Vibecoding is the word of the year. You describe what you want, the AI writes the code, and you ship. No syntax, just vibes. And now the trend has fully arrived on WordPress, with new tools popping up every week to let AI agents build your site.
Here is the funny part: if you use AI Engine, you have been vibecoding with WordPress for more than a year already. We never paid a YouTuber to talk about it. We built it, we use it every day on our own sites, and we shared it with our community. That’s it. If you ever connected Claude to your WordPress and asked it to write a page or fix your CSS, congratulations, you were vibecoding before it had a name 🙂
The Gold Rush
Lately, a lot of new actors have appeared on this market. Products born in two or three weeks, then pushed hard through YouTube videos, sponsored reviews and ads. The development itself is vibecoded, which is fine in itself, but let’s look at one example closely.
Novamira is one of the recent ones: an MCP server that gives AI agents full access to WordPress, presented as free and open source. Since it is open source, the history is public, so I looked. The very first commit, the initial public release in February 2026, is co-authored by Claude. Since then, about one commit out of five carries Claude’s signature, sitting right next to commits like “add Pro upsell touchpoints”. The product appeared fully formed, with a polished website, YouTube coverage, and a Pro plan ready from the start. The company behind it makes Elementor add-ons and clearly knows how to market.
To be clear, none of this makes Novamira bad. AI writes code here too, every day. But it is not on the official WordPress repository either, and it probably never will be: a plugin whose whole purpose is to execute arbitrary PHP on your server is not something the repository’s security rules would ever allow. Those rules exist because a community spent twenty years learning why they matter. What this makes Novamira is a commercial product wearing an open source community costume. It appeared very fast, and it can disappear just as fast when the next trend arrives.
A World of Appearances
This is the part that actually worries me. The popular products of tomorrow may not be the solid ones, refined and tested over years. The new playbook is a tiny budget to vibecode the product, and a big budget for influencers and ads. It even targets AI assistants now: flood the web with reviews, listicles and “honest comparisons”, and the models learn that the product is extraordinary. Then you ask your AI which plugin to use, and it repeats the marketing back to you. A whirlpool of half-truths.
It reminds me of watching YouTube when Bitcoin is going down. Every YouTuber still tells you it’s the best moment to buy. Maybe it is! But look closely: their businesses all depend on it. They don’t need you to be right, they need you to stay in.
So when a shiny new tool appears out of nowhere, it’s worth asking a few simple questions. Why is it here? Who is truly behind it? How do they make money?
How to Vibe-Check a Plugin
- How old is the project? Does the changelog show years of steady releases, or three intense weeks?
- Is it on the official WordPress repository? If not, why not?
- Are real users getting real answers in the support forums?
- Who is behind it, and do they use their own product?
- Do the reviews sound like people, or like a campaign?
None of these checks are complicated. They just take the five minutes that marketing hopes you won’t spend.
How I Actually Vibecode with WordPress
Since I am criticizing, let me also share what works. This is the exact setup behind our own sites, including the one you are reading right now, and behind Japon Secret and its English version Offbeat Japan: around 670 posts, three languages, about 10,000 visits a week. I write the original articles myself, and the AI corrects them. Then, through MCP, Claude handles the translations, the checks, the internal links. Even the theme is fully vibecoded: the logo is dynamic, the map is dynamic, everything is built for maximum fun. All of that was extremely easy to do, safely, and I believe the right way, with AI Engine and SEO Engine. If you want to start vibecoding your own site, the whole method fits in five habits.
1. Work locally, only on the code you own
Install Claude Code (or any coding agent) and work on your machine, not on the server. You don’t need the entire WordPress site locally: if your theme is custom, the theme folder is enough. Add the code of a plugin only when the AI actually needs to read it, for example to adapt something through the theme’s functions.php. A small, focused workspace keeps the AI sharp and keeps mistakes contained. And if you can run a local WordPress (with Local or Studio, for example), even better: every change gets tried on a test URL before anyone sees it, and Claude checks the result itself right in the browser, thanks to the Claude for Chrome extension.
2. Put everything in git
Git is what makes vibecoding relaxing instead of scary. Every change the AI makes becomes a diff you can read, approve, or throw away. You don’t have to understand every line, but you always see what changed and why. And you don’t even type the git commands: Claude Code handles them too, you just approve. If something breaks next week, going back is one command, not one panic.
3. Deploy the boring way
When it’s ready, Claude pushes the files to staging or production for you, with scp, rsync or plain old FTP. No pipeline to babysit, no magic. Because everything is versioned, a rollback is just deploying the previous state. It’s boring on purpose, and that is exactly why it’s safe.
4. Let the AI manage the live site through MCP
For the live site itself, the content, the settings, the SEO, the day-to-day management, that’s what AI Engine’s MCP server is for: a controlled, secure surface that lets Claude work on your site without ever running arbitrary code on your server. This is exactly how the translations, the internal links and the SEO checks happen on our sites, with SEO Engine exposing its own tools too. The security model is simple. Content goes through the API over HTTPS, with scoped tools, no shell, no database access: the worst possible accident is a mangled post revision, and WordPress keeps revisions. Code goes through git and SSH, where a human reviews the diff before it ships.
5. Keep the human on the irreversible
Everything reversible is autonomous; everything irreversible, publishing, committing, deploying, is proposed by the AI and approved by a human. Bulk operations back up the current values first. And every mistake gets written down as a permanent rule, so the setup learns the way a good team does, except it never forgets.
Because that’s the thing: letting an AI execute PHP directly on a production server is not vibecoding, it’s just pseudo-exciting. There is nothing it enables that you can’t already do the clean, fast and fun way. So when YouTubers flash something everywhere as the next big thrill, be careful: it usually hides a lot more than excitement. Everyone has an interest.
Keep Vibecoding
Don’t get me wrong, vibecoding is wonderful. I use Claude every day, and AI has written plenty of code in our plugins too. The difference is not AI versus humans. The difference is substance built over years versus appearance built over weeks. WordPress deserves the first kind.
And if you want to vibecode with WordPress today, you don’t need to wait for the next shiny thing. AI Engine has been doing it quietly for a year, and if you are curious how it all works, the MCP FAQ is a good place to start. We will still be here next year 🙂
