I just spend the weekend vibe coding a WordPress plugin for my page and here’s what I learned.
The plugin makes it easy for my site to show the latest video from my Youtube channel. I tried different plugins and was just thoroughly disappointed with what I found.
I wanted a super easy, but flexible setup. I needed controls for the layout. Shortcodes with options were important. I also wanted a flyout with a larger thumbnail and description. You can see the plugin working on my site (https://itsplaitime.com), and you can check out the code in this GitHub repo.
I would have never done this if it weren’t for AI. Building a plugin for yourself is easy enough. I started by just asking for a simple grid display of the latest videos.
I know I just talked to Dylan Davis about his structure for developing projects. I think there’s value in having system messages to guide the tools. However, this was mostly a YOLO (You Only Live Once) coding session. It was almost pure vibe.
Since I didn’t really have experience creating WordPress plugins, I wouldn’t have known what to tell the AI to do. I could have probably asked ChatGPT to make me a plan, but it worked pretty well…until it didn’t.
At some point, I encountered issues with the tool. It kept trying to do things I didn’t want it to do. For instance, it would fire up new version numbers any time I asked it to do something. It was up to like version 5 by the time I got frustrated with it. I added some more stuff about keeping the docs updated when I made changes and following secure guidelines.
I used Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot. I liked using Cursor, but over time VSCode has gotten better. I wouldn’t mind it being more assertive like cursor, but it works fine.
I noticed something important. There’s no way I could have just vibe coded this without understanding what I was doing. My php is a bit rusty. Eventually, you run into CSS or layout problems. Solving these issues required a lot of skills. Newbies are just not going to have skills like inspecting the CSS or suggesting specific code. When you get stuck with vibe coding, that’s probably the biggest problem you’ll have.
In terms of models, I was all over the place. I tried Gemini Pro 2.5, GPT 4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4. If I was to pick one I’d have to go with Sonnet. The outputs are just…nicer and clearer, although I don’t think it’s supremely a better coder…just nicer. Ultimately I pursued a combination of 4.1 for most things and Sonnet 4 when I got in trouble.
The other place where the AI was amazing is at just making it more than a hobby project. I wanted to submit it as an official WordPress plugin. The process, amount of work, and infrastructure required for that is pretty insane. All types of specific coding guidelines, file structure, required content. Just to much stuff that I didn’t know and honestly wasn’t necessarily interested in learning.
All in all, it was actually a lot of fun. I think the best way to learn is to vibe code something that is personally useful. If you don’t mind, share it with others. It’s going to go through a WordPress review. This process might take a few weeks. I will let you know how it goes.
