And vibe coders are knocking

The moment

People are describing websites to AI agents and getting working sites back. They may not know PHP or WordPress hooks, and they shouldn’t have to learn them before trying.

They’re called vibe coders. There are going to be a lot more of them. And every platform is racing to be where they land.

Wix and Squarespace already have AI builders. But those are template machines with a chatbot on top. The AI fills in blanks on a locked-down system. That’s not building. That’s decorating.

WordPress is the only open platform where an AI agent can build anything: a membership site with custom logic, a WooCommerce store with weird pricing rules, a portfolio that does something no template ever imagined. The ceiling is as high as the person’s ambition.

WordPress doesn’t have a front door for these people yet.

Build for vibe coders, hand coders come free

WordPress has world-class tools for people who already know how to build. WP-CLI is powerful if you know what commands to run. Block development is incredible if you know React. The Site Editor is flexible if you understand template hierarchies.

Now the audience is changing. The next million WordPress users aren’t going to learn PHP. They’re going to describe what they want and expect it to work. The opportunity is to build for them first, and make the tools so well-structured that hand coders love them too.

That’s not dumbing anything down. A site audit that returns structured JSON is more useful to a senior developer than a Lighthouse report, not less. It’s also useful to an AI agent working on behalf of someone who’s never opened a terminal.

Build for the widest audience and the power users come free. Build for the power users and everyone else stays locked out.

Help check the work

There is a reasonable concern that AI will generate bad code.

And yeah, it does. Agents ship bloated CSS, inaccessible forms, pages that choke on mobile. They don’t test what they build because they literally cannot see what they build.

I think that’s a reason to help people check it.

My reaction is: these people need us.

A baker in Duluth who described her dream website to an AI agent and got something back; she doesn’t know it fails WCAG contrast requirements. She doesn’t know the hero image is 4MB. She doesn’t know her contact form doesn’t work on Safari. She shouldn’t have to know. That’s not her job.

It’s ours.

WordPress developers know a lot about what makes a site work well. We should make that knowledge available to the agents building sites and give them tools to check the result.

Make the checks available.

A note for the Studio team

I use Studio every single day. And I had an idea. Ideas without action are boring, so here it is.

The Studio CLI has solid bones. Create sites, run WP-CLI, deploy preview links. The AGENTS.md convention is forward-thinking, every site ships agent-ready out of the box.

But right now the CLI is all action and no judgment. Agents can do things through Studio. They can’t tell whether what they did was any good.

Here’s the specific thing I want to see:

studio site audit

I’d like one command to return structured checks an agent can act on, drawing on WordPress.com’s experience with performance, hosting and accessibility.

studio site audit

Returns structured JSON, performance scores, accessibility violations, mobile issues, security flags. Each issue includes severity, a description, and a fix hint the agent can act on immediately.

The agent reads the results. Fixes the hero image. Adds form labels. Adjusts the contrast. Wraps the nav in a responsive container. Runs the audit again. Scores go up. Everything passes.

Build → Audit → Fix → Audit → Ship.

That baker’s site goes live with a 95 performance score and full WCAG compliance. She doesn’t know what those mean. She doesn’t need to. WordPress.com handled it through her agent, in the background, before she ever shared the link.

And then keep going

After the audit, I’d want these steps:

studio site audit: the eyes. Performance, accessibility, mobile, security. Structured JSON that agents parse and act on in a loop. This is the moment Studio stops being a dev tool and becomes a development platform.

studio site screenshot: the mirror. Capture the site at multiple viewports, return image paths. Agents with vision can look at what they built, compare it to what the user asked for, and iterate until it matches.

studio site test: the checklist. Behavioral validation. Forms submit. Links resolve. Cart flows complete. Not unit tests, the things a real person checks before going live.

studio site audit --fix: the autopilot. Find issues and fix them in one pass. Images compressed. Alt text generated. Contrast corrected. WordPress.com quality standards, applied automatically, before anyone sees the site.

The complete cycle

Put it all together and Studio offers something nobody else can:

Describe → Create → Audit → Fix → Deploy → Share.

I’d like someone to get from an idea to a published link through one tool, with an agent doing the work and WordPress.com checking the result.

The CLI would let agents act, and the audit would let them check their work.