.
Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I, I'd assume the same thing, the dependencies. If these things are just learning by pattern matching, and it's just so much easier for the, for the system to learn, you know, TypeScript in a single file versus everything that WordPress needs, you know, to manage it, um, back front and back end, um, and a database layer, then I assume the training is just like, "Nah, we're not gonna use all that stuff."
Give us something that's just way easier, and it just went- Yeah ... the easier path.
Patrick Gallagher: Yeah, yeah. So I think another part of it, um, and I actually literally just saw this last night. So, so I'm using Factory.ai, um, Factory Droid. They have a, they have a function called Missions, um, which I can actually check it right now.
I have a mission that's been running for thirty-four hours and ten minutes [00:17:00] continuously. Um, and I mean, I, I've spent probably two hundred dollars in tokens in the last thirty-six hours on that one project. Yeah. Um, so it's very impressive. It's very interesting. But I made a mistake last night, uh, and I switched the primary, uh, orchestrator model.
Um, so basically the way Factory Droid is doing all its stuff is you have an orchestrator that's queuing off all these workers to go and do hunt down little, little things, yeah. Well, I switched the, the orchestrator to Kimi K3, which is the current most powerful open source, um, large language model. Uh, it's created by, I think the company's called Moonshot.
It's a, it's a Chinese company. Um, uh, if you, if you haven't been paying attention to this, there's, there's like four or five Chinese companies that are all of them at the bleeding edge of, um, most impressive large language models, and they're all open source. Um, and so you can literally [00:18:00] just download Kimi K3.
You know, you just need a hundred thousand dollars worth of hardware to even make it work at all, right? Um, and even then, it's very, very slow. But I switched it to that model, and then I went and, you know- ever, and I came back, and it's thinking and cranking and cranking for like three hours, and I'm just tracing through all of the thought, like the, the reasoning, you know, of, "Yeah, and then I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do this."
And then it's going, "But wait, I need to think about-- I need to think more deeply about this, and then I'll, and then I'll write the plan," right? And so I just kept seeing thousands of versions of, "And then I'll write the plan, and then I'll write the plan," and it just kept second-guessing itself and just chewing up through all my money, right?
And, um, and so part of, part of what it, what I realized is that it's just like it's trained
What do we [00:19:00] With people's shared public thoughts, right? And what's in all of that training? It's a lot of people second-guessing themselves. It's just an enormous amount of people kind of playing house, right? And, um, and I think that, that, uh, it's clearly in, in these models, right? And it's like so, so one of the things that, um, that I think is, uh, really scary, that's still true, so you can get artificial analysis also.
This is the artificial analysis omniscience hallucination rate, okay? And so these are all of the most impressive models on the face of the planet, and this is the rate at which they hallucinate an answer, okay? And you'll notice this, all these black bars over here, these are all of the OpenAI, uh, frontier models right now.
GPT 5.6, uh, Sol is right here [00:20:00] at ninety-two percent, okay? This is the most impressive model, arguably of the front runners of the Coke and Pepsi of Anthropic and, and OpenAI. This is their most impressive model, and if you tell it, "If you don't know the answer, do not answer," ninety-two percent of the time it'll go, "Okay, great.
Here's the answer." And it'll just spit out a guess, right? Like, it knows that it's not supposed to do that, and it still does it anyway. And the reason it does that is because it wants to be helpful, and because it's told, "You're a helpful helper," right? So, um, like it, it wasn't told to play Jeopardy, right?
It wasn't told, "You're gambling with your m- with, with your own money here, right? So don't guess. Don't ring in and say the answer is forty-two if you don't know that the answer is forty-two," right? And it's like the best one are [00:21:00] still... Yeah, Command A is fourteen percent, right? And, um, let's see. There's Claude.
There's that model that I was discussing earlier, Quinn three point eight, twenty-seven billion. Thirty percent of the time, it'll still guess incorrectly even when you tell it not to. Yeah. And so this is why you have these things because, um, a non-trivial amount of the time it's just making shit up, right?
And, and even when you tell it like, "Hey, don't guess. Make sure you know the answer," it'll go, "Yep, great. Uh, thirty percent of the time I'm still just going to confidently make things up," right? And unfortunately, this is, this is not just an AI problem. This is a human problem as well, right? Like, we all forget exactly how things go.
We all, you know, we all are like, "Yeah, I think it's that," right? I-- We confidently guess at stuff. I read this somewhere, and it's like, well, what... Yeah, okay, and then [00:22:00] what? Right? And so, um, I think that there's just this very, uh, very scary reality that we're still forced with, um, forced to deal with, which is at the end of the day, you still want to have somebody to point your finger at, and so you can't just blindly, you know, turn your life over to these things.
Yeah. Um, and so I think that having a very strong foundation in understanding just even the fundamentals of computer science, um, this is, this is kind of required, right? In order to, um, in order to not shoot your foot off. Um, and so I think kinda back to the original, like, why does it not pick WordPress?
It's like, because there's so many question marks around what WordPress is, right? A-and there's an enormous amount of the internet that says WordPress is dumb, right? Like, don't-- WordPress is old. W-like, like I've talked to, I've talked to people at [00:23:00] companies that they're, you know, they've raised tens of mi- tens of millions of dollars, and they're working on some cool database thing, and I'll tell 'em, "Oh, yeah, well, I, you know, at GridPane we're doing XYZ and, and, you know, we help-- we've got a hundred and fifty thousand sites on WordPress."
And they're like, "Wait, WordPress is still a thing? Like I d- I th- I didn't realize that it was still a thing." Right? And it's like these are intelligent people who are, are building software, and they have no idea that forty-three percent of the internet, uh, let's say it's diminished, and it's gone down to forty percent of the internet.
They have-- You know, there's a lot of people out there that are like, "No, WordPress is old. It's dead. Nobody does that. Nobody does that anymore." Yeah. Um, and it's like, no, there's a lot of people that are, that are still doing this, you know? Um- So yeah, I don't, I don't know. Let's see. Uh, what are some of the other slides?
Yeah, so this is kind of funny. Um, there was a [00:24:00] point last year, it, it was the end of last year where it's really started to get impressive for me, um, where I messaged my co-founder and I said, "Hey, um, you know that problem that we have?" Well, I just, I just prompted, I think it was Sonnet 3.7. Um, it was a new Anthropic model at the time, and I, I had something where I needed like a very specific calculator, effectively, like a fancy calculator.
And um, and I prompted it, and it got it exactly right the very first time. And I said to my co-founder, "I don't know whether to save the prompt or the code or neither." Right? Because I knew that the models were gonna get so much better from there that it's like, what's the point? Right? Like, what's the point in saving the prompt?
Because future versions of all of this stuff, it's like, will you even have to say the prompt out loud, right? Or will you just have a brain computer that's just going, "Well, [00:25:00] Patrick's interested in that," and will go and calculate what it is that Patrick's gonna wanna talk about an hour from now, right? And it's like I get that an idea like that seems like a sci-fi future that won't exist, and it's like, mm, they're already doing this, right?
They're, um... What's the, what's the company? Elon's 16th company or whatever. Um- Yeah. Yeah. Um, what is it? Neuro-
Eric Karkovack : I wanna call it Mind Eraser, but it's not Mind Eraser.
Patrick Gallagher: Yeah. Ne- Neuro
Where you can say, thousand dollars and have a computer implanted in my brain, and some people will say yes and some people will say no, right?
Eric Karkovack : Yes. I mean, it, it's interesting when, when you look at some of these statistics, I mean, that directly flows into what we're doing when we're building stuff, right? I mean, I, I'm currently working on a plugin for myself that I've been using Claude for and, and you know, I-- one of my [00:26:00] points about it was that I can get a working prototype in five minutes, but to actually make it usable, to make it, uh, as detail-oriented as it needs to be for other people to wanna use it, you know, it's going to take time and you're going to have to, to, um, also understand that the methods that these models use may not always be the best method.
Patrick Gallagher: Um- Mm-hmm ...
Eric Karkovack : there are certain things, like even with W- WordPress, you can tell it, you know, "Well, here are the security guidelines. Use those guidelines," and sometimes it'll use them, sometimes it won't. How, how have you kind of navigated that in just sort of verifying what the model's doing and so that it's something that you know you can safely use and, and maybe have other people use?
Patrick Gallagher: Yeah. So, um, so s- very good question. So the, the short answer to that is, um, the, the-- or the, the answer that's most [00:27:00] useful to everyone, I would say, is you should have two or three or four paid accounts with all the different providers, all the different models, yeah? And what you wanna be doing is you wanna be basically red teaming.
Whatever code you create, you want, you know-- Let's say you build it in Anthropic and Claude, you build version one inside of Claude, you then would wanna have OpenAI 5.6, GPT 5.6 Sol basically sanity checking that code, right? And then you could have Grok 4.6 also, you know, um, red teaming that code and basically creating iterations, um, and refining and refining and refining.
Um, but then, you know, unfortunately, the, um, the, the sad fact at the end of the day is it still just comes back to, um, you need to have a human being in the loop [00:28:00] that actually knows whether or not This is shit, right? Whether this is brilliant or not, yeah? Yeah. Um, and, and, um, so a, a hyper-specific example of this is I've been working on something for about the last 18 months that's way off in the weeds, um, that I, I don't actually care sharing it.
Yeah, so, so if you are a hosting company, for example, and you have really big WordPress websites that have millions of orders, um, in the database, and you need to move that website from point A to point B, one of the things that you might end up doing is, um, a search and replace in the database to change the URL.
Okay?
Eric Karkovack : Sure.
Patrick Gallagher: Very straightforward. Yeah? Um, most people just use a plugin. Some people use WP-CLI. Yeah? Um, [00:29:00] and, you know, some, some people just use the tool right within their hosting platform, right? Um, but what I've been working on, uh, again for about 18 months, is I just keep taking the same work that I started after 01pro.
It was actually 01pro was the first one that was able to advance this idea for me. Um, that version of that code that I built in December of 2024, every new model release, I have it test that code and make it better, and make it better, and make it better. And about three months ago, I finally handed it off to my CTO, and he then made it an order of magnitude better than what I had made because he had ideas around what we could do with, with making it better, right?
And, and ultimately, like, I had gotten the code so good that it was like I, I was convinced there was no, no more room to improve it, right? And I had taken something that in a very large database, [00:30:00] a, a search and replace could take 24 hours, literally 24 hours. And you don't even know if it's working, right?
Like, you could be 23 hours and 59 minutes in and not know how far along you are, right? Not know that you're even-- that you're that close to the diamond in the mine, right? And we took this 24-hour task and, um, and I took it down to about an hour, and then he took it down to 10 minutes, and then I had an idea that took it to 10 seconds And so now we've taken this work that's real, like it's a real problem.
You can't-- If you go to any host anywhere, they'll go, "Oh, shit, I'll see you in twenty-four hours. That's how long that's gonna take." And now we've compressed it down into literal seconds, like real time. And so I guess the, the long, long story long answer to your question is, um, for stuff that's really important, at the end of the day, you need to have an actual intelligent, actual [00:31:00] intelligent human being in the loop.
Um, and then you still need Three different versions of the AI, right? And so it's like the way that my co-founder and I work together now is thankfully for us, this, um, he's-- he lives in China, so he's always twelve hours off from me. He's off thirteen hours when we're doing daylight savings time 'cause they don't do daylight savings time.
Yeah. So every day, um, when I'm getting ready to go to bed, he's getting up and vice versa, right? And so I'll hand him what it is that me and my clankers have been working on that day, and then he and his clankers work on it, and they hand it-- and we hand it back and forth, right? Um, and so we're using at minimum always two different models that are sort of sanity checking each other.
And then we're, we're still having to jump in though and go, "Wait, stop Kimi K three. Stop second-guessing yourself. Stop doom scrolling," right? Stop going, "And then I'll make the plan, and then I'll make the plan, and then I'll make the plan," right? [00:32:00] Um, and, um, and so yeah, like the, uh, what's the, what's the meme?
It's like the astronaut's pointing the gun at the other astronaut, right? And it's like, it's always been that way. Um, I think, I think at the end of the day, the reason that I'm not concerned about AI taking my job is at the end of the day, the reason that a company will pay me a lot of money to host their WooCommerce site is because we will be the last astronaut at, at the end of the line that has a gun pointed at his head.
And it's like, yeah, we'll-- we will be responsible, right? If something breaks, we will go, "Okay, this is what broke and this is why." Now we may be fully assisted, and we are fully assisted by AI models, right? But it's like I have a head of engineering that lives in Dallas, and I have a CTO that lives in Wuxi, China, and I have another guy in another place and, you know, and I have access to other people where I can go, "Yeah, but why?"
And then [00:33:00] understand it and explain and, and make our own internal models better, right? Um, and so there is no, there is no, um, perfect answer. And, and, and it was a real light bulb for me last night thinking about like, um, at the end of the day, nobody is going out on the internet. Like, I think that people are going out on the internet and writing what they, what they feel, right?
And they're, and they're second-guessing themselves publicly. But I think that there's a lot of people who run podcasts or run companies or build, build things or write books or get on stage and perform in front of people where they're petrified to get on that stage. And, and if you-- if they had to write their thoughts out publicly, they would go, "I don't know what I'm gonna do," right?
Like, "I, I might screw up. I don't know if I can hit that high note," right? But they go on stage anyway Right? And the, and there's not a lot of [00:34:00] training data out there for that, right? There's not a lot of people who s- who, who are writing about like, "Yeah, I was terrified every minute of every day, but I still just ate another b- bowl of glass," right?
"I still just decided to press record. I still decided to get on this podcast with this totally thrown together slide deck that I had no earthly reason to ever present," right? And, and who knows if anyone will ever see it and if anybody cares. And it's like, but yeah, we're still doing it anyway, right?
Eric Karkovack : Absolutely. Well, I think it's interesting you talk about the human factor. I mean, because that, that is still important, right? I mean, you-- we need to have humans still guiding the ship. I mean, it's like, to me it, it's kind of like being the general of an army or something. You still have to have somebody that knows what they're doing at the top to, to make sure things go in the right direction and to kind [00:35:00] of, uh, have that critical thinking, right?
'Cause AI is not at a point where it's gonna do it for us, and especially if we're making products, if we're expecting other people to use what we're building, you know, there has to be some level of expertise and a, a conscience about it.
Patrick Gallagher: Mm-hmm. Yeah. A-a hundred percent. I mean, it's like, like the thing-- Like there's a, there's this cliché in, in, um, in venture investing in particular, in, in VC-backed businesses that, you know, ideas are shit, right?
Execution is everything. Ideas are shit, execution is everything. And, um, and every venture capitalist everywhere has, has muttered that phrase, right? And it's like, well, now you can farm a lot of execution off, like an enormous amount of execution. And so you could make the argument that now ideas are really important, right?
And it's like we could build the, the most amazing [00:36:00] combination Bose wave radio, uh, freestanding urinal umbrella, right? We could make that. But who would want it, right? And like why-- Like who would actually say like, "Yeah, I bought the combination Bose wave radio, you know, catheter thing." It's like no, no one wants that, right?
And so you still have to, you still have to understand like what keeps people awake at night, basically. Like I think that that's what great products actually solve, you know? Like making the software, making the boxes appear, and the boxes get checked, making those things is easier now than it ever was.
But, um, like that thing that I described, that database, um, search replace tool, it's only important to like maybe five hundred people on the planet. Like it really-- Like the reason that it doesn't matter to ninety-nine percent of people that are building WordPress websites is [00:37:00] because their database is so small that it doesn't matter, right?
You can do the search and replace through WP-CLI and it'll be done in two minutes, right? And so like who cares if it's, if it, it, you know, if it gets done in a, in a minute versus three seconds, who's signing up? Nobody. Nobody cares, right? But it's like if you're building and managing and maintaining WooCommerce websites that have billions of dollars transactions and history in them, not only does it matter, but it's really important that it's correct, right?
It's not good enough that it's just super fast. It's verifiably correct. And, and we actually literally found ourselves in a place with that specific tool that none of the other tools that exist, we, um, none of them do it well enough for us to benchmark against it. So like, if you use WP-CLI Does it wrong in like all these weird [00:38:00] edge case ways.
So like, if you, if you compared what our output was versus the right one, WP-CLI, twenty-four hours later, WP-CLI would have it wrong. And then you'd go, "Well, you didn't do it right." And it's like, "No, actually, actually, WP-CLI does it wrong, you know, in this very specific way." And it misses when you have escaped URLs encased with, you know, sh- you know, serialized strings encased within, encased within, encased within, you know?
And so, um, so I mean, I think at the, again, at the end of the day, it just really comes down to who, who do you serve, right? What do they need? And do-- are they willing to pay, right? Like, are they willing to actually part with their money in order to get the thing that, that you're going to give them, you know?
And I think all the fear around, um, "Oh, AI is gonna take my job," or like y- you know, we see these collapses of, um, you know, utility plugins in particular. U-utility plugins, the demand for utility [00:39:00] plugins is going down. It's like, well, mmm, yes, because five years ago, there were literally hundreds of thousands of people that they didn't know how to solve the thing that they wanted, and so they went and they looked in the plugin directory, and they found one little thing where it's like, "Oh, if I check this box, then it'll do this thing," right?
And it's like, so now if you are the, you know, nth edge case on, on an add-on, on an add-on for Gravity Forms, well, mmm, I don't need that anymore, 'cause I can just tell Claude, "Hey, can you make my Gravity Forms do that thing?" But things like Gravity Forms are still going to exist, and they're still going to be very important because I'm not gonna go, "Wait, what are we, what are we doing?"
We, we're, we're gambling our whole business on something that somebody that I've never met vibe coded in five minutes versus somebody who built a company to millions or tens of millions in revenue, and they have hundreds of thousands or millions of [00:40:00] customers all across the globe. And all of those people every single day are going, "Hey, wait, that's broken."
And then somebody picks it up and fixes it and makes it better, right? And provides support. Um, yeah, I'm not gonna gamble my business on, on those question marks, on the, on the, on, you know, this, this chart right here, which is, you know, even if I'm, even if I'm doing everything right, you're saying that there's a twenty or thirty percent chance that it's completely wrong, and you told me to, to bet my life on it anyway, you know?
Um, and then I'm sure you guys have seen this, like you take it to the next level, right? Where what's, what's the fundamental-- wha-what's the biggest reason that one-
Back and forth between... It's-- No, it's that, it's that there right here is 'cause that plugin over there is doing it wrong, right? And it's like eventually somebody has [00:41:00] to be that last astronaut and go, "Okay, it was, it was my fault. I'm sorry. Here's how I fixed it. Here's how we're gonna make it so that this doesn't happen again in the future."
Right? And the closer I think you can get to being that for whoever you serve, that, um, that will always have value, I think. Like I can't-- At the end of the day, I can't see somebody s- um, saying, "No, I'll just, I'll just gamble it all on AI. I'll just gamble every aspect of my life, my health, my wealth, my business, my sanity.
I'll just gamble it on, on this chart right here." Like no, you're gonna-- you're going to want people that are using these tools, but they're also going, "Yeah, this is our responsibility. Like we will take responsibility for, for this thing." Um, and so I think that, I think that while it, it will potentially get harder for people to make a narrow [00:42:00] plugin that, that has value in that way, I think it's, I think it's a lot easier to, to think of yourself
Problem set of a particular group of people, right? And, and then, you know, just lean into that heavily where, where it's like, "Oh, I serve golf course superintendents," right? This seems like a narrow segment. This seems like this couldn't possibly be a, a big business. I can name two different businesses that are doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually, and all they do is literally just serve golf course superintendents, right?
Like I can't name a single golf course superintendent, but there's tens of thousands of them in the United States. There's tens of thousands of them in Europe, in Australia, right? And it's like that narrow, tiny little segment that nobody thinks about is, is a multi-hundred million or billion dollar vertical
Eric Karkovack : Matt, did you have, uh, something you wanted to [00:43:00] say?
Matt Medeiros: Yeah. On the, um, and we'll y- we'll wrap this up, uh, and then we'll just get any questions for folks that are in the audience. But, um, the thought of the AI training coming from people second-guessing themselves, I, I'm wondering also, 'cause I had always thought about it like, oh, when it's training, it's training it from the technical level.
I hadn't, I mean, I knew that it was, but I hadn't really thought about it in the fact that people could be criticizing WordPress, therefore the AI model is saying, "We'll never use WordPress," because people are either criticizing or second-guessing it, versus just like what you and I said, Eric, not to throw you into the same thought process as me, but just from like a strict dependency issue.
Mm-hmm. Um, of just like, "Okay, I just need this code," versus, "I just need this code, and by the way, thousands of people have said WordPress [00:44:00] sucks." Yeah. So therefore, therefore the model says, "Ah, we'll, we'll probably not, I'll probably not use this." But curious, h-how, how has... A-and with that in mind, like how has that played out for, for GridPane or your take on people wanting to use WordPress these days?
B- you know, people, pe-people are just never happy, and this is just like an internet thing. Sure. But people are just never happy with, like the progress of, of WordPress, no matter what happens. I see so little positive sentiment around WordPress, and I don't know- Mm-hmm ... if I'm just living in my own bubble because I am a WordPress podcast publisher.
Patrick Gallagher: Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros: You know? But, uh, the Studio 2.0 thing, I just put a video out the other day about Studio 2.0, and you can now build it agentically, and it's, it's like having Claude, a, a, like a Claude desktop but for WordPress. It's how I see it. Mm-hmm. I posted it in Dynamic WordPress Facebook group, [00:45:00] and people are like, "This still sucks.
This is still slow." Like, it's still... And I was like, "Eh, wh-when is anybody ever happy about anything that comes out?" And know that this is like beta version and it's gonna get better, just like the models on this chart used to- Yeah ... w-we used to hate the words that ChatGPT would create and the images that ChatGPT would create, and now people are just like, "Yeah, just give it to me.
Let's go." It's, it's fine. Like now it- Yeah ... it's good now. Don't even think about it anyway. Prompt engineering, we don't even think about it anymore. We just go and take it. So anyway-
Patrick Gallagher: Correct ...
Matt Medeiros: the, the point, uh, the question I have is like how have you seen the, this spite against WordPress, uh, affect either your business or your outlook on, on WordPress as a whole?
Patrick Gallagher: Yeah. So, so, uh, I guess the, the short version, I would say, and sort of going back to like why would the AI not pick this, right? From a [00:46:00] pure Like just mathematical, you know, strictness, computer science standpoint, um, WordPress is not a good idea for a lot of things, okay? Like, like when, when you-- if you have a lemonade we-website, right?
You have a lemonade stand website. It's a mom-and-pop brochure site. It changes almost never, right? WordPress is not the right answer. It just isn't, okay? And so, um, I do think that there is going to be-- it's har-- we're already seeing it. It, it is going to be easy, um, for people to choose to not use WordPress anymore, right?
But every single day, I also see scenarios where somebody vibe codes the lemonade stand website or the quilting website for Nana, right? And then Nana comes back with eighteen questions about, "Well, how do I do this, and how do I do this, and how do I do this?" And then they go, "Well, shit, I should probably actually [00:47:00] vibe code this back into WordPress because then I can point her to YouTube, and there's eighteen million videos on YouTube how to make the..."
Right? And so, um, certainly there are people who would say, you know, "WordPress sucks." It, it-- Yeah, doesn't matter what you push out. It's not fast enough. It's not good enough. It's not agentic enough. Like everybody, everybody has their complaints, right? And, uh, I was actually talking to Matt Cromwell about an hour ago, and he said, "Hey to you, Matt."
And then also he wanted me to make sure that you knew that you suck. He said, "Hey, make sure that Matt knows that he sucks." But he said hi. Um, and we were talking about just like everybody has this negative vibe, right? And it's like, I think what people need to do is just surround themselves with people who are actually not saying those things, not doing those things, right?
It's like if when I talk to the people that I know that have successful businesses, they're [00:48:00] very, very busy, right? And, um, and they're in WordPress, right? And it's working. And I can assure you, there are literally millions of dollars that are going to be transacted today on websites that are on WordPress and WooCommerce, and they're running on Good Paying, and they're happily paying me more than they paid me last month, right?
Because number goes up and to the right . Yeah. But I think that, I think that the, the majority of people on the internet commenting on the internet think about what that person is doing, right? They're not-- They don't run a podcast. They don't own a business. They don't have a team of employees. They don't, they don't have, um, the same inputs and outputs that, that we do, right?
Um, and so it's very, very easy to just, you know, sit in a, sit in a glass house and chuck rocks. Um- [00:49:00] Actually get out there and get punched in the teeth and pick yourself up and keep going, right? And, and nobody has time that's really busy and is winning to run over to X and go, "Hey, by the way, I'm winning," right?
Yeah. And, and even if you did, nobody wants to hear that.
That's
the- Nobody wants to
Matt Medeiros: hear that ... level of business I wanna get to though, Patrick. I just wanna s- sit on Twitter all day and be like, "I'm winning here, I'm winning there."
Patrick Gallagher: Right. Right. No, but, but the, the thing about it, it's like nobody would want to hear, you know, Kobe- Yeah
or, or, or, or, or Michael Jordan going, you know, he's dunking on everybody, and then runs over to, you know, whatever it would've been then, t- Myspace. He runs over to Myspace and goes, "Hey, I'm dunking on everybody." Yeah. It's like he's too busy dunking on everybody, you know? Right. And, and, and, and it's bad enough that he's dunking on everybody.
Nobody wants to hear him rub it in, [00:50:00] right? No one wants their faces rubbed in it. And so, um, I think that that's why I think that, like, in-person events are going to become more important, not less important, you know? Like, I think it's, I think it's gonna be more important that you're putting yourself in the right room with the right people, talking about the things that are working, right?
Um, and because there is just so much negative sentiment everywhere, right? There's, there's, you know, when you look at the 80/20 of anything, there's 80/20 of 80/20 of 80/20, right? There's, like, one small fraction of a percent of people that's doing exceedingly well, and nobody wants to hear what they have to say because everybody else is struggling and sad, and it's not working and, you know.
And so, um, so I think it's just get in better rooms, right? Yeah. Get in better rooms with better people and talk about cooler shit, I guess.
Matt Medeiros: Stay out, stay out of Facebook groups is what I'm
hearing.
Patrick Gallagher: Well, right. Right. Like, I [00:51:00] mean, certainly, certainly you could, you know, there's a version of me that, you know, uh, WordCamp 2024 happens, and the keynote pops off the way that it pops off, and then, you know, just downward spiral of bad from there.
And it's like- Yeah ... no, I, m- myself and a lot of other business owners i- in and around the WordPress space, we kept our heads down, and we just kept working, and we kept working on what we knew we could, we could do, and we kept delivering value to our customers, right? Yeah. And it's like, I think if you can do those things, y- you're always going to be able to find success, you know?
In, in anything you set-- A- anything that you really commit yourself to and you just don't give up If, if there is gold to be had there. Again, maybe the Bose Wave Radio, you know, umbrella, um- Urinal ... vibrator is not a great idea.
Eric Karkovack : Let's go back to urinal, please. Yeah.
Patrick Gallagher: Whatever. [00:52:00] Whatever it is, yeah? Um, so, so yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that, um, if w- if we just look at the regular discourse that all of the models are trained on, there's a lot of negativity, there's a l- there's not a lot of positive things being said about, about WordPress, right?
There's not a lot of positive things being said about anything, right?
Eric Karkovack : Yeah, yeah.
Patrick Gallagher: And so just pay less attention to that stuff, I guess. Listen to more podcasts like this one.
Eric Karkovack : Yeah.
Patrick Gallagher: Well,
Eric Karkovack : well let me wrap up the, uh, recorded portion of it on this. I will say that just because there are loud voices out there do not mean they are correct voices.
And that's something- Yeah ... I think we all have to learn because we, we pay so much attention to these people that just blasts out negativity at every turn, and sometimes they're doing it for profit. So you have to remember that- Sure ... in all aspects of life. Uh, but Patrick, I thank you for coming to, uh, join us, and, um, with the well-prepared [00:53:00] slides.
Um- How can people connect with you?
Patrick Gallagher: Uh, so I'm, in terms of, uh, the easiest place to get me is probably on X. Um, so just @GridPane. Um, you can also go to GridPane.com, and there's, there's my fat head in the bottom right. There's this thing called Video Ask that you can click on. And, um, I don't see all of those, but pretty much every single one where somebody actually submits a video message of themselves as a real human being saying, "Hey, this is my problem," you know, or, "Hey, this is my question," um, I, I'm pretty sure I answer 95% of those, or I see 95% of those and respond to them just like this.
And so, you know, if you have a question about WordPress, particularly anything on WooCommerce, that's where we, we tend to have the biggest impact. But if you have questions ab- agency owners that are winning, that are succeeding. Happy to talk about that. Happy [00:54:00] to talk about, uh, parenting, golf, not politics.
Um, uh, but you know, uh, yeah, that's, that's the best way to get me. Re- reach me on X or just, um, send a video message and I'm happy to connect and help if, if I can.
Eric Karkovack : Awesome. Well, uh, thanks to you. Thanks to everyone for, uh, checking out our, uh, member meetup this month. Visit us over at thewpminute.com/subscribe.
Grab our newsletter, support the work we do here at The WP Minute. Okay, we're gonna turn off recording now, and if anyone has any other questions, we'll go to that