I spend over eight hours a day building with Claude, Cursor and Telex. I love those tools and WordPress, and I’m tired of being told to choose.

Here’s why I still want WordPress: I have never once considered replacing the WordPress layer with something AI generated. Not once. And I build with AI every single day.

Think about it like remodeling a house.

When you renovate, you rip out the ugly kitchen. You tear down a wall to open up the living room. You add a deck. You repaint everything. Maybe you go full HGTV and add an addition.

You know what you don’t do? Rip out the plumbing. You don’t tear out the electrical. You don’t dig up the foundation and pour a new one because you saw a cool new concrete mix on TikTok.

The plumbing and wiring already work. Every fixture connects to them, so changing the rooms doesn’t mean replacing all of it.

WordPress is the plumbing.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this

WordPress has been “dying” for as long as I can remember. The threats change but the headlines don’t.

Mobile was going to kill it. Remember? Fixed-width PHP themes couldn’t possibly survive the iPhone era. WordPress went responsive and grew from 13% to 21% of the web during the exact years everyone said mobile would finish it off.

Wix and Squarespace were going to kill it. They spent millions on Super Bowl ads with movie stars. They ran attack campaigns. WordPress barely acknowledged them. Today WordPress powers 43% of the web. Wix has 3.7%. That’s not a competition. That’s a rounding error.

Gutenberg was going to kill it. This one came from inside the house. People were furious. Two thousand one-star reviews. A literal fork of the project. And WordPress grew faster in the three years after Gutenberg than almost any period before it.

JAMstack was going to kill it. Developers on Twitter declared WordPress’s architecture “impossible to scale.” WordPress added a REST API, absorbed the headless CMS concept, and grew from 29% to 43% during peak JAMstack hype.

Every single time, the pattern is the same: someone declares WordPress dead, WordPress absorbs the thing that was supposed to kill it, and WordPress gets bigger.

AI is next in line to not kill WordPress.

AI needs somewhere to land

Here’s what the “just vibe code everything” crowd doesn’t talk about: where does the thing you built go?

AI can generate a good-looking website quickly. But I still need somewhere to manage content, accounts, media and form submissions. A client may also need to update pages themselves.

WordPress handles that work.

AI helps me make themes, blocks and interactive pages. I still need the system that manages what goes into them.

I use AI to build WordPress blocks. I use AI to write plugin code. I use AI to generate custom CSS and prototype ideas in minutes that used to take days. AI hasn’t replaced WordPress in my workflow. It’s made WordPress better in my workflow. The two aren’t competing. They’re collaborating.

The people who built WordPress get this

WordPress 6.9 shipped with an Abilities API that makes every WordPress function discoverable by AI agents. It shipped with an MCP Adapter so tools like Claude can talk to WordPress directly. There’s now a PHP AI Client SDK baked into core. Telex turns plain-English prompts into working Gutenberg blocks.

The WordPress project isn’t pretending AI doesn’t exist. It’s not circling the wagons. It’s opening the front door and saying “come on in, here’s how everything works, build whatever you want.”

WordPress has adapted to other changes. I’d like it to keep doing that with AI.

The real question isn’t whether AI replaces WordPress

It’s whether the WordPress community welcomes AI or fights it.

Because the technology isn’t the risk. The risk is us. It’s WordPress people getting defensive, treating AI as the enemy, gatekeeping who counts as a “real” developer, and making the same mistake every threatened community makes: turning inward when they should be opening up.

WordPress has always been at its best when it’s welcoming. When it says “you don’t need permission to build here.” When it treats a blogger with no technical skills the same as an agency shipping enterprise sites.

I’d like us to help people building with AI use WordPress, even if they haven’t learned PHP.

I know which side I’m on.

Keep the plumbing and improve what people use.