Every WordPress developer will have faced a familiar paralysis: staring at a blank editor, knowing exactly what you want to build but dreading the work ahead. While you might have the destination in mind, you’ll still need to pave the road yourself. Vibe coding could help: you’re the site foreman that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver, rather than being the manual laborer.

I’m going to take a look at vibe coding, how it could reshape your development workflow, and what implications it might have for the WordPress ecosystem. The first task for me is to help you understand what this technique is.

Understanding What Vibe Coding Actually Means

Vibe coding is a term from Andrej Karpathy – the former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder – in February 2025 on an X post. He describes it as a coding approach where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

This is so vague to me that it’s almost profound, but I’ve had to try to understand why this isn’t simply the developer’s equivalent of voice search.

This is because, in practical terms, vibe coding is creating software by describing what you want in natural language rather than manually writing code. Instead of crafting functions, classes, hooks, and loops yourself, you provide instructions to an AI tool that generates the code for you. The developer’s role transforms from writing code to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated solution.

For example, imagine telling an AI tool to, “Create a custom WordPress Block that displays recent posts in a masonry layout with category filtering”. As it gets to work, you watch as it generates all the necessary PHP, JavaScript, and CSS.

This is vibe coding in action. While it’s a significant departure from typical coding, it’s likely (at a base level anyway) what you might already do with a Large Language Model (LLM) such as GPT-4 and Claude. I know I definitely do it.

How Vibe Coding Differs From Traditional Development

My first thought has been to understand how vibe coding is different to voice prompting and what it brings over typical development pathways and workflows. I’m not a developer myself – I call myself a ‘busking coder’. However, WordPress development usually involves a few steps in the chain:

• Planning, where you plan your solution and architecture in general.
• Writing the code in PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Testing, debugging, and refining the code through multiple iterations.
• Deploying and maintaining your codebase after you push it live.

With vibe coding, I figure the workflow transforms into something with subtle differences:

• Describing what you want to build to the LLM in natural language.
• Reviewing and testing the code it generates.
• Refining your prompts to guide the AI toward better solutions.
• Deploying and maintaining that codebase with perpetual assistance from the AI.

The planning and writing stages essentially become the descriptive step in vibe coding. However, I know that testing and debugging in typical development can take a substantial amount of time.

If you eyeball the steps of each process, you’ll see that vibe coding has two points where you’ll review and refine your code and prompts. For all intents and purposes, this is testing. The job with vibe coding appears to be almost constant testing and iteration: for science!

As such, vibe coding doesn’t require you to have deep technical knowledge of programming languages or frameworks. Instead of knowing syntax, algorithms, and design patterns, vibe coding prioritizes your ability to articulate problems and find solutions.

The main differentiator of vibe coding from simple voice prompting for me is that you’ll use code-generating AI tools as part of the process. Of course, you can simply boot up Claude, Gemini Pro, or whichever LLM you like and get to work.

However, there are several platforms and apps that facilitate and can adapt to vibe coding. Each one has its own approach. The first in my eyes is GitHub Copilot. It’s a joint effort between GitHub and OpenAI, and functions as an AI pair programmer.

It’s a few years old at this point and I first learned about it from YouTuber ThePrimeagen – a former Netflix dev:

The original focus was to suggest the next line or block of code, but it now includes a chat mode where you can ask coding questions in natural language. For WordPress development, Copilot might help you generate theme functions, plugin hooks, and database queries, among other elements.

Cursor is one of the most popular tools for vibe coding within development. It’s a dedicated code editor itself that integrates AI with a sidebar chat window (‘Composer’). You describe what you need, and Cursor generates or modifies code in your files.

This impressed me when watching an eight-year old girl use it to build a chatbot on Cloudflare tech:

There are plenty of other solutions available, and the landscape changes constantly. For WordPress though, there are some dedicated tools to watch out for.

WordPress Specific AI Coding Tools

The main tool I can find is CodeWP, which uses a corpus focusing on WordPress code to offer AI coding assistance for the platform.

The idea is that these types of tools will understand WordPress architecture, common hooks, and development best practices better than a more generic solution. It’s similar to building custom GPTs, so the potential is there to get a better output from the get-go.

Unfortunately, CodeWP isn’t accepting new registrations after an acquisition by Automattic. The good news is that we may see the functionality end up in core WordPress down the road.

You can also find AI extensions within WordPress page builders. For example, Elementor has an AI interface that uses Copilot under the hood. It’s not a solution I have much experience with, and I’d be interested to know whether it’s simply ‘Copilot in Elementor’ or trained on WordPress.

Regardless, the goal is to code with vibes rather than get decision paralysis over choosing a tool. My advice is to pick one and begin to understand if it’s helpful to you. You can always refine and switch to something else later on.

How to Start Harnessing Your Aura with Vibe Coding and WordPress

Okay, the heading leans a little on New Age concepts, but you do need to understand what vibe coding might help you achieve in the real-world. 

Once you choose a tool (pick one from Copilot, CodeWP, or Cursor, basically), start thinking about the problems you encounter every day with WordPress. In fact, an LLM could help with this too.

Prompt Engineering

A complete tutorial on this will be for another article – please leave a comment at the bottom of the post if you’d like to see this! However, you do need to make sure you understand the concepts of prompt engineering, and how to get the best out of your AI tool.

Each one will be different, so here are two general purpose tips on straightening out your LLM minion:

• It’s helpful to have a framework to follow, and the right one will be different based on the LLM you choose to work with.
• I like to give any AI knowledge on what I want to achieve (maybe using files) and ask it what it knows. That way, you can correct any misconceptions early on and reduce errors.

Finally, this is a subjective take, but make sure you understand that an AI isn’t there to complete a task, it’s to make you satisfied with the output. As such, give it goals to find solutions for rather than telling it what to do.

Creating for WordPress Using Vibe Coding

One piece of advice that works beyond vibe coding is to work on tiny parts of your project and switch focus often. This means you’ll flip around between describing what solutions you need, running and reviewing the output, and iterating to get the right result.

This is another concept I take from video game development. If you watch Indie Game: The Movie, there’s a quote from the developer of Super Meat Boy that I can paraphrase:

“…create a dot on the screen. Then make the dot move. Then make it jump…”

This is how you can look at developing using vibe coding. Do tiny things that also act as a learning experience, but over time will build into a new project.

For instance, you can build tiny proof-of-concept projects: maybe generate some plugin or theme boilerplate in order to test whether the tool can deliver what you need and meet WordPress’ guidelines and standards.

Once you’re ready to build on top of a sound foundation, you could tackle a few larger projects that might step you closer to meeting your overall and original goal. This could be creating a custom Block or shortcode, building a simple contact form, or finding a way to customize your site’s footer.

A Real-World Vibe Coding Project

Let me give you an example of using Cursor to build a basic WordPress plugin. I’m using some custom rules that let me switch the focus of the AI based on the project status, and I’ll stick with an RTF framework to keep things simple.

First, I’ll tell Cursor what my goal is, give it a role, assign a task, and prompt for a solution to my problem:

My prompts tell Cursor to generate a development plan file that outlines what it will do. This is great, because I can make changes to that plan to get better accuracy from the output.

After some clarifications and dialogue, I have some boilerplate to work with:

The cool thing is that Cursor will go into as much detail as you wish about what it is doing. Of course, you can ask for further explanations too. After some deliberation, I think I want to create a new Block. Again, I prompt Cursor to generate the necessary code to build it:

To keep things straightforward, the Block will display text for now. However, this is where your own ideas, creativity, and needs come into play.

I’ve decided to check on the plugin’s security as it’s always good to get this right at the start. Cursor takes a look and makes some fixes to ensure the plugin is safe:

From here, I ask Cursor to build the plugin for me, which will often catch errors or bugs to further iterate on:

The cool thing is that Cursor can catch this and fix it:

Once it completes, I have a plugin file that I upload to WordPress and test further:

There is (of course) much more to vibe coding than this. However, you can see that within about 15 minutes, I can create a full-function WordPress plugin that meets coding the standards.

The Benefits and Limitations of Vibe Coding

I’ve had to use vibe coding in a similar way to perhaps many of you reading this: again, I’m a ‘busking coder’. If I lay it out, I have a particular set of requirements and needs:

• I don’t necessarily know all of the syntax and intricacies around WordPress code structure.
• My experience in troubleshooting WordPress code within development is low.
• I might not know typical practices, or whether the code that generates meets WordPress’ standards.
• I’ll want to spend as little time as possible to create what I need, with as little outlay.

There are a few more items for this list, but you get the point: we’re not necessarily going to be developers. We want to create something one or two levels beyond what we can reasonably achieve right now.

Vibe coding has advantages and limitations that directly affect these points and more. For example, development speed is a clear benefit. You can complete tasks in minutes that would potentially take hours, which lets you iterate and prototype at speed. Maybe this would benefit creating proof-of-concepts or delivering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on deadline.

Also, vibe coding lowers the barrier to entry for WordPress development. This makes it possible for designers, content creators, and business owners to create custom solutions without deep programming knowledge. I love this democratization of development in the same way I love early video game programming: teams of two sitting in a garage to create and bring new perspectives to the space.

On the same track, innovation can be rich due to reducing the technical overhead of implementing ideas. The headspace you get back can help you pursue plugins, themes, and WordPress applications that might otherwise be too time-consuming to build or infeasible.

The Limitations and Challenges

Despite these benefits, vibe coding has many of the same limitations of general-purpose LLMs and AI. Code quality and reliability can be inconsistent, especially for complex requirements.

Without the right prompts, your code may contain errors, inefficiencies, or security vulnerabilities that aren’t immediately apparent. If you’re using vibe coding as someone who is ‘unconsciously incompetent’ – i.e., you don’t know what you don’t know – you could miss a lot of issues. This means your review and testing stages, especially for public-facing and production-grade WordPress products, will need to be longer and more thorough.

Similarly, vibe coding might generate code with security holes if you aren’t explicit in asking for security measures. Again, you could lack the knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in the code. Maintenance will be an issue too, especially if you don’t fully understand how your code works. Imagine how problematic this could be on client projects that need ongoing support and maintenance.

Vibe Coding FAQ: Common Questions

It’s understandable that vibe coding can seem confusing. I had some confusion at first! As such, here are some questions and answers around the topic. If you have any more, let us have them in the comments section at the end of the post!

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is a software development approach where you describe what you want in plain English. From there, AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor will generate the actual code for you. It lets non-programmers create custom software without learning programming languages. It’s a focus shift from writing code to creating solutions.

How do I start with vibe coding?

To start with vibe coding, choose an AI tool that supports code generation (such as Cursor). Then, begin with a simple project – a contact form or custom footer, for example – and write specific descriptions of what you want. Next, iterate based on the output and implement the solution on your site. The key is to be clear and in-depth in your descriptions.

What is the difference between vibe coding and no-code solutions?

No-code solutions use visual drag-and-drop interfaces with pre-built components, while vibe coding uses natural language to generate custom code. Vibe coding offers arguably greater flexibility to create unique solutions, although it produces actual code that you can customize further.

What’s the best AI tool for vibe coding in WordPress?

CodeWP was the best starting point, but it is no longer available in its current form. Cursor is excellent and GitHub Copilot works with popular code editors, but requires some technical background. General purpose LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude will need more specific prompting for WordPress tasks.

Is vibe coding safe for my WordPress site?

Vibe coding is safe if you use it with care. You should always back up your site first, test on a staging environment when possible, use a code snippet plugin for small changes, and be cautious with code that handles sensitive data. While AI tools are getting better at generating secure code, a professional review of the critical functionality is still a solid recommendation.

My Final Thoughts on Whether Vibe Coding is the Future of WordPress Development

Based on the current trajectory, I’m somewhat confident that vibe coding will have an important role in aspects of WordPress development. It’s not a replacement for traditional coding, and I can’t shake the same vibes as when I had to constantly write about the capability of voice search. Also, security remains a concern, as does quality and accuracy.

Vibe coding is different to search engine voice prompting though, and the best output will be a mix of both human talent and mystical vibes. The skillset will be different, such as needing the ability to write clear prompts with enough detail to generate the code you need.

It might open doors for some who wouldn’t trudge a development pathway in other circumstances. This shift is going to place greater emphasis on architecture, design, and problem-solving skills rather than syntax mastery.

For agencies and freelancers, vibe coding could help you deliver projects faster and at lower cost. I’m not yet convinced the technical overhead will reduce though, simply move elsewhere in the chain.

Does vibe coding have the right energy for you? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section below!