Comment by hungryhobbit
3 days ago
Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do.
Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
You don’t need them 99% of the time as these mods and plugins are effectively what WP lacks. For most trivial sites, and WP does lots of them, they can be promoted.
It is much easier to prompt a relatively tight slop doing the same that WP plus dozens of plugins does. Particularly if you know what you’re doing.
I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
Ironically, the antiquated model of a bunch of source code and a database sitting on a computer is something coding agents really like.
WordPress and a nice page builder with MCP is actually a joy to use, and the absolutely enormous catalog of plugins that are easily extensible and endlessly modifiable makes it so easy to work with when building via agent.
Having worked with WordPress for over a decade, I find it hilarious that WooCommerce (the bane of my existence that has inexplicably paid my rent for a gigantic chunk of my adult life) is easier to use and better positioned for building with AI than Shopify.
The future is actually pretty bright for WordPress I think.
The absolutely enormous catalogue is an absolute security (and often maintenance) disaster in 2026.
Those who have ever delivered actual WP sites know the pain of it. Typical WP setups grow very fast growing towards completely entangled mess of plugins and template hacks as the project matures.
2 replies →
> I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
As someone who made a number of bespoke backends, WordPress wins on turnkey host-support, ease of content-authorship, familiarity (when handing over or taking over a backend), and breadth and depth of plugins. A lot of people would be well-served by static-site generators, and those were on the rise for a bit. WordPress stays winning because of the user-friendliness of its publishing workflows (vs SSGs), and self-reinforcing ecosystem.
I hear the words you're saying. But this was not the case for myself setting up Wordpress and trying to help a non-technical user navigate the admin dashboard to manage their content.