fidzu : WordPress

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case real life AI tools and workflows in WordPress development.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you'd like us to feature on the podcast, I'm keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Corey Maass. Corey's been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables. Learning JavaScript, ASP Classic and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he's taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks.

He's joined us before, and today he's here to share his perspective on what it's been like adopting AI tools into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.

Although AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code, review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn't expected.

We hear about how his journey with AI started, how he's reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow.

Corey describes the shift from using AI to just save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavors like music production.

Much of the discussion centers around how these advances have affected client work with Corey exploring the real world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code? Or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness a part of the toolkit?

Whether you're a developer, curious about what working alongside AI means, or just wondering about the future of tech, and WordPress, in an increasingly automated world, this episode is for you.

If you're interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you'll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you, Corey Maass.

I am joined on the podcast by Corey Maass. Hello, Corey.

[00:03:33] Corey Maass: Hello.

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Corey's been on the podcast several times before. He's here today to talk about the subject, which almost nobody has touched during the year 2025, that's AI.

But actually I think we've got a curious angle because we're not just going to touch it from a sort of more generic point of view, although we might. We're going to talk about it from a client point of view and building things for clients and how, I guess, Corey is leveraging that to make life a little bit easier for himself. Let's find out.

First of all, Corey, would you just introduce yourself? Give us you a little bio, tell us about you.

[00:04:04] Corey Maass: Absolutely, Corey Maass. I currently live in New Hampshire, which is in the northeast of the United States. I've been building for the web since 97, I think. Back in the day when we would do designs in Photoshop and then slice them up and put them in tables. And then I learned JavaScript, and I learned ASP Classic, and I learned PHP, and I got obsessed with building SaaS apps, you know, making websites actually do stuff instead of just look pretty. And then I found WordPress in about 2010 and it's all been a wonderful, joyous, rollercoaster ride of happiness without exception.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: That's lovely. And I think we should end the podcast right there.

[00:04:48] Corey Maass: And I met this wonderful guy named Nathan somewhere along the way, and my heart is full.

[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: It does not get better than that. I really think we should end there. Congratulations, Corey Maass, we'll see you next time. No, let's get into it properly.

[00:05:01] Corey Maass: And then the robots came.

[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. That's what we are going to talk about. But you've been building for a long time. I mean, in terms of the internet, you really are like the heritage, aren't you? 1997 was when people were just sort of starting out. I mean, there's a few people that go maybe a little bit longer than that, but you've seen the whole thing.

Seems like in the year 2023, something like that, maybe 2024, certainly 2025, we've now got the advent of companions, AI companions that are helping us to do things online and build websites and so on. And I'm kind of just curious, let's talk about your stack and where it is at the moment, and then we'll get into how that stack has changed. But just tell us what you're using right now. And we're recording that December, 2025. And no doubt that will change fairly soon.

[00:05:45] Corey Maass: Still changes frequently. We're chatting before we started recording and you said, have you updated Mac OS to this glass nonsense? And I went, absolutely. I bought into, to put myself in context, like I bought into the Apple ecosystem a few years ago. And I tend to, when they say update, I update. I might wait a day or two. Usually I will hear about, if something is truly crashing your computer, I'll usually hear about it on Reddit or what have you. And so I might wait a day or a week, but I'm generally an early adopter is the point I'm trying to make.

But with that said, I'm also a pragmatic developer. So I want to use the tools that are the most beneficial, but I'm also not cutting edge, bleeding edge on what model is the absolute best and all that kind of stuff. But I'm also not not going to use AI once it actually benefits me. So I'm probably somewhere on one side of the bell curve or the other, but I'm not bleeding edge.

Anyway. So as of today, I am using Cursor as an IDE, but I am not using the AI in Cursor at all. I have been meaning to, but again, it's pragmatically. I'm not trying to use things because they're in front of me or what have you. So we can talk about why I wound up using Cursor. But what I generally am doing during the day is opening Terminal inside Cursor and using Claude Code almost exclusively. Which then, a buddy of mine has gotten me back into the process of actually doing pull requests, so that the code gets pushed to Git. And then I'm running Copilot, which is GitHub's AI to do code reviews. That's what I was trying to say. I've got Claude generally writing the code, and then I've got GitHub's Copilot checking the code.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, so that's where you're at the moment. But historically, if we were to gaze back over the last year, let's go with that, how often does that iteration change? How often do you move from one thing to another because the landscape has moved or something superior appears to have come along?

[00:07:53] Corey Maass: Yeah, it's kind of amazing. This is part of why I wanted to have this conversation is, for me it started pretty much in March. I went to Thailand for a few weeks visiting a buddy of mine there who's a developer, he had to work. Like, every weekend we were running around looking at temples and stuff like that. During the week he had to work, and so I was left to entertain myself. And so doing my usual client work, which was still very clicky, clickly, because it's still WordPress, and WordPress hasn't quite crossed that bridge, though we're working on it.

But I said, okay, I want to use this time to start my AI journey. That's where I said, let me subscribe to Cursor, 20 bucks a month, not unreasonable in the scheme of all of the software subscriptions that I have, and let me see what I can do.

And I have an app called Timerdoro, which is a productivity timer app, Pomodoro and that kind of thing. Friends and I built it, now it's got to be 20 years ago, and we've never figured out how to monetise. In fact, yesterday I finally just slapped some ads on it because I couldn't stand it anymore. And, no, that's not true. I found an ad network that I wanted to try. But that's kind of a perfect indication of how I think of Timerdoro. Timerdoro, I have rewritten at least a dozen times in at least four different, using four different tech stacks because a lot of people use it.

It has a hundred users a day or something, which is really cool. None of them want to give me any money, which I totally am fine with. It doesn't cost me anything. But it gives me an opportunity to, here is a product that people are using, let me continue to play with it, tweak it, design it, totally rewrite it. And so I rewrote it again in March using Cursor, which was an okay experience.

Looking back, I can see how much Cursor has improved, both the IDE and the models that are built in. And I have completely changed, because a big part of it is your own learning how to work with it. And so, at what level do you give it, build a productivity timer, go? Or do you say, install the following libraries, create the following files, make the classes look like this, name the methods and functions like this? Like, too granular, where it just does the typing for you. Versus, it totally conceptualises everything. And so you've got to fall somewhere in the middle, maybe, right? Or figure out where you are in the middle.

And I generally, having written my own code for years and years, sure enough, was too granular. But I think that benefited me at the time. Whereas we've come a long way, where you can be more in the middle and something like Claude can figure it out.

The buddy that I was visiting, coincidentally, has absolutely doubled down. So he follows, he always talks about Tech Dev Dan or something, Dev Dan, who is sort of the thought leader in AI that he follows. And so he signs up for anything that Dan puts out, classes or courses or videos. And then he tends to, my friend Robert tends to distill some of that down to me. And so I might or might not implement it.

But then I've also got other colleagues in the WordPress world. I actually had a friend of mine come to me and be like, hey, will you kind of be my AI buddy as we figure out how to negotiate all of this changing landscape? I said, absolutely. And coincidentally, it has turned out that I've kind of been the Robert to him a little bit, where I am a little bit ahead of him, and a little more embracing of things than he is. And so we've all kind of, we all evolve, but we're all kind of getting information from different sources.

So somewhere along the way, I mean Reddit and Twitter were just absolutely blowing up nonstop Claude. Claude Code when that came out. And so I was actually a little slow on the uptake, meaning a month, because I just, I didn't get it. Like, so many of these things, people are like AI, and you're like, right, but where do I type? Where does the code go? Or, I want to use AI, I am doing air quotes here, how do I get a website on the internet where people can click on it? It's actually not intuitive necessarily to make that leap until, again, Robert has explained some things to me of, because again, he's much more up on the words where he's like, I think it's called a harness is the thing you type into versus, the model is the actual AI you're interacting with.

And so you've got TypingMind or you've got Claude, or you've got Terminal, but then you've got Claude, but you can actually use Claude with Gemini's model if you want, or a Cursor. You know, if you go into the preferences, you can select which model. Do you want to use Open AI Opus, or do you want to use Gemini or do you want? And it was like, oh, right, okay, so there's a thing you type into or interact with, and then there's the actual model. But then, again, what are the patterns?

And like I said, I've just recently started, so with my buddy, we've been rebuilding, I have a game that I've talked about for a while. Mexicantrain.online is the website. And so it's an online version of the Domino game, Mexican Train. I built it during COVID and I talked about it at WordCamp US two years ago, because it was kind of an amazing, one of those projects that I built because my wife told me I should, so that our family could play, continue to play, during COVID. And then it turned into thousands of users, and so it just became this, organically became this nice thing that a lot of people use. And it's run by donations, which cynically, I never would've thought actually works. But people continue to give, I mean it's amazing.

But it's been a long time coming that it needs, the tech is now five years old. I needed to rebuild it. I approached my friend and said, hey, would you mind building this with me? Because we've kind of looked for a reason to work together. We worked together at a big WordPress agency five years, eight years ago, which is how we met, but we haven't worked together since. And he's gone very enterprise, and I tend to be still my freelancer self, working with individual clients directly and stuff like that.

And so what's been hand ringing, but good is he's like, okay, we're going to introduce pull requests because we're going to have Copilot check our work, and we're going to have full suite testing. And I tend to not, like I can do that stuff, and there's the occasional project where I need to do it, but for the most part I'm a, make a change and push it to the internet and see what happens kind of developer. And so we've introduced more process, but again, it's neat because I have to make myself be like, do what he tells you kid. And so then I'm learning better ways to use these tools to build more robust software.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Was there ever a moment where, I don't know if you were always bullish about technology, especially AI, it's entirely conceivable to imagine that any given person that you see could be extremely bullish about AI, you know, somewhere in the middle or extremely, a little bit allergic to it or what have you. Now, I don't know if there was any point where you swung between those two extremes or anything like that. But I was just curious if there was an epiphany that you had, like if there's a particular moment that you can remember where you thought to yourself, oh, this is curious, you know? This is not something we've seen before. And if you do have one of those, I'd love to know what it was.

[00:15:07] Corey Maass: There've definitely been those moments where, mind blown, mind blown, mind blown. Even recently, Nano Banana the new image AI is mind bogglingly good. And so there hasn't been one moment, there have been many moments because things like, I did pay for whatever the original ChatGPT was for a while. When it really became popular, I think last year, right? And so I said, well, let me pay 20 bucks a month. But I wasn't using it. It wasn't that good. It was definitely helpful, but again, it was more of a dumb typing companion. I need an email that says this. There's your 20 lines. I didn't have to think about it. I skim it, I edited a little, I might run it back through, and then I'd go, yep, good enough. Take out the em dashes so it doesn't look like AI, paste, send.

Treated it more like that. A year ago when I tried to have it right code, sorry robots, I love you. In the future, don't murder me. You know, but a year ago, like the code that it was generating wasn't great. It really was hallucinating a lot. Oh, you need to write a WordPress function that uses this hook. A quick Google determines that hook does not actually exist. Stop making stuff up. Whereas I very rarely encounter hallucinations these days.

[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's a profound realisation.

[00:16:23] Corey Maass: Yeah, but to answer your question, like there were just these great moments of, like I had it write song lyrics and I was like, wow, these are surprisingly good. Or I remember early silly moments like we all had where I was like, take these song lyrics and rewrite them so that they're in pirate speak or whatever, ha ha ha. Like this is a gimmick, right?

But then, again, probably in March, working through my first project building Timerdoro again, using Cursor. Googling how to use Cursor, taking the time to watch videos to understand how better to use it. And then again, moving along throughout the year, these little moments of, oh, that's amazing code or, wow, and in 45 seconds we had an entire authentication system with front end that a user can sign into and it all just works. The database is already created and all this stuff. And you're like, oh, okay, wow, it's getting more and more powerful.

There's always this thing in the back of my mind, I'm like, has it always been capable of this, meaning in the last year? And I'm just sort of taking, giving it more lead. Because again, I mean a big part of this is how we interact with it. And I keep thinking about scientists using it, or artists using it, because it's the, little by little, again, we're taking the collar off or, there's a horse or a dog metaphor in here somewhere, I can't quite. But giving it its own freedom to do what it wants, you know?

And how far can you take that? Like I keep thinking about, again, like science, where if you could give a model enough information, could it conceivably jump ahead months or years in our own research? Now research needs to be done, and things need to be proven and all that kind of stuff, but like in terms of thinking, are there things that it can conceive of that we just can't? Brian Eno, the musician. I think it was him. I want to say it was him. I'm going to pretend it was him.

[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: He feels like the kind of character that it easily could be him. There's a lot of technology in Brian Eno's life, isn't there?

[00:18:20] Corey Maass: Even away from technology, he, I believe it was him, I have to Google this. He created a deck of cards that said, as a musician, you're in the studio and you're like, my creativity needs help, right? And so there's this deck of cards where you'd flip over a card and it would say, play the melody backwards. Or you'd flip over a card and it would say, what if this piece of music was being performed underwater? Or, what if somebody had a gun to your head? These thought experiments, right?

And you could actually look at that as, I don't think anybody really would, but you could look at that as, oh, that's not true creativity because something else is helping you do the work, right? As a human, if you're a pure artist, it's all supposed to come from your brain. You're supposed to sit there in a dark room with a pen and a piece of paper. If it doesn't come purely from your brain, then it's not pure. And again, I don't, it's a weird example, but I don't think most people would actually say that. They'd be like, it's fine that you found random inspiration. Just like looking at nature, it's going to inspire a painting or whatever, right?

[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, or looking at a previous painting will inspire your next painting.

[00:19:26] Corey Maass: As long as in theory it's not too derivative or whatever, right? So the interesting thing about AI that I keep trying to use, the way that I'm using it, even past writing code or what have you is, help me introduce that element of randomness, the flipping of a card. Next time you're having your favorite AI model write an email, or do some creative writing, or come up with funny slogans for, like a lot of us are using it for. Help me come up with the tagline for the next SaaS landing page that I'm building or whatever. Introduce negatives. What is it not? Or say things like, have it write this in German and then translate it back to English or, write it like a 5-year-old would. Basically like help introduce that element of randomness and creativity.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's kind of interesting, the sort of through line that I've gathered from that is that at the beginning when you were using AI, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like the entire productivity gain, or the gain was a function of time. You were trying to reduce the amount of time a thing took to do. So, you know, if you want to, oh, I don't know, modify the game that you were describing, this train game that you've got. You were trying to reduce the amount of time it would take to do the next iteration of that.

But it sounds like in the last year to 18 months, something along those lines, the expectation has now shifted. I'm presuming that the time thing is now just in the background. That's guaranteed all the time. It's always going to be quicker than it would be for a human to do it. But you've now moved into this curious creativity phase, which for many people I think was almost like the Turing test. You know, it was the bit that the computers, you could never imagine that the computer would ever be able to approximate something like that. And there's a whole philosophical thing in there, which is probably too deep for us to open.

But it sounds like you are making use of that. You are using it to generate ideas, to come up with variations around a theme and relying on it to be creative. Now, if that's the case, I wonder how long it will be before that becomes just the normal, in the same way that maybe the time function has become normal. I wonder how long it will be before we're all just, well, yeah, the creativity piece, of course, go to a computer, go to an AI if you want ideas.

I wonder what the next thing, the next sort of hurdle to fall is? Because it's hard for me to imagine anything beyond creativity in all honesty. Once it's got approximations and mastered that, I'm doing air quotes this time, if it's mastered that, it's difficult for me to imagine what the next domino to fall would be. But no doubt there is one.

[00:21:49] Corey Maass: And that's what I'm getting at with the science stuff. There's definitely, I think we've sort of chosen not to talk about the negatives. There are plenty and, or we're foreseeing plenty or fearing a lot of things. Optimistically, at least in terms of output, to me we're looking at coworkers who can do things faster, or employees or, I'm hesitant to say people who work for us but, you know, work that gets done on our behalf faster than we can do it, and in a way that we are satisfied with, right? Writing code is black and white. That's not true at all, but it's much more black and white compared to like writing a song.

[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's true. I think the, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to sort of establish that point a little bit more. I think you are absolutely right. The WordPress slogan, code is poetry, obviously kind of leans into this a little bit, but there is a kind of binary nature to it. When you finish it, it either works or it doesn't to some extent. The goal is to do this thing, does it do this thing? No. Okay, something's wrong in that. Something needs to be ironed out. The ones need to be zeros and the zeros need to be ones, whatever it may be.

In the real world, things can be a lot more messy than that. So for the tech industry, it feels like the technology is perfectly aligned to satisfy the goals of that. But, I don't know, let's say you are a, let's find something which would be a great example. Let's say you are a psychoanalysts, or a therapist or something like that. It's not quite so straightforward, but the industry that we are in, it lends itself heavily to great success in that arena. Right, sorry, that was my interruption over.

[00:23:20] Corey Maass: No absolutely. Perfectly restated. The code, there are degrees of efficiency. There are, you're taking into context all of the different elements. So like Claude might write a method but it needs to work well with the way that the database is set up or whatever, right? So there's nuances. This is what we've made careers off of.

But exactly as you say, at the end of the day, it needs to work, it needs to be performant, it needs to be sustainable code, a few things. You check off these boxes and good enough if nothing else. Versus like, I am also a music producer. I make dance music and I like the way that I make dance music. It probably could be made by AI, if I'm honest, but it won't scratch that itch for me, and that's fine, right? This is a thing that I will probably, I and my music colleagues will all continue to do, even in the face of AI, because that's not the point. It's not about a thing that does work. And we're going to talk about a client project in a minute. We said we'd talk about that, right?

I have a client who's hired me to build a piece of software that needs to do a certain thing. And so with her blessing, I am co-writing it with Claude Code, having it checked by Copilot, but at the end of the day, she doesn't care who writes it or what language it's in or, dot, dot, dot. It has to do a thing. It has to let people do a certain kind of work, right?

Different from music. I'm not, for me, bedroom producer, I'm not trying to make millions of sales. I'm not a pop recording artist who's reliant on this stuff. And so for me, it's about connecting with other humans after I produce a piece of, let's call it art, which is, I think a stretch.

But I'm also, I've always struggled with the actual mixing of the music. Like hearing all of the frequencies and optimising the output. Because there is, again, a right way, like it's not, again, it's not black and white, but it's much closer to, there is a right way for a song to sound with infinite variations, but within a very narrow gap, right? So I could write any kind of song I want, but the way that it should sound when I release it on Bandcamp does have answers. And in fact, this morning, I had finished a mix of a song last night, different from writing it, I'm going back through and tweaking it to try to make it sound as best as it could so that when I send it to DJs and they play it on dance floors, everybody throws their hands in the air, right?

I've always struggled with that. My ears aren't good at hearing those kinds of things. I dropped the track into Gemini, and Gemini came back with a, you've got a peak of frequencies at around 5,000, so you should drop that by two db. Your kick and your base are competing, and so you should add a ducker to the base so that the kick comes through and that'll actually save you four db of headroom when you're mastering. Like, I mean it was.

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: It just gave you all the science, which is absolutely fascinating. That is genuinely interesting.

[00:26:15] Corey Maass: It probably isn't perfect, and it definitely can be subjective, like maybe I'm going for Lo-Fi House instead of Big Room House. But I gave it that information where I said, here's the genre, make me sound like these other artists. And so it said, well, here's sort of how to help guide you closer to their sound.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing there, I think, is it gave you a new rabbit hole that should you wish to explore, you just got it prized open. And you wouldn't have known what any of that was. And so you could probably map that into a million different scenarios, you know, music, art, whatever may be. And it will just give you something back and you'll be, oh, there's that universe of stuff to get interested in. You know, the headroom of the dbs and all of that kind of, I mean it means nothing to me, but I kind of grasped that there's a thing there.

Do you know, you said something really interesting earlier and it probably just slipped out of your mouth and you didn't notice how interesting or profound it was. You said it wasn't the point. And you were talking about making music and using AI for that isn't the point. I think that's going to become the metric of so much in the future. What's the point of that thing?

So as an example, if I want to go and see a band, I do not want to watch a video of a band where I have a suspicion that there was an AI involved and it created this video and the music. The point is I want to go and see a bunch of human beings who I know have struggled with their art and their discipline and, you know, failure and moderate success and all of that kind of stuff. I want to know that there was that soul searching going on in that musical arena.

But curiously, when I go to a SaaS app, the point is, does it work? It's really simple. Does it work? And do I care too much about how the functioning of it was achieved? Not really. The point is, does it work? And maybe we'll be asking ourselves that question more. What is the point of the thing I'm about to do? Does it matter to me if AI was involved? On closer examination, yes it does. I'm going to avoid that thing. Or, no, it doesn't. That's fine. I'll embrace that thing. It really landed with me what you said there. So that's kind of curious. I wonder if I'll start doing that more in my own life, examining the point of it. Is it a human enterprise, something extremely human and only for humans, or is it somewhere else on that spectrum? Yeah, interesting.

[00:28:32] Corey Maass: An example just came to mind, which of course has now just gone out of my mind because I started thinking about six other things. But like I read a couple of graphic novels. That's what it was, memes. I read a couple of graphic novels and some of it is, I read for the artistry. Some of it I read for the stories. There's graphic novels where I actually really don't like the artwork, but I like the storytelling. How would I feel about the art being generated by AI? Because the person who was writing the story couldn't draw, but could tell a good story.

Or the example that had come to mind were memes, or funny photos, right? I'm not a meme person. I generally don't repost animated gifs, or can haz cheeseburger, or any of that stuff. Some of it's cute or whatever, and I'm not against it, but it doesn't tickle my sense of humor, right?

But lately, I've long been proficient in Photoshop because like we said, I started in 97 when you were designing websites in Photoshop or whatever. And so for a long time, like I would say, so here's a good example. One of my big clients is Seattle Magazine. And so we were doing, I don't remember, there was some reference of Sasquatch, creatures that are most active in the Pacific Northwest, often around the Seattle area. They are real, by the way.

But the joke was that our editor was writing his letter or something. And so I, quick, ran over to AI and said, here's the picture of Bigfoot that everybody knows, walking across the stream bed or whatever. Here's headshots of my editor. Put my editor in this photo. And it generated a photo of Jonathan as Sasquatch, like walking across the river. And it made us all laugh. And I think we did end up putting it in the magazine. I don't remember.

I would have done the same thing in Photoshop, much less effectively. Even 10 years before, I would've grabbed a copy of the original photo and done my best to Photoshop Jonathan into the photo, maybe he's hiding behind a bush or something. I couldn't actually change his body to be walking in that pose. Now I can.

Is the effect the same? And again, we're not talking about the negatives, or obvious negatives, about image generation of other people. Used in a harmless, funny way or day to day. Like, another good example. So on the Mexican Train website, one of the things that I wanted when I created mexicantrain.online was, again, this was about people connecting. This was my COVID project. And so I, a couple of years before, I'm chatting with a buddy online, I was joking about how I was eating Cheez-its, which we like never have in the house and how Cheez-its are just the best thing in the world, and they're dangerous to have in the house. And a week later, a box of like 50 packs of Cheez-its arrived because he had shipped it to me as a joke.

So I took a picture of me like looking absolutely exalted, elated, holding up Cheez-its. Oh my God, Cheez-its, right? And that's what I put on the Mexican Train website as a like, hey, I'm Corey, I built this thing, because it was a very relatable photo. A funny little side story is that still, five years later, a lot of people who play Mexican Train daily or weekly using my website buy Cheez-its, or buy Cheez-its for each other as prizes and things like that. Like, it all became an inside joke.

In building the new version, I wanted a new homepage. But that photo, I've actually lost the original file of it, and I only have a low res version. So I uploaded that into Gemini. I'm also more bald and my beard is longer. And so I uploaded the original photo and then a couple of photos of me more recently and said, hey, Gemini, using Nano Banana, create a new version of this. And also, like the original photo is very zoomed in. You could really just see my face. And so I was like, I want head and shoulders. And it did a beautiful job. Fixed the lighting. It looks almost a little too polished, frankly. And my wife looks at it and she's like, I don't know why, but I can tell that's AI generated, like I can tell that's not you. But to anybody else, it's certainly close enough. I look at it and I'm like, it's me but I've been photoshopped a little or, you know, it's been cleaned up or something. But it's close enough. But it's a better photo that still conveys the same message, but it works better on the page, I think. But it's not authentic, air quotes.

[00:32:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that whole authenticity thing is going to be, well, I guess it's going to be a question for everybody going forward, certainly in, you know, you can imagine politics and things like that. Just judging whether or not the politician that's on your screen at the moment is in fact doing that thing.

[00:33:12] Corey Maass: That's the terrifying part is, what's real anymore?

[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: There's no doubt that we are going to have to kind of work that through.

When you are using your AI, and we will get onto your client bits in a minute. When you are using the AI, on what level do you feel that you are in some kind of relationship with it? That's a very ephemeral question. But, do you view it as, so you described that a year ago it was less good. So in human terms you might say, okay, it's more childlike or something like that. You know, it's a smaller version of a human being. It's less mature and what have you. Now it's grown up, for want of a better word. It's a little bit older perhaps, or more mature or whatever it may be. Do you think about it in any human terms?

[00:33:48] Corey Maass: Oh, absolutely.

[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that fascinating.

[00:33:49] Corey Maass: So what's funny is, we've had a few of these conversations lately. My neighbors have Alexa in their house and they changed it to respond to computer, and they will only refer to it as, it. They did not want it to be humanised dogmatically. Like, it's important to them that this is not a companion, a creature, a whatever, right?

I don't care that much, and in fact, I enjoy playing with language. And I don't see, the current state of how we're interacting with our technology, I don't have a problem with humanising it, or at least using certain pronouns and things like that.

And that's why I say that specifically, Claude is a, he, it's a male name, male, Western English name, right? Or if nothing else, I've never met or heard of a woman named Claude. Claude has always been a he. But one of the funny things that happened working with my buddy Robert, is he, like I said, he introduced Copilot to do code reviews and we're chatting, he's one of my, the buddies that I have where, you know, we chat online all day, every day, ongoing conversation. And he just started saying she about Copilot. And I did too. I did notice it, but I'm like, I have no objection, reaction to this. I see no harm in it.

I have no idea if we're going to take this conversation way too far. The Octocat, that is the mascot of GitHub. I don't know if the Octocat has a gender or pronouns or what have you. If you're going to think of Copilot as some version of the Octocat, like I don't, how you might get there, even subconsciously, right? But like just using Copilot, Robert started saying she, so I started saying she. And then he actually said after, Robert, after a couple of days was like, you know, by the way, I don't know if you noticed, but I'd started saying she for Copilot. For some reason I got a, call it a feminine energy off of her. And I was like, yeah, I noticed. I could maybe pick up, perceive that too, if I'm going to overanalyse it. I mean it so doesn't matter.

So now Copilot is she and Claude is he. I've never thought to ask Copilot if they have preferred pronouns, which I guess would then actually get it into that like real world and societal conversations and philosophical, not to say that a gender discussion is philosophical but, you know what I mean? Like, actual consequences of real world issues, let's call it that.

[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is so interesting that a lot of things, the sort of anthropomorphic nature of it, so we're trying to build robots at the minute, and in many cases we're trying to build a version of a human being. You know, it's got legs and arms and clearly in many cases that is the least plausible design for the thing it's trying to achieve. But we have this notion that, well, if we get a human being out of robots, that's going to be great. It will be able to do all the things that we can do.

But equally, on some level, we're trying to get it to approximate human intelligence, human creativity, and things like that. And that kind of leads me to this one final thing before we talk about your clients, and that is, at what point do we start learning from it?

[00:36:43] Corey Maass: Aren't we already? You're constantly asking questions.

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that was exactly the question. Yeah, so it would appear that in the case of code, at least anyway, you know, you ask it to do a particular thing and it will come up with this, I mean you could ignore what it's done and just play the output and interact with what it has achieved. But if you were to delve into the code, I suspect there is quite a lot of head scratching and looking at things and going, gosh, that's interesting. Why has it done it that way? That's curious. Oh, I should be doing it that way.

[00:37:08] Corey Maass: Is it better than me, versus is it better than everybody? We don't have a way to determine that. And that's why I brought up the science stuff earlier. I'm like, okay, so if a bunch of scientists, let's just be vague here, are in a laboratory, or in a think tank and are working together, but they're also feeding everything that they're thinking into an AI who is also thinking, at what point if, somebody comes up with a brand new concept or a new way to approach a medical issue or something like that, you're like, oh, that's amazing. I don't think that's been done before. What happens when that's Claude or ChatGPT?

Presumably, in that specific instance, like the same process of like, oh, that's, I don't think any of us have thought of that before, let's go do some experiments to see if that actually works, kind of thing. What if it's well beyond our comprehension? What if it's, there's a conclusion, words that are typed on a screen that are so far beyond anything that we're doing? You think of Einstein or you think of these scientists who have done stuff that, you know, or even, I mean you could be as vague as like painters who died in poverty and obscurity, but we revere them today. Vincent Van Gogh of course comes to mind.

[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's kind of curious because obviously each one of us is a little entity and we're constrained by our biology. You know, we've got this finite capacity in our brain. You have a finite time span on earth so, you know, for much of that time, you are just basically a recipient of knowledge, if you like? You're this sponge, which is sucking things in. And then for a period of time you'll be able to regurgitate it. You know, if you have an accident, your capacity will be diminished. If you're knocked on the head or something like that. But you're bound in time and you are bound in capacity because of the size of the neural network that you've got in your head.

And yet we're now being confronted with this other thing, which can do things remarkably quickly, can have the entire corpus of more or less everything at its disposal at a moment's notice. And it can, this version of the entity over there, inside that other box is exactly the same as this one over here. You know, they're kind of replicas of each other. And then if you put those two together, they can do things in symbiosis at twice the speed than, basically they've got this whole load of stuff going on that we can't hope to manage.

And it'll be so interesting being in relation with that, and how we start to learn from it because, when was the last time you actually went to a book or went to a human teacher in your adult life to learn something? You just sort of go to Google, don't you? And you've trusted on a computer to serve up the information for you for a long time. We've now got a new route to that information. I wasn't really going anywhere with that. It was more of a sort of thought process. Yeah, interesting. Okay, let's move to your client then.

You did allude to this a little while ago, and it sounded like, certainly for the one client that you've got, there's no obstacle here. You are just building the stuff. The client is entirely happy. I presume you are taking on the responsibility if the things that you produce with the AI kind of backfires or something is not working correctly. Is that your estimation of sort of the future into 2026, 2027, that the clients basically don't care?

And if that's the case, does it allow you to be more profitable because you are spending less time? Or more effective because you can do more complicated things? Or, do you sense that maybe we're going to hit a point in the years that come where the clients start to, well, rebel is the wrong word, but you know what I mean, their expectations will be, well, it's no longer, well, I know that Corey's using AI, so my expectation's going to go up in terms of his output, but also my expectation of his fee is going to go down as well? So there's a lot in that question, but unpack bits however you choose.

[00:40:47] Corey Maass: So answering part 2.6b first.

[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's helpful.

[00:40:52] Corey Maass: The story is, I had a client who had software built, it didn't work out. But that meant that, largely her budget had been spent and so she was left with software that was, didn't do everything she needed it to and, or at least there was not a lot of budget leftover for, because it's, when the rubber hits the road kind of thing. Going, oh wait, we didn't think of this. Now that we're actually using it every day, we need it to do this and this instead of this and this. You design in a bubble and then you actually need to use the thing. And there just wasn't budget left over.

And so when we started talking, she's like, I need these few things fixed. I looked at it and was like, I can't really maintain this. We really want to, I mean typical, this is going to sound like every developer is like, I have to build it from scratch my way. But in some sense, at least in order for me to maintain it, it needed to be rebuilt my way. But we kept looking at, what would that cost? And she's like, I've already spent my budget and so we're waiting for new clients to come in or lightning to strike so that Corey can do this.

AI happened to be that lightning. And I went back to her and I said, I think we're to the point now, this was just a couple months ago, that I can build it for probably half based on hours. Because we're still, at least at the moment, going, okay, we're charging X dollars per hour of Corey's time which isn't, has never been, or at least for a long, long time, has not been just me typing characters into an IDE, right? A code editor. You're paying for Corey's experience, you're paying for Corey's planning, you're paying for conversations that we're having in order to come to certain conclusions to figure out the software we're going to build, blah, blah, blah.

So thinking of it in that same context, it's not just about me typing. And so now it's not about me typing at all. And in fact, I've had friends now, and I've read this too where the sentiment, or a sentiment, of developers now is we are project managers. We are product designers, or acting as the client in classic agile project management style. We are code reviewers because we're not, why should we take the time to write the code anymore? And again, this is why, part of why we introduced Copilot, because it's like, oh, then if we can also not do that part of it.

Humans are valuable. That was something that you inadvertently alluded to earlier, is that we are still currently, we think we're steering the ship, telling AI what to do and controlling how we're using it and stuff like that, but like we make mistakes just as much as AI does. We aren't the stop gap we often think we are, because we often make mistakes, or we don't know what we don't know, like you said a minute ago about just googling everything and that kind of thing.

So anyway, talked to the client, said, look I think we can build this for half the price. I'm willing to take the risk if you are. I'm very upfront about like, we're building this with AI, which is part of why we can do this. And she said, great, let's do it. And so it's been a slightly different experience. We still had to have the conversations about what the product looks like, what it does, and stuff like that. But I was in fact able to get it going a lot faster than I would have before. And because this is client work, I'm checking it a lot more diligently. Because again, like you said, there's liability, or at least I'm going to be the one that has to fix it, so I need to make sure that it's written in a language that I understand, and it's laid out in a way that I understand.

And I was a little more opinionated because I want to make sure that files are in certain folders, which nobody, as we said at the beginning of the call, nobody cares about. Like, as long as the software works, nobody cares where the files are. But we've, over 30 years of development, we've developed certain patterns that just make it easier. So why shouldn't we take the time to make it easier? And especially since I don't have to do the work, I can say, hey, Claude, you put this file over here, put it over here instead. And Claude goes, sure. Why not? I don't care.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if we ever get to the point where the AI is literally doing everything, then all of that would go out the window, wouldn't it? You wouldn't ever need to care where that file was, so long as the AI had a hand in knowing where that was, and it could retrieve that information and modify things as it was. But it feels like we're certainly still in that human diagnosis phase, where you need it to look a certain way. I'm doing air quotes again, the sort of old fashioned way, you know what I mean? The way you've always done it, so that when it puts something out, you, yourself can look at it and go, okay, this is comprehensible to me. I can understand and see if there's been errors. But I would imagine it's not going to be long until that moment has passed.

[00:45:23] Corey Maass: With the new version of Mexican Train, treating it kind of like I talked about Timerdoro early on, I'm caring a lot less, and I'm forcing myself to care a lot less. I've got a working version, this is an online game that is important to people, and it's not that it's not important to me, but I am comfortable with taking a little more risk. And so I am letting it more freely do what it wants.

What's interesting is we are not to the point yet where, as you said, this box is the identical to this box. So I am finding that on certain days it'll go, well, I'll put the file here, and on other days it'll say, put the file here. It doesn't matter, right? At least with that example, it doesn't matter. You want it to write performant code, so you want it to make choices where things like performance matter, but whether a file is in one directory or another does not have real impact on the performance of the game.

But comprehension down the road, because this is where we overlap with humans. You're like, okay, so Claude tomorrow needs to understand where things are. It still makes more sense to have a logical file structure so that Claude tomorrow can go, oh, it looks like all of these types of files are in this directory. And so we end up coming to some of the same conclusions that 30 years of human development has decided are the better patterns.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I mean, I guess it was ultimately because it's creating its own, I don't know, it's next word based upon the whole corpus of the human word written down on the internet. It's probably going to make, draw some broadly similar conclusions.

It sounds, from what you just said, you used the word like half, I think a minute ago when you were talking about maybe the budget or the time available. Sounds like you were at roughly 0.5, half of whatever the commodity was, budget or time or what have you. Is that roughly where you think you are at the moment compared to pre AI in terms of efficiency? And do you see that efficiency, again, time or money, whatever it may be, do you see that dynamic changing so that you eventually get to, I don't know, 0.4, 0.3, 0.1 of the amount of time that you would've done? And do you have an expectation that, at the time that you are doing 0.1 of the work for the same outcome, that you'll get 1.0 of the salary that you got? Or will you have to do, you know, the other 0.9 on other jobs?

[00:47:43] Corey Maass: There's a reason why developers really like starting new projects or rewriting them from scratch, right? Clean slate. And I think that that work, where you are in total control, in an empty directory, all technology at your fingertips, I see that quickly speeding up. I'll tell you, one of the biggest hacks, I should have said this way up front, like the best value, because I'm finding a lot of people don't know this, is screenshots will save you.

Claude Code does not, there are ways around this, but largely Claude Code or other AIs do not know what things look like in the browser. So taking screenshots, dropping them in, you can now say, look, the columns are misaligned or whatever. But also, even text, like I am just constantly taking screenshots and throwing them in to Claude, right?

So part of what I'm doing right now, I know there's a better way to do this, but I haven't stopped to figure it out yet, is, Copilot reviews the code and then spits out a bunch of comments, right? I am taking screenshots of each one of those comments and dropping it back into Claude and saying, here's what Copilot said, fix it. But I don't even really have to type any words because Claude just reads the words that are in the screenshot. So it takes me three seconds to take a screenshot, drop it into Claude, and then Claude goes, oh, it looks like Copilot said we should do this instead, that makes sense. Or even has come back and said, well, Copilot doesn't understand the bigger context, so I'll push back on this kind of thing, right?

But I'm still copying, I'm still taking screenshots and pasting. There's got to be a way, I fully intend to do this soon, to figure out how to have Claude just read those comments and so the two of them can work together. So I shouldn't be involved until there's, I want a system that comes back and says, Claude did all, made all these changes, Copilot made all these comments, Claude is cool with these and not with these. Overall, we're good to go.

[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: It'd be so interesting to set the two agents against each other, I don't know, at bedtime on one evening, and to wake up in the morning and see quite how they've got along, if you know what I mean? You know, has it been this entirely, because obviously it's built upon the corpus of human knowledge, it'd be interesting to see if it's been this entirely productive experience, or if there has been some element of humanity creeping into that conversation where, you know, one of them throws their toys out the trolley halfway through and things like that. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see if they, you know, or if one just sort of, I don't know, determines that maybe, oh, that AI's doing a much better job than I am. I'm going to slow it down with some.

[00:50:19] Corey Maass: Or level up or, yeah. So getting back to your question though, right? Nothing is the same as actual humans interacting with something. So if we're talking about traditional software that humans are clicking on, and then that's my second biggest point right now is, since we're supposed to be talking about WordPress, WordPress is all about clicking, right? It's all about interface. It's all about, you're signing into an admin so you think about how visual that is, and then in the admin, you've got this left menu with, here's all your options, click, click, click, click. And then the design of the page, right?

Every client wants the logo to be bigger. And so you can go into AI and say like, oh, where I'm at right now is, if I'm building something new, I can use AI, I can generate it if I'm building software. But trying to essentially retrofit into current existing WordPress sites, we've got all these features that require clicky clicky on buttons, and AI can't do that readily or what have you.

So I'm still spending a large part of my day signing into WordPress sites, clicking around actually making changes, reconnecting. When we post a story, it pushes to Facebook and so I've got to actually go in and connect and click through the screens and all that kind of stuff. Which at the end of the day, most of the changes that you're making in UI correspond to things being saved in a database. So at some point we're going to get to where AI knows, oh, for Beaver Builder, I can make this change, store it in the database in a certain shape, and Beaver Builder will know how to render that on the front end.

I'm already finding that with ACF, for example, like I have ACF save field groups as JSON, a feature they've had for a decade. But because it's in JSON, in text files, AI can read that and then go in and make changes or replicate it sideways because it says, oh, it wants the data to look, have this certain structure so I can create another file and make the data have this certain structure and does a great job. But there are 50,000 plugins. And I'm not about to let AI go and look at my database willy-nilly to say, oh, Elementor wants the data to be stored this way in the database, let me just start writing things to, you know? And so there's still that disconnect right now.

[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think WordPress is doing a lot of work with things like the Abilities API and things like that to sort of surface what WordPress is capable of. And I would imagine, you know, you mentioned Beaver Builder and Elementor, I'm imagining that in a future, they'll be writing what their capabilities are, and where they're storing their information in such a way that the, hopefully anybody with any AI can kind of instruct the AI to do the thing, and it will know what the thing is.

Absolutely fascinating. I'm so curious because you are doing a whole load of stuff that I'm just not doing. I was never really an out and out developer, I was kind of dangerous with code. But equally it does seem like folk like me, who are not really experimenting with this too much are getting, well, left behind is maybe one way of describing it, maybe we're sort of enjoying it on some level as well. We're enjoying watching other people do it, and we get to worry about what the societal impacts will be.

[00:53:44] Corey Maass: It's points of integration. Electric cars came along and most of us were like, I don't want or can't buy a Tesla. But then the Prius came out and everybody went, oh, I can buy a Toyota. That's probably historically inaccurate. Maybe the Prius came out before Tesla, but you get my point.

The people around me, my neighbors are teachers. One of them has no interest, has no reason to use AI other than like, oh, let me look up a recipe or something. Versus, the other neighbor who really wants to be cutting edge and also thinks that this stuff is really neat. Is constantly trying to figure out, how can I run, generate, bingo cards was the new thing? Have AI figure out how to do these bingo cards for my students, or what have you. And you get into the moral gray area of, who's actually writing papers and then who's actually grading them? And so basically you've got AI grading papers that were written by AI. And you can get into, like anything, there's all these sort of side effects. But, again, trying to keep it upbeat, like there's neat things.

[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I think we've done a great job of kind of keeping it upbeat. You've just been relentlessly positive about it. You know, it's obviously had a profound impact on your life, your capacity to do things. You sound like you're infinitely curious about it as well. So it's, maybe the life of a developer was something that wouldn't have held the same level of excitement for the next decade or more. But this new technology getting injected and shaking everything up a bit, makes it so that you can do things that you might not have ever taken on, because the technical challenges or time might have been too difficult.

[00:55:12] Corey Maass: Would I want to be a new developer? I don't know. Again, I think things are, I'm trying to describe where I'm at now, where, again, like WordPress is still very clicky clicky, and that happens to be the majority of the work that I do professionally.

I also think that, like I run a lot of websites for friends and for local nonprofits and stuff like that because there's still something to be said for having a website. And the easiest way, so like we have a local, city owned, calling it a ski mountain is generous. You can technically ski on it. Most of the value to the community is there's a tubing hill. So you get pulled up the hill in a tube and then you come screaming down the hill at 25 miles an hour. It's freaking awesome.

I volunteer there and so when we needed a new website, I said, let me make a new website, right? I don't want to be, if I'm involved in a tubing accident, this is the pointed version of getting hit by a bus, the developer scenario of getting hit by a bus, right? Somebody else needs to be able to step in and maintain that. So the website can't, the value of something like WordPress, a CMS software in general for generating websites, right. I can't, and even, TMI, but the guy who had the previous website had built it all by hand, and so nobody else could begin to maintain it or make changes to it.

And so for the new version, I was like, this is literally the best scenario for WordPress because I created the website and then I shot a video of how to update the website. And just a week ago, the head of the board in charge of it got in touch and said, hey, how do we make changes to the website? Do I have to send them to you? And I said, here's a video, go give it a try. And if you get stuck, then absolutely contact me. But if there was any sort of running of scripts or FTPing into the server to make changes, or any of that stuff, like it would fall flat. And so you still need, at the moment, you still need clicky clicky.

Shortly, as you said with the new API and stuff, there'll be a little chat bot where you'll say, look at this website. And the AI will go, oh, it looks like you're using Beaver Builder with ACF, and you've got Yoast installed, dah, dah, dah. And then you'll say, okay, we need to change the homepage to say the following things. And I think we're going to go through, like any of this stuff, we're going to go through a phase where it's going to absolutely break the website and my phone will ring.

But six months later, it'll get better and better and better, and then using certain plugins. And I think, you talk about adoption, I think, if the plugins that lean into making AI be able to use their software well and quickly. So like I'm a big fan of Beaver Builder. So if Beaver Builder leans into enabling AI to interact with Beaver Builder, right? Then we are going to, just like any of the things in WordPress, there's good and there's bad, there's favorites, there's things that break over time. There's all that kind of stuff, things that are maintained well and whatnot.

And so we're going to get to a point where certain stacks are going to work better with AI. And I think site creators like me are going to say, oh, I don't want to maintain this website for our local ski hill more than I have to. But instead of them having to go in and click on things and adjust boxes on a screen, I'm going to use Beaver Builder, but maybe I give up, ACF will never let me down but let's, hypothetically, ACF doesn't work well with AI, but Meta Box does. So I might say, okay, I'm going to switch my AI friendly stack to be Beaver Builder with Meta Box, so that they can just go in and type something, it'll all sort itself out more reliably. And I think that's what we're going to see over time.

[00:58:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think there's been so many interesting predictions about what is coming. Most of my predictions have turned out to be just hot air, essentially, because the rate of change is so, so, very fast. But I do like the direction that WordPress is going in, where it's being sort of agnostic of the AI, the actual API, for want of a better word. You know, it's just going to hopefully be able to bind to any of those. I think that's a curious direction, and it kind of leans into that, I guess the philosophy of something like WordPress as well. That it's there for everybody and it's not there to generate money for a particular company, be it Open AI or Gemini or what have you.

We've probably hit the sweet spot in terms of the amount of time that we can give to this. What an interesting discussion though. So far ranging. We ended up with lots of sort of philosophical points, and lifestyle points and all sorts in there. But I think in the end we sort of wrestled it back to WordPress.

So Corey, where can we find you? If somebody's interested in sort of having a chat and wants to talk AI, where would you be online?

[00:59:53] Corey Maass: Sure. Twitter, @coreymaass, is probably the social that I'm most active on. But also, Post Status, the WordPress community. Always love shouting that out. That's been invaluable in my life and career. And then me as a developer, company, gelform.com. G-E-L-F-O-R-M .com. You can email me there if you want to yell at me or praise me or, but privately.

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We will put all of those into the show notes so that anybody that wants to reach Corey can do that. Head to wptavern.com, search for Corey's name. It's a slightly unusual spelling. The surname, it's C-O-R-E-Y, the Corey bit, but Maass is M-A-A-S-S. So search for that and you'll be able to find him. Corey, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[01:00:39] Corey Maass: Thanks Nathan. Always a pleasure.