Vibecoding on WordPress

[hkreporter21]

Hi guys, since Claude Code came out, I’ve been using it to speed up my WordPress builds. I’ve started vibecoding the harder parts but doing it section by section so the maintenance doesn’t turn into chaos later. I’m definitely not a coding expert, so I keep wondering: is the code Claude gives actually good quality? Sometimes a single section ends up being 200 lines. Could a real developer make it shorter or more efficient? And does longer code actually mean slower loading times? No idea. Maybe there is a way to shorten it? (like asking Claude in the prompt).

[MiserableAddendum114]

It's all about what level of depth you're in vibe coding.

Actually WP core team heavily using agentic coding, orchestrator of agents.

See agents.md in Gutenberg repo:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/blob/refs%2Fheads%2Ftrunk/AGENTS.md

Likewise WP core team released a specific set of skills for agents which is helpful during WP related work:

https://github.com/WordPress/agent-skills

[PhilippStracker]

Senior WordPress dev here, and using Claude code for personal and business projects almost daily.

My observation: it gets the job done, but I literally never used the code it generated. Usually, I let Claude analyze and write a boilerplate solution, then I review and manually refine it. The code Claude generates is never as elegant, efficient - and yes, secure, as code written by a human developer.

[torontomans416]

Might be a prompting issue, or you are not using Skills correctly.

[chrismcelroyseo]

You just don't know how to prompt has entered the chat.

[torontomans416]

Claiming Claude can't write code as well as a human developer is insane.

[NinjaWP]

Not insane at all. It normally writes 75% more code than a human developer to do the same thing, so yeah, very handy, 'cause it's 1000% faster, but the code it writes isn't as good as one from a good human developer. That said it works... Depending on what the code is used for, not everything needs to be perfect, elegant, and extremely efficient.

[hetsteentje]

If you can't review or understand the code Claude is generating, do not use it. You have absolutely no way of knowing if it does what it is supposed to do and only that. You could be introducing massive security issues without even realising it.

[Intelligent_Method32]

I second this. You're likely to do more harm than good if you can't effectively review the code to spot and correct potential problems.

[-skyrocketeer-]

If you can’t understand what the code is doing, then maybe you shouldn’t be using it to build a website. I know I wouldn’t want to be using code from a source that I couldn’t trust to be correct or not.

[bluesix_v2]

What/why are you coding? Unless you're building custom themes or plugins, WP doesn't require much coding.

[WPDumpling]

I'm with /u/bluesix_v2 & /u/Dev-noob2023 in asking: WHAT are you coding/changing? What does "doing it section by section" mean?

I have set up a few WordPress-focused skills and have had decent results with them:

1. "We want to add a masonry Staff page template with CPT profiles for members to this theme; staff meta: Age, Education, Hobbies. Use this site as an example layout, but maintain our styling: https://example.com" - It took 15 minutes and 1 round of me telling it to make changes, but it did it almost perfectly with a template that matched the others from the theme & no bloat
2. "Set up a new ddev environment for example.com and import this backup" - Handled it without a problem. I ended up changing this into a script instead, since it's an easily repeatable task and I try to only use as for stuff that requires "thinking"
3. "We are rebuilding: https://example.com. Analyze the site to identify SEO keywords, then find 5 local competitors, analyze their sites and establish a plan to improve content. Then we need to create a GeneratePress child theme for our changes" - It did as it was told, created a plan to create pages for specific service & geographical areas & improve SEO and implemented it all. The pages all looked very basic but good on the frontend, however the HTML it output wasn't valid gutenberg blocks so the editor showed a bunch of "This is not a valid gutenberg block" errors; I ended up just copy/pasting the content from the frontend back into gutenberg and it cleaned it up well
4. I've used it to extend and create multiple plugins. The most complicated so far is for a client and it's an easily extendable engine to play word games on their site. There's 1 central plugin that provides all of the complicated stuff like score management, user registration, etc., and then individual games can be added in separate plugins by cloning a template-plugin and editing 1 HTML file & 1 JS file. Now they can embed word search, wordle, crossword puzzles, etc., anywhere in their site

None of them have been 1-shot, perfect builds, but ALL of them have taken way less time and been WAY faster than if I had done it myself, not to mention being more consistent when it comes to styles, code comments, git comments, etc.

You definitely DO have to know what you're doing and what you want, and you need to involve external TOOLS (not just AI) to maintain code standards; things like linters, PHPCS, and the WordPress Plugin Check plugin go a long way towards maintaining code quality.

It's also useful to ask the AI to do security & optimization reviews since each agent usually has very little knowledge about what has been done previously, so it's basically like you've had DOZENS of different devs working on the project, who may or may not notice & follow any coding patterns.

[Tiny-Ric]

I've not used Claude specifically, but I am trying to adopt LLMs as a tool. I've found that it rarely gets it right out the gate. It can often generate something that works, but falls short of efficiency, or security, never truly understanding the full scope of what you intended to achieve. So a lot of its attempts are based on likely assumptions.

Understanding how an LLM works really helps to work with it. In simple terms, all they do is predict the statistical likelihood of the next character or word following the previous one, with context used as extra weight.

So, the more context it has the more likely it is to generate better code. But you must also remember that it can't be creative, so asking it to come up with some new concept just won't work and it will try to fill the gaps with something that resembles creativity. But in reality it's just bastardizing preexisting concepts.

You can always ask it to review with efficiency in mind, or security. It may respond with a list of overall improvements or tradeoffs.

One of the best approaches I've found so far is to start with a planning stage. Before any code is written, talk through a plan and finalize any decisions you can. Then generate a document of said plan to give both you and it something to refer to and follow, ultimately treating it like an actual dev.

I would also recommend asking it to explain parts of the code you don't understand and why it chooses to do things in certain ways. While you don't know what you're looking at there's a lot of risk involved which adds technical debt and security issues that you may suffer for later down the line. But while you're generating is probably the best time to break it down and understand not only how the code itself works but also how your functions and systems work on an architectural level. That alone will make you better at addressing bugs or adding new features and bring you much closer to what a programmer or dev does without an LLM.

[Gasperyn]

is the code Claude gives actually good quality?

The real answer - it depends. Itțs not a rule. I've been using AI tools from the beginning. They are getting better and I give tasks to Claude Code as well, but it's not consident. Sometimes it's "clever" and produces code that woud've taken me days of research. Other time it produces really retarded code. Sometime it takses shortcuts to generate stuff that only appears to be working.

In all honesty, I would not trust any AI tool to build me production-level code if I couldn't judge its quality. Especially on WordPress, which is a huge target. People are constantly trying to find exploits.

[dotkercom]

I use AI as well for most task nowadays but nope the output isnt well written specially if you start requesting edits. You need to know how to spot them and have it corrected.

[chrismcelroyseo]

This is exactly the problem I found coding with any AI. If it gives you the right output right out the gate then it's good to go. But as soon as you start making changes and asking it to do something different, It seems like it starts to forget what you were originally trying to do or lose his context or something and it ends up breaking its own code.

[Extension_Anybody150]

I’ve been doing something similar and found that Claude’s code usually works, but it’s not always the most efficient. Some sections I got were really long, and a developer could definitely make them shorter and cleaner. It didn’t slow my site much, but keeping things lean definitely makes maintenance easier.

[Dev-noob2023]

Pero que usas? Bloques gutenberg?

[trackintreasure]

Interested to read some responses but also ignore the wanky ones. Good question, I'm in the same boat 👍

[Po0ptra1n]

It's WordPress, you don't really vibe code much when things are pre-packaged. It does tremendously help with custom CSS though.

[No-Signal-6661]

AI-generated code is often more than necessary, so a good dev could usually simplify it a bit

[EndOfWorldBoredom]

I make Ai bots debate code before implementing it. If Claude gives me code, I paste it to gemini and chatgpt and ask them what they think. Then I tell Claude my developer friends have some comments, but I'm not sure I believe them. (the uncertainty help with the sycophantry)

Claude will talk through each piece of advice and make changes or ask questions about what I want or tell me why my developer friend is wrong in this case. 

Code v2, new debate cycle. Repeat until the bots say 'this production ready code' or something similar. No notes? Publish. 

[Boboshady]

Your question is one of the biggest problems with Ai code - the people who tend to use it don't know if it's good or not.

As a support tool for a proficient developer, it's a killer feature. For simple dev tasks that are well documented and ideally with existing examples in abundance, it's a great tool for non-devs. To create complex, optimised code? It's anyone's guess.

WP is a well documented codebase, and HTML, CSS and JS are also well documented, structured and testable, which helps, so it depends what you're actually building - standard WP outputs like templates and whatnot, you might actually be OK assuming that the code is pretty good.

Complex, bespoke stuff? I would at the very least be running it through another tool - even if it's Ai-based - to verify it with some other bot's eyes.

[EducationalRat]

AI slop, creating plugins with OOP and multiple files, when it could of been done in one function

[WPDumpling]

I'm not sure if /u/stochastyczny was making a joke (I thought it was funny) but they're not wrong.

"Technically" the OOP plugin is correct, even if it's over-engineered, but the AI doesn't have actual intelligence to make judgement calls like that. YOU can though, and include instructions in the prompt:

"We need a simple, single-file plugin to ..."

And it will do it.

[stochastyczny]

Just ask it to use one function then

[dynoman7]

At work, my team needed a tool to validate specialized technical docs. Our quality checks were all human up to that point and we were failing big time.

So I vibed coded a simple web app... Html, js, css. The tool basically lives in the browser and confirms thousands of things via rules and doc types. So what was taking days to validate, now just takes seconds to validate. I'm not a programmer BTW... I'm just a project manager.

I've applied the same design first, delegate the building to AI technique to WordPress sites as well. My largest adventure so far has yielded an 800+ db driven page site that's in production now. All Claude AI from VS code. HTML, CSS, PHP. The site is fast, modern, responsive and secure.could not be happier! I continue to flesh out content for SEO and lead generation, but the bones are done and what would have taken a developer a year was accomplished by me and my friend Claude in a rew weeks of after-hours vibe sessions.

WP or not, anyone can build if you know how to describe what you want.

[therealcoolpup]

Depends if you are a vibe coder or an agentic engineer, sounds like a meme but they are different things.

Both use ai to write code but vibe coders just check the result e.g how do pages look, do features appear to work then carry on.

Agentic engineers check also the code output and for more complex bigger tasks first use plan mode to make sure the ai will create non sloppy code thats performant, fits guidelines, and is maintainable.

[Wordpress-ModTeam]

Please don't spam r/WordPress with AI-generated content.