WordPress wasn't built for AI, or was it?
In this opinion piece, @miriamschwab makes the case that two decades of open infrastructure, hooks, and 60,000+ plugins have positioned #WordPress perfectly for the AI era.
https://t.co/z863RNAcRW
#sponsoredpost
"I built a site in 2 hours with AI" posts are missing the point entirely.
Nobody's arguing AI can't generate a website. It can. The question is what happens on day 31.
Your developer is busy. Your marketing manager wants to update the homepage hero. Your content team has three blog posts ready to go.
Who's touching the site?
If the answer is "we have to wait for a developer" that's not a website problem. That's a business problem that isn't solved by AI.
This is exactly why WordPress still powers 43% of the internet, not because it's trendy, but because it works for real teams over the long haul.
A few things AI-generated sites quietly can't do:
Look like you.
Vibe-coded sites and no-code tools recycle the same layouts. Your competitors are launching the same "site" with different colors. Custom WordPress builds don't have that problem.
Hand off cleanly.
Any developer on the planet can open a WordPress project and know exactly what they're looking at. Try that with someone else's AI-generated codebase.
Let non-devs take the wheel. WordPress was built around the idea that content people — not engineers — run websites. That's still true.
Scale without starting over.
E-commerce, memberships, multilingual, complex integrations — there's a plugin or a pattern for it. You're not rebuilding from scratch every time requirements change.
Keep you in control.
Your data, your hosting, your codebase. No platform deciding to change pricing or deprecate a feature you depend on.
Speed to launch is a metric. It's just not the most important one.
The sites that win long-term are the ones people can actually maintain, update, and grow — without the whole thing becoming someone's full-time job.
I have now missed the first session at 11am I wanted to see at @SusHiTech_SUJP 2026, stuck in this queue. 20 mins in and I'm only halfway.
Despite receiving a QR code on the ticket via email - everyone needs to queue up if they havent PRINTED IT OUT ON A4 paper.
What the ... ????
I can't believe a tech event needs a paper ticket in 2026. A terrible, terrible advertisement for Japanese tech.
Happy to be a digital transformation consultant for Sushi Tech next year to improve the customer experience.
@SusHiTech_SUJP@japantimes
#STT2026
最近のWordPress界隈でのいろんな論争を見ると、こちらの投稿の「WordPress people stopped being "WordPress people", WordPress could regain the community hype that it used to have.」が重みを増す…
The WordPress community had has a lot of thoughts about Emdash. Here's mine:
The most important thing to know: it's a CMS layer on top of Astro.
What does that matter? 2 reasons:
1. At it's core, it's not something super new and unstable. Astro is incredibly mature and well maintained.
2. Emdash takes something that was built for modern developers, with a ton of great conveniences, and builds something accessible to WYSIWYG folks on top of it.
I've been using Astro to build sites since the pre-1.0 days. Back then, it was primarily for static content. As it's evolved, it's gone from being a really great SSG to my go-to framework.
IIRC, one of the first ones I put into production was the Pagely Quickstart docs site. Yup, I decided against using WordPress for an enterprise WordPress hosting company's docs site.
Why? Astro was the better tool for the job.
I won't go into all of those details right now, but building and maintaining it in WordPress would have been a PITA. I needed fast, reliable DX with near-zero maintenance.
But here's the problem with Astro: if ya can't write up some code, Astro is gonna be a bad time. It's a framework, not a CMS.
WordPress shines because of the WYSIWYG nature of it. Even your mom can write a blog post in WordPress (she told me in bed last night). If she needs something extra, there's a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes to go wild with. Worst case, she hires a dev to build something custom - WordPress devs far outweigh the demand.
Emdash is to Astro was the WordPress admin dash + post editor is to WordPress core.
But here's the big elephant in the room: is Emdash the "WordPress killer" that it's claimed to be?
Short answer: Ehhhhh... Right now? Not really.
Long answer: Over time, quite possibly. But that's going to depend on a lot of variables.
1. WordPress isn't going anywhere, even if market shifts. We still have demand for COBOL devs, we'll still have demand for WordPress devs for years to come. Companies take an eternity to switch over things that already work fine.
2. The WordPress ecosystem is so huge that it's going to be a while before anyone has 1:1 solutions for all the weird niche stuff. Especially if we're talking about non-devs who need a site builder experience.
3. WordPress could start progressing. If the repo got cleaned up, dev workflows improved, hosting became reliable, and WordPress people stopped being "WordPress people", WordPress could regain the community hype that it used to have.
Anyways, there's my brain dump. If you have thoughts, hit me with 'em.
TLDR: No, Emdash isn't going to murder WordPress. At least not right now. But it has a ton of potential. Only time will tell.
The WordPress community had has a lot of thoughts about Emdash. Here's mine:
The most important thing to know: it's a CMS layer on top of Astro.
What does that matter? 2 reasons:
1. At it's core, it's not something super new and unstable. Astro is incredibly mature and well maintained.
2. Emdash takes something that was built for modern developers, with a ton of great conveniences, and builds something accessible to WYSIWYG folks on top of it.
I've been using Astro to build sites since the pre-1.0 days. Back then, it was primarily for static content. As it's evolved, it's gone from being a really great SSG to my go-to framework.
IIRC, one of the first ones I put into production was the Pagely Quickstart docs site. Yup, I decided against using WordPress for an enterprise WordPress hosting company's docs site.
Why? Astro was the better tool for the job.
I won't go into all of those details right now, but building and maintaining it in WordPress would have been a PITA. I needed fast, reliable DX with near-zero maintenance.
But here's the problem with Astro: if ya can't write up some code, Astro is gonna be a bad time. It's a framework, not a CMS.
WordPress shines because of the WYSIWYG nature of it. Even your mom can write a blog post in WordPress (she told me in bed last night). If she needs something extra, there's a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes to go wild with. Worst case, she hires a dev to build something custom - WordPress devs far outweigh the demand.
Emdash is to Astro was the WordPress admin dash + post editor is to WordPress core.
But here's the big elephant in the room: is Emdash the "WordPress killer" that it's claimed to be?
Short answer: Ehhhhh... Right now? Not really.
Long answer: Over time, quite possibly. But that's going to depend on a lot of variables.
1. WordPress isn't going anywhere, even if market shifts. We still have demand for COBOL devs, we'll still have demand for WordPress devs for years to come. Companies take an eternity to switch over things that already work fine.
2. The WordPress ecosystem is so huge that it's going to be a while before anyone has 1:1 solutions for all the weird niche stuff. Especially if we're talking about non-devs who need a site builder experience.
3. WordPress could start progressing. If the repo got cleaned up, dev workflows improved, hosting became reliable, and WordPress people stopped being "WordPress people", WordPress could regain the community hype that it used to have.
Anyways, there's my brain dump. If you have thoughts, hit me with 'em.
TLDR: No, Emdash isn't going to murder WordPress. At least not right now. But it has a ton of potential. Only time will tell.