Every blog post. Every plugin page. Every WordCamp talk. The entire WordPress world is singing the same song about AI: build faster, automate more, save time, be more productive.
We looked at the most transformative technology of our lives and said, “You know what? Workflows.”
We sound like we’re selling printer toner.
AI doesn’t just make you faster. It gives you skills you never had. That’s not an upgrade. That’s a completely different thing.
Faster Is a Treadmill
At State of the Word 2025, the AI conversation was about handling “repetitive work.” WordCamp US ran sessions called “AI-Powered Publishing Workflows.” Elementor wants you to publish faster. Yoast wants to save you time on summaries.
You know what faster gets you? The same website everyone else has, sooner.
And that should terrify us — because WordPress already has a sameness problem. Automattic’s own design blog asked years ago: “When was the last time you felt wowed by a new website design?” Websites have gotten measurably more similar over the past fifteen years. WordPress, powering 40% of the web, is ground zero for it.
Now here comes AI promising to “generate a full site in minutes.” Think about what that actually produces. The average of everything the model has ever seen. The median layout. The most probable color scheme. We took a sameness problem and handed it a turbocharger.
“Faster” without “weirder” just means more of the same.
What Actually Changed
Before AI, every feature on your site had to survive a cost-benefit analysis. You wanted a playful hover animation? That’s a developer’s afternoon — $500 minimum, if you can even find someone who’ll take the job. An interactive quiz that matches your brand’s personality? A few thousand. Cursor-following particles? A block that rolls dice for your D&D blog? A confetti button? The ROI is zero. Nobody’s writing that check.
So you didn’t build it. Neither did anyone else. We all did the math, shrugged, and moved on. Millions of times, across millions of sites.
That math just broke.
That dice block? Eight minutes. The hover animation? Five. The personality quiz? Fifteen if you’re picky. The entire category of “I’d love that but I can’t justify it” just vanished. Not the expensive stuff — we were already building that. The interesting stuff. The stuff nobody would greenlight because it doesn’t convert, doesn’t rank, doesn’t fit in a sprint.
AI didn’t make the old work cheaper. It made new work possible. And almost nobody in WordPress is talking about that.
Proof
I can’t write code. Not a line. But I’ve spent the last few months building things that shouldn’t exist: a Pokémon fact block that serves random trivia every time you load the page. A confetti button — literally just a button that blasts confetti, because your site should make you smile. Personality quizzes. Star charts. Scrolling tickers.
Zero conversion value. Zero SEO benefit. Zero productivity gain. They just make sites worth visiting.
Tammie Lister spent all of October building a new Gutenberg block every day. One was a playable Tetris game inside the block editor. The Gutenberg lead clicked it and lost an hour of his life. Matt Mullenweg gave us both a shoutout on his blog.
And that’s roughly where it ends. Two people making this argument. In an ecosystem of millions.
Everyone Else Gets It
Outside our bubble, this is already happening. The vibe coding movement is full of people building sites that are expressive — not optimized, not productive, just unmistakably theirs. The indie web is surging with people who are sick of algorithmic sameness and want their corners of the internet to have personality.
And WordPress? The platform built for personal publishing? The project whose entire reason for existing is democratizing the web? We’re sitting this out. We have the biggest install base, the most users who want interesting sites but can’t code, and AI tools that are ready right now.
Instead we’re writing meta descriptions 40% faster.
Build Something Stupid
I’m not talking to developers. I’m not talking to agencies. I’m talking to you — the person with a WordPress site and an idea you never built because it wasn’t “worth it.”
Build one thing this week that has zero ROI.
You run a bakery blog? Describe an animated oven timer that counts down to your next recipe post. Ten minutes. Now your site has something no other bakery blog on the planet has.
You have a classroom site? Describe a block that lets students vote on the next book with emoji reactions. Fifteen minutes. Your kids will lose their minds.
You’re a photographer? Describe images that tilt slightly when someone hovers over them, like holding a real print. Five minutes. Yours and nobody else’s.
These things never got built before — not because they were bad ideas, but because you can’t bill a client for delight. The economics didn’t work. Now the cost is zero and the only thing you need is an idea and a few minutes.
AI just eliminated every excuse you had.
Stop building faster. Start building weirder.
WordPress was never supposed to be boring. So let’s stop acting like it is.