How AI and Cloud Tools Are Transforming Development and Testing

Derek Hanson:
Welcome everybody to another episode of Open Makers on the Open Channels FM network, now on YouTube. So as you start watching, or if you’re listening, jump over to YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe and let’s get this channel growing. Today’s guest, I’m joined by Brian Coords, developer advocate for WooCommerce at Automattic. And we’re going to talk about a few things today. And just like, you know, the in vogue thing going on, obviously right now in WordPress and WooCommerce is AI and cloud code. And we’re going to try to get a little peek and insight into what Brian’s doing with WooCommerce and that. So welcome, Brian.

Brian Coords:
Hey, thanks for having me, man. Yeah.

Derek Hanson:
So let’s just kind of jump right in and hear how AI and cloud is really transforming what you’re doing in your role as developer advocate at Woo.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, definitely. Um, yeah, so like the role of a developer advocate is weird because you’re sort of half a developer and sort of half a marketer. So you’re kind of like, like I’m basically not good at either of those two things, but I combine them together, you know? So not a great developer, not a great marketer, but we get to like be in that sweet spot in between. Um, so a lot of our time is spent basically watching what’s happening in WooCommerce and trying to like communicate that out to the broader community for like agencies building with Woo or extension developers trying to extend the platform or, um, even just store, you know, Woo has a lot of store owners that just manage their own store by themselves. So, you know, we’re trying to think about all that, that audience and then also think about like bringing whatever they’re working on and like bringing it back to the core engineers so they get like good feedback. They know. How people are using it and that sort of thing. So we have spent the last year really just leaning heavily into AI for a number of things, whether it’s from like managing, like understanding what’s in WooCommerce and using it to like help problem solve and stuff like that to just like, how can I build with it? How can I build on top of WooCommerce with AI? And, um, because that really seems to be, I would say like the future forward is, you know, agents writing our code for us. And so we’re trying to be at the front of that as much as possible.

Derek Hanson:
Right. And WooCommerce, like, it’s, you know, the size of stores can vary drastically, you know, from the little, you know, local, you know, bakery or clothing store or whatever to enterprise-level, uh, e-commerce solutions. I find, how challenging is it in your role to try to address all audiences and the Woo ecosystem.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, that, I mean, that is the big issue. Like I made, well, I didn’t, I used to work at a WordPress agency before I worked at WooCommerce, but I didn’t do WooCommerce. I did a lot of like big publishers, multi-site, that kind of stuff. I didn’t do a lot of WooCommerce. And when I joined, I made some comment like, uh, oh, you know, a large WooCommerce store with 1,000 products or something. And all the engineers were like, 1,000 products? That’s not a large WooCommerce store. Like a large WooCommerce store is, you know, could be 100,000 SKUs or something like that. Like it’s not, you know, like there’s just massive differences between that and, you know, the small business that just has, you know, 30 products that they’re, they’re selling or some subscription products or something like that. So it’s, it’s such a wide range. And the other piece is that there’s such a different technical level throughout really WordPress in general. There’s people who are comfortable with PHP and they don’t even want to look at JavaScript and React. And then there’s people that are. Deep in the block editor and React, and they’re, they’re learning all of those skills. And then there’s people who just want to get a code snippets plugin and throw a couple code snippets and it gets everything that they need. And so we try to kind of COVID all of those ranges, but like there’s a, a huge like variance of, you know, personas that we’re trying to address with WooCommerce. It’s pretty wild.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. So I wanna, I wanna talk about and, and, and have you share a little bit about like things that maybe you’re doing and building, but first, like, how are you using AI right now, like in in your role to communicate all the things that, you know, is happening in Woo with, you know, releases? You know, what is the cadence of releases and how are you doing that research and putting together, you know, a new publication that’s talking about what’s coming out in Woo?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, so WooCommerce, the core, and we mostly just focus on the core WooCommerce. We don’t dig too deeply into all the extensions, even though, you know, the average Woo store is going to have a few dozen extensions modifying it. But for like the core platform itself, A new version comes out every 5 weeks. So our team is responsible for doing like the release notes and the communication around the release. Like what are the new filters for developers? What are the new blocks? What are the new, um, things? What are all the beta experiments that you can turn on and play with right now? And so our job is to communicate that. I would say that engineers inside of WooCommerce are very good communicators. I think that’s maybe an automatic. Kind of mindset that people that join Automattic are generally good writers and good communicators. I think it’s part of the culture. And so we do get a lot of good information from them. And sometimes our job is just to be the, the editor, you know, do a final pass, publish it or something like that. But for a release every 5 weeks, there’s a few hundred PRs that make it into each release. So I’m, we’re starting to lean into AI to go through and say, okay, pull all the PRs from GitHub for this release. Read all of the comments, all the description, what actually shipped, organize them into categories. What are all the PRs around blocks? What are all the PRs around performance, which has been a huge, uh, priority right now? What are all the PRs around beta features? Organize them for us and help me find the most important ones that I can highlight. And so we’ve been exploring a lot of tooling around that, you know, getting Cloud Code to use the GitHub API to pull all these things and do this analysis on it and stuff like that. So there’s, it’s been a journey, you know, trying to get that to, to work really well. And at the end of the day, like it really still requires a human to go in there and, and give the, the actual context and to fully understand, cuz AI is not perfect. Sometimes it doesn’t realize that a feature got added in one PR, but then removed in another one and didn’t make it, you know, it doesn’t always get all the ins and outs, but Yeah, we’re trying to use it to really be able to like give us like a bigger picture for a piece of code that’s like almost too big for one human brain to comprehend, you know?

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, yeah. AI seems to be really, really beneficial in those scenarios. I mean, like the whole basis of it is, you know, large, you know, amounts of data. And I think that can easily be the, one of the best areas to gain greater efficiencies and insights and knowledge. But I like that you still have that, you know, what is that human touch? Um, especially like as you’re putting together like a release, do you have a way that you’re communicating that across different channels or is it just going on the WooCommerce blog and is it broken down into sections based on audience? Like what, talk me through like a typical way that you would take all that data and then synthesize it into something that’s consumable by, by the audience?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, we, so most of our communication happens through our developer blog, and then we are in the last 6 months starting to lean into YouTube more, and that’s a new thing. So we’re experimenting a lot with different ways to like show information on YouTube. But for now, the developer blog is like the main way. And like the other piece of WooCommerce is that it is a platform, much like WordPress, which means that if a new version of WooCommerce is coming out, the, about 2, 2 to 3 weeks before we find out, all right, this is all the code that’s going to be in the next version. A beta gets shipped, um, based on, you know, making sure everything works and a beta gets shipped and it basically says like in 2 weeks, this beta will be the new version of WooCommerce. But now everybody who builds an extension for WooCommerce, agencies that are managing like a really high critical stores, they now have 2 weeks to basically make sure that they’re, you know, compatible. Obviously WordPress WooCommerce backwards compatibility is a huge thing. So that’s not usually the issue, but like, we do want to make sure these extension developers are testing. If you’re running the Stripe plugin, you know, you really want to test before the release comes out. So the first thing we do is publish kind of a like more summarized, focused on developers. Like these are the big important things that are changing. These are the new hooks and filters. These are the developer advisories of things we might be deprecating. Or different ways we’re, you know, ’cause we’re always trying to optimize performance, but we need that to be tested. So we’ll do that. And then on the day of the actual release, we’ll do a nicer blog post with like screenshots of the new features. It’s a little bit more merchant friendly. It’s a little bit more, uh, like visual and stuff like that. And then we’re trying to turn that into YouTube content, but like that’s, um, doesn’t always happen. It’s just kind of depending on bandwidth.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, that’s kind of like sliding into that marketing edge a little bit, right?

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Derek Hanson:
So I like that there’s like layers of communication to make sure you have like a really like a successful release that really kind of lands well with, with everybody. And I like that focus on the developers first for sure, but then keeping in mind this is what merchants are going to be really excited about or will impact their store the most in their day-to-day. Talk me through a little bit about like, like the testing and like what, what does that look like for you and your role or just the Woo team in general? Um, so you’re using AI, and we can talk about like the specific like setup that you might have, whether it’s cloud or, or, or whatever. Um, talk me through like how AI is impacting the testing of new releases for WooCommerce.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, that’s been a huge thing. Um, so there’s a few different ways that they’ve incorporated AI into like the development process. One is that they’ve just added a lot of like, uh, workflow skills, things that like, help you write PRs, help you get the proper information. Um, obviously WooCommerce itself has massive amounts of like end-to-end testing inside plugin. And then as, you know, as part of any PR does like a huge suite of testing, like this week, um, the WordPress 7 beta started out. So all our tests started running against 7.0, which meant a lot of tests started not working because it’s a new version of WordPress. So it’s like a huge apparatus, but it makes everything a lot more reliable. We also have a testing suite called QIT. It’s like Quality Insights Toolkit. And it’s a thing that if you’re building extensions for WooCommerce, you can actually run a bunch of the same tests and it’ll pull in like common WooCommerce plugins and it’ll do all the end-to-end testing. It’ll check like cart and checkout flows. It’ll check, you know, making sure you’re not impacting performance and all these sorts of things. Um, but then the one thing that we’ve done recently, which has actually been pretty helpful, is we’ve added AI code reviews to every PR. So every PR that comes into WooCommerce, whether it’s from a community member or an internal engineer, it goes through an AI review. And when it first turned on, everybody was like, I don’t know, this is kind of a lot of noise, but it very quickly ended up being really valuable because the AI review looks at your PR. And it just pulls out things like simple stuff like, hey, you described this, this way here, but here you described it this other way. Make sure it’s accurate. Or things like, you know, this is changing how this filter works and it actually runs over here. So have you thought about that use case? And it just does like a really nice analysis. And so to submit a PR to Woo, you actually have to respond to the AI and, uh, make sure you resolve all of its comments and make sure that you’ve addressed them. And sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong. But we’ve found that overall everybody prefers having it than not having it because it sometimes just illuminates something that you might not have noticed. ‘Cause like I said, it’s, it’s so much code. It’s so big. It’s, it’s just, you can’t track everything anymore.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, it really helps with finding the blind spots, it sounds like, which can be really helpful. Have you seen an uptick in PRs, pull requests for WooCommerce from, you know, either from agencies or contributors, or even, you know, more on the merchant side now with, you know, everybody having an opportunity to do more code-related work with AI? Have you seen an uptick that’s been like really noticeable, or has it been like, yeah, it’s kind of been, you know, pretty status quo for the most part?

Brian Coords:
It’s been pretty status quo. We have a number of people in the community that either build extensions or work at agencies who are just generally good community contributors. If they want something, they’re pretty good at like showing up with a PR rather than just showing up with an idea. And so that’s continued. I’ve seen people like project managers inside Woo start to spin up PRs and pass that off a lot more, which I think is gonna be something we’ll see a lot of. A project manager just, or, or a product manager just saying like, well, I need this little thing and I could go bug an engineer for it, but they’re busy. I could at least get the proof of concept up. And so we’re seeing a lot more proof of concepts. Um, and then I think we’re going to spend some time doing some like gardening on the repo itself and cleaning up some old issues and that sort of stuff, because I think we’re expecting there to be a lot of AI PRs coming, but we want to make sure, like, if they’re finding issues and things like that, that we, we want those issues resolved. Like, we want to close things that we don’t think are important. We want to make sure like we’re that it’s all set up for that, but I haven’t seen like a major increase, but I actually haven’t really looked into it, so I should probably check that out.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, that, that sounds awesome. So talk me through a little bit about like in your role right now, what is your specific like AI tool stack that is getting you through the day-to-day, month-to-month? What are you really leaning into right now and you found success with?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, definitely. So The way that I’ve been working recently, well, number one is experimenting. I think like it is early days. I think everybody, like, you don’t know what’s going to work, you know, you can try something, but you know, in two weeks everyone’s going to have a new thing that they want to try. Um, but I think that there are some fundamentals that we’re starting to see become really important. Um, I think number one is keeping your code well documented is really kind of important. Um, Yeah. AI is really good at reading code, but like sometimes there’s meaning behind the code that’s not really present. You know, why a filter exists or why a feature was added a certain way, I think is important. Um, and then I use, like, I’m a big Claude Code person. I feel like most of the people I talk to are big Claude Code people. I hear Codex from OpenAI is also really good, but it’s relatively new for, you know, new to the, to being used at this level. But the main things that I, when I set up, number one is I work in a local development environment always. You know, I’m not trying to vibe code on a production site. I like to work locally. Yep. There’s a bunch of advantages to that. Number one is like, it’s just easier to like do things and not, and break things and stuff like that. Um, number two, if you are working locally, you have WP-CLI, which is like WordPress and Woo’s command line interface. And that is really, I think, critical to speeding up your development. The fact that I can ask Claude to work on something and then it can actually like use WP-CLI to see if it worked. It can run code, it can like check if the data’s been updated. It can, you know, add sample data to test out a new feature that I’m building or something like that. That’s been a huge, huge like improvement. Um, and then the other place where I’m leaning into is this concept of Claude agent skills, which we can kind of talk about more in depth, but it’s ways to kind of tell Claude, hey, if I’m working on this, always do it this way. If I’m working on this other thing, always do it this way. And so it’s a lot about having good context, having good tools, and having like a really robust local development environment. I think those are like the 3 big things that I’m leaning into right now.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, let’s, I’m gonna jump right into skills, like for, you know, the, I’m gonna call it the early days, but as AI was really starting to come on with ChatGPT and Claude, it was all about, are you gonna be a prompt master or a prompt engineer? That’s completely shifted. Skills are the thing right now. So yeah, talk me through like, a few of the skills, uh, especially in the context of WooCommerce. And, um, I know WordPress released agent skills for like the entire, you know, you know, core WordPress, but what, what do you have for Woo and what do you have maybe like, like personally? So I know that’s a little bit of two-part, but what kind of like Woo skills and then what kind of like personal skills are you leaning on?

Brian Coords:
Yeah. So when I, so to give like a concept of skills, the way I think about it is like you said, prompt engineering, it’s all still prompt engineering. Like, it’s all still how much information can I give when I ask a question. And I think the first phase of that was like cursor rules files, Claude MD files, Agents MD files, these sort of files that are like, you know, here’s a bunch of markdown that explains how I like to do things. Um, and what skills have done is take that same concept, which is like, here’s a bunch of markdown of like how I want to accomplish a certain thing, but it like divides them into nice little folders and they each have like a little description. And then Claude doesn’t read any of it until it thinks it’s valid. And so it kind of like keeps it out of your prompt and keeps it outta your context until it says, oh, you’re working on adding a block. I have a skill for adding blocks. So let me now, let me pull that in right now because now it’s actually relevant. Um, and so it’s, it’s definitely like made it a lot easier and it’s kind of like, it’s similar to say like a reusable prompt or something like that, but it’s, it’s really like workflow based and you can just kind of say like, all right, you’re making a block. Here’s the 3 pages of like instructions of how I like to use my blocks. I always want a variant that’s dynamic and I always want you to use this command to spin up the scaffolding and I always want you to use, you know,, this certain type of namespace or whatever. Like you can have all of that in there, but it’s, it’s used in like the relevant moment. So I have been working on a set for WooCommerce, but the hard part with WooCommerce is everybody’s kind of doing something different. Like we talked about earlier, like, are you building a store because you’re an agency? Are you building an integration that needs to like do custom payment integrations and shipment integrations and all these other things? Are you just adding a little custom code? Are you actually contributing to WooCommerce itself? ‘Cause that’s a different task. Um, there’s all sorts of different things. So it’s really like breaking apart these different little jobs to be done into different skills. So it, it’s kind of, it’s kind of all over the place still.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. The ecosystem is vast, right? Yeah. Like, you know, not even just counting WordPress, but even just if you thought about WooCommerce itself, you got the store owners, the agencies, and then you have, you know, entire businesses that they build a product that they sell based on Woo, right? So there’s, there’s so many different scenarios. And so I think what I’d like to talk about now and ask you about is let’s think about the merchant side of things. Like I’m just a, you know, a store owner and I’m running a business. And I know one thing that makes WooCommerce so incredible along with WordPress is its flexibility, its malleability that you can transform it to do what you want. And I think right now we’re probably in the greatest transformation wave with AI that you can literally be very niche about something you want your store to do. So talk me through like that end as you’re learning and testing and trying new things with WooCommerce from like a merchant perspective. Do you have examples of that, of what you’re doing and testing and trying out?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I can pull up a screen share if you want to look at like—

Derek Hanson:
Let’s do it. Yeah.

Derek Hanson:
And for anybody following along, if you haven’t subscribed to Brian’s newsletter on his blog, he has a pretty recent post about his scaffolding that would be really great to go check out and see how he’s doing things specifically for himself with Woo.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, and I’m sure like whatever I published in the last week, I’m already changing, let’s see. For sure. How does this look? Can you see a Woo demo store on your screen?

Derek Hanson:
Yep. Yeah. Woo test.

Brian Coords:
Yep.

Derek Hanson:
All right.

Brian Coords:
So this is my local test environment. I have a few different ones. This one is one that I kind of hack on a lot. And one of the hard things about it is like we were talking about earlier, like some stores have way more data. Some have way more plugins and things active. So even when you’re testing this stuff out, it’s like, oh, well, I didn’t know they had this one theme running that overrides the checkout page, or, you know, there’s so many, oh yeah, so many ways people can, can vary it. But like, we’ll do kind of a simple example. I’ll show first, let me show you, this is my code editor. I’m gonna just load up, um, VS Code, which sometimes feels a little crazy to even get into VS Code. You’re like, right after you’re in with agents all day, but I have my full, I love having my full WordPress local environment here with all the files and stuff. I think it adds a lot of context. It makes it easier for it to understand. It can open up, Claude can open up my plugins and look, all right, what plugins are active? Um, what theme is active and kind of have access to that. And then I generally start with a Claude MD file, but I keep mine extremely minimal. Um, I don’t tell it too much information because I feel like there’s a few things. I feel like number one, if it can read the code base, it can get a lot of information. It can figure out what plugins are active and that it’s a WordPress site. Like you can, it can kind of know all of that stuff. Um, so in my example, like I just tell it what the, what the local URL is. So it doesn’t have to always guess. I tell it to put content in plugins because it likes making, uh, MU plugins, like must-use plugins, if I don’t tell it, or it likes editing my theme’s functions.php file, which I don’t like.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, like, quick interjection and like, kind of like an AI fail. This telling Cloud, like, if you’re working with Cloud or whatever, telling it what site to work on, even local, was really imperative because I was playing around with building a theme and I had like a new, like, you know, test theme and it started modifying a totally different studio environment. And I was like, whoa, whoa. I was like, stop. I was like, go back. You are working in the wrong thing. And it was able to undo it and get back to where it was. But it was a little terrifying for a moment.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, it’s, um, it’s scary because some days I’m like, uh, I hate having to say yes to everything Claude wants to do. Can I run this command? Yes. Can I run this command? Yes. But I’m still not in the dangerously skip permissions mindset. Like I just, I don’t trust it yet enough for that. I still, I still would rather say yes to everything than turn it on and go to bed and wake up and see what happened. 100%. Yep. I also include a little instructions for WP-CLI, ’cause I want it to know, I want it to use it as much as possible. Um, there’s a thing with WooCommerce where a lot of times you have to pass this like user, like make sure it knows it’s an admin user or it can’t like access a lot of things. So I tell it that, um, if I’m using Studio for my local environment, then I will tell it like run the commands with Studio in front of it. ‘Cause Studio includes WP-CLI like as a subcommand. So sometimes I’ll tell it run, you know, with Studio. This environment isn’t Studio, but sometimes, uh, when I’m using Studio, I’ll do that. But yeah, so I keep a minimal Claude MD file and then let me open the terminal and then I’ll just go to the root. Like this is the same root folder and I can, I’ll go to that same root folder and I’ll run Claude directly from the root of my whole WordPress and WooCommerce installation. And it, it’ll kind of know. But the other piece that’s been really, I’ve been experimenting with and I think is gonna be a big thing is this idea of agent skills. And so like we were talking about like, These are like little tasks that it’ll pull up when it’s relevant and it won’t pull it up when it’s not relevant. And so if I run like /skills, I think it’ll list, um, some of these skills. A lot of these I haven’t built out yet. They’re not fully good. But they’re ones, you know, you want, right? Yeah. Most of these are the ones that I think I’m gonna want. I actually, this is what I’ve been learning as I’ve been doing it. If Claude already knows a lot about a thing, then you don’t generally need a skill. But if it, if you want it to work a certain way or you want to teach it about things that are newer, like blocks especially is a big, anything with the block editor.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah.

Brian Coords:
It’s, it doesn’t know that stuff very well, but otherwise Claude knows a lot about WooCommerce. If you want to like update a product or add some meta to an order or add a custom field to a product, like That kind of stuff has been around for a decade. It knows how to do it really well. It doesn’t need any additional information from you. Like it, it’s really just these specific new things or like weird ways that you like to work. So they’re very personal.

Derek Hanson:
I think that’s great. That’s what I really, that’s what I’m enjoying a lot about different AI tooling is that you can make it fit you specifically and the way you like to do things, which is great.

Brian Coords:
I’ll do, I can show you one. So. One that I’ve been working on is one for the cart and checkout blocks, cuz I feel like there’s a lot of power in the cart and checkout blocks, but they’re not like, people aren’t fully sure. So I’ll open up the Claude skills folder and like skills are literally just, um, they’re literally just a bunch of markdown files. Mm-hmm. And really like whatever you put in your description here, like that’s gonna help Claude decide if it wants to use, like you can tell it, hey, use this skill. But if you don’t tell it and it matches like this description, it might, it might actually just say, hey, I think I should use this skill. Um, and so this skill is, I mean, it’s basically a markdown file that just tells it like, hey, this is how to figure out if you want to find out if the site is even using the checkout blocks and it’s not using something else and it can run a CLI command and here’s some links to documentation internally. And then I also include links to like the developer docs for specific tasks. Like you want to add additional checkout fields? Well, we have a guide for it on the developer docs. So go there and get that information. Um, and it’s just kind of about giving it like things. And then it uses this eval WPCLI command a lot, which basically just lets WPCLI run a little PHP chunk of code. And so it, it kind of will use that a lot to like, hey, is this thing working? Are these fields working? All that sort of stuff.

Derek Hanson:
So.

Brian Coords:
I didn’t write this, like Claude wrote this, but I guided, like I iterated it, I guided it. I kept working with it to get it to do this because it was really struggling with cart and checkout and it was trying to do things the old way or it was trying, you know, it was just failing. So it’s just something that I’ve just like chip away at, take the lessons you learn and, and I don’t ever open these files myself and edit them. When I’m in Claude, if it does something different, I go, hey, go back and update that skill. To remember this information now or to do it this way. It’s, it’s all weirdly happening inside of Claude.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. And that’s the benefit of doing it, doing it local, doing it on your own device because Claude has access to all that information and can update that information there.

Brian Coords:
And so it’s pretty good. Like if I go to Claude and I say something like, um, if somebody’s buying this one product, Add a custom field to the checkout block. And then the first thing it’s going to do is it’s going to say like, hey, I’ll help you add that field. Let me read this relevant skill. Like it just knows that I have a skill that’s going to help it do that. And then it’s going to use WPCLI to find the product and it’s just going to skip its way through that. So I’m going to just allow it, but let me jump to the store just to show what product it is. So we have this, oh, it’s called Monthly Album Club. Let’s see if it can find it. Yeah.

Derek Hanson:
I gave it the wrong name of the product, which hopefully it might though, like if it’s using a subscription, right? Like it might kind of track that down and we’ll—

Brian Coords:
and what’s great about Claude too is like, I used to love WP-CLI in general, but I always struggled to remember how to use it. Like what flag is this? I would always say like WP plugin, like I would always say the wrong word. Like instead of activate, I would say like enable and it would be like, that’s not a command. It’s activate, not enable. But like, if Claude messes up a CLI command, it just fixes itself. Like, it just goes, oh, I did it wrong.

Derek Hanson:
Okay. I’ll run it again the same.

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Derek Hanson:
Yep. I’ll figure it out. I know I’m, you know, the work that I do, we have, you know, CLI and I’m always like, show me the list of commands so then I can find it and copy and paste it. Um, but I feel like now, yeah, we’re able to kind of like move past that, which is great.

Brian Coords:
So it found the Monthly Album Club product. So it got the product ID by itself. It knows that I want things written in the plugins folder instead of the MU plugins folder, which is just something I wanted to do. Um, so it’s going to want to write its own PHP. So I will just allow all edits. It’s going to write the plugin for me. It’s going to activate the plugin with WP-CLI for me. So I don’t even have to go to the plugin screen and turn it on. Mm-hmm. And then it’s gonna run an evaluation action where it’s gonna make, like, it’ll literally make its own cart, add the product to the cart, and then read the checkout blocks to see that the custom field is showing up or not.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. Now, is that the eval part of the command or was that part of the skill?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, the skill just said you can use eval, which is literally just means run this PHP. On my WordPress site and it just did it. It checked that the API is available. I don’t know. I have, it found something wrong. It found an invalid attribute that it made up and hallucinated. So it removed the attribute, like, like it fixed its own errors because it ran its own testing, you know?

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. Which helps bypass all of that testing work that you got to do manually, right? Like, oh yeah. Like earlier when you were talking about the WooCommerce repo and the PRs getting first tested by, you know, an AI reviewer, like that just eliminates an extra level of review that needs to be done. Yeah.

Brian Coords:
And it’s, you know, I mean, you can, there’s obviously like, uh, if you’re using like WordPress coding standards, um, that kind of like cleans up your PHP and makes sure that, you know, or like even just like basic linting, are all the semicolons there and all that sort of stuff. And it’ll do that stuff for you too. But sometimes, you know, you write some code for some feature and then you go to the front end of your site and it’s not there. And then you’re like, all right, now I gotta like go through the whole process. Is the plugin not turned on? Did I miss a thing? Did I not add the action at the right place? Like it could be a million things. And so not having to do any of that work, I mean, basically solves it. So. Let’s, we can test this out and see. So the premise is if I have this monthly album club subscription in my cart, there should be a birthday field that adds additional information because now they’re in my subscription. I want to send them a birthday email or something, you know, whatever the premise is. I want to send an email to subscribers on their birthdays or something like that, you know, maybe with a coupon. So on my demo store, I have a beanie in the cart. So if I go to the checkout with a beanie in the cart. I should not see a birthday field anywhere on the checkout page, and I don’t. So I just see email address. But if I go back to the store and I go to my shop and I add that monthly album club subscription and I add it to the cart. Now, if I go to my checkout, there we go. Now they have to add their birthday. And as far as like the code that it generated. Like this is the nice thing is Woo has some pretty good APIs for this. It’s going to use the proper WooCommerce init action. It’s going to use WooCommerce’s register additional checkout field that kind of does all the work for you. So like, it really was only like 50 lines of code that it added, but like, I didn’t have to do any of that work.

Derek Hanson:
And it’s super lightweight and it’s because it was using that skill that had all the developer resources, all that stuff that is already documented. And can we go back to the store and look at that field for a minute? Yeah. So I think what’s cool is like, this is like V1, it’s there, but in my mind, I’m looking at this and I’m like, okay, the input field is, is it just a text field right now?

Brian Coords:
Mm-hmm.

Derek Hanson:
We’re talking about a birthday. Can we say, let’s make this a date picker field? You know, what, what types of stuff can we, you know, iterate on from here?

Brian Coords:
Yeah. And that’s the kind of stuff where like, Now that it’s done and now that I can just like keep like iterating through. And so you’ll see here, Claude actually like pulls the developer docs. Yep. To like understand, all right, what are the fields that are available? What are the different types of fields? Um, and it just reads it for, for you and it should be able to fetch it as markdown and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And if you did this like without a Claude skill, it would probably work. It would do some Google searches and it would look it up. But a lot of times, because like the block checkout is new, it’ll try to do it in all these weird ways that would’ve applied in the shortcode checkout era where you had to actually write the field yourself and like write the validation and do all that stuff. But the checkout field has, um, has that option. Let’s, let’s just do a, it wants to know what kind of input, 3 select dropdowns. Or a simple text field. I like the simple text field ’cause I like when I’m on my iPhone and it just handles the date inputs correctly. So the checkout blocks do formatting, like, or do validation like instantly. Yep. So if I put in the wrong thing, like I put in a bunch of random letters, it will validate it for me. But like sometimes this is where I give a call. I’m like, can you use a date input type? And this is like the other thing too, I think where we’re still at that age where like you still have to be kind of a developer, like, to use this a little bit.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, a little bit. Yep. Yeah, there’s like that simple first version. This can do kind of the thing that you want, but do you want a polished feature, right? And this is— I know this is where, yeah, you either have to be really great at communicating exactly what you want and maybe finding examples or knowing how to tell AI to find examples. Um, yeah, it can be a little tricky.

Brian Coords:
Yeah. And so what it did here is it actually went into the WooCommerce like code and read through it, which is why I like to open Claude with like the whole WordPress installation, cuz now it can, it literally just went into WooCommerce, the plugin and read it and said that it didn’t have, I actually feel like it does support date, but I could be totally wrong. Um, cuz I feel like I’ve done this in the past, but it kind of gives you some other attributes. Um, and stuff, and then it’s like, oh, or option 3, you can build a custom block, but I don’t wanna, yeah, I don’t wanna see what happens if I go there.

Derek Hanson:
You always build it custom, right?

Brian Coords:
Yeah. So right now it has like basic validation. I think if I was iterating on this more, I’d either say just try the date type and see what happens, or I would say use the pattern attribute in a text input that kind of like gives you that pattern style. Yeah, I mean, it’s just. The, I feel like the zero to prototype stage now is like just so much faster when you have like all the tooling set up.

Derek Hanson:
Checkout blocks is the perfect use case, like you said, because it is newer and how many store owners or site owners building stores for clients are starting maybe with checkout blocks when they’re updating to a block theme, but then as soon as these custom requirements for the business need to customize the checkout fields, you almost have to revert, like you said, yeah, to the classic shortcode version just so you can have all these options to create those custom fields. It’s like, well, great, now you can just add those in, which you probably could have been able to do for a long time. It’s just like knowing how and when and like the, the process for it. So like you said, zero to MVP is much more rapid now. And you could even be a store owner at this point and say, yeah, I want to collect a birthday or I want to add a custom note or like whatever, whatever thing doesn’t exist in Checkout Blocks, you can just give it a shot and say, I need this field, help me do it. And it’s going to work through it for you.

Brian Coords:
Yeah. And like the checkout shortcode is good and it’s still supported and it still gets new features. Like it got, address autocomplete recently, which came to both the block and the shortcode checkout. But, um, overall the block checkout, because it is more locked down and because of the way it’s built, it generally has a higher conversion rate because it’s just faster. The validation’s better. So I, it’s like, I want people to use it, but I definitely understand like there are just some plugins out there where like, it’s just not an option. The extensibility doesn’t allow it. You, you just need the shortcode checkout, but I’m curious to see like how far, like right now, like I’m a developer. I know Woo pretty well. I have this, but in, in 6 months, skills like these or whatever the new version of skills are, are more widely available. Maybe they’re built into some AI that’s built into your hosting platform and you can just jump to a staging site and it kind of knows how to do these things. Like, I feel like we’re going to get to a place where, uh, you’re, you’re less likely. Like it’s going to just make everything easier, you know?

Derek Hanson:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is fantastic. To me, this is a great way to kind of like, like end and hopefully inspire people that are working with Woo. Or maybe you’re like on the fence, like I need to, I need to create a store, but I’m not sure if Woo is going to be the thing for me. Start to follow along the things that are happening on the developer blog. If you’re, you know, using Cloud Code or Gemini, whatever you’re using, see what you can do in a test environment with Woo to really make it, make it yours, uh, which is what, you know, is the great promise of WooCommerce, you know, democratize commerce, um, and, and make it accessible to everybody and make it fit what you want.

Brian Coords:
And if you’re playing with these things, there’s a Woo Community Slack that’s free to join. And there’s developer channels, there’s an AI channel where people are talking about AI and some of the stuff we didn’t talk about, like MCP and all these sorts of things. And so you will find a lot of other people kind of going through the same stuff. And so it’s, um, I would say the developer Slack is a, or the community Slack is a great place for anybody at any level of WooCommerce experience to jump in and kind of like share, learn from other people, uh, get your questions answered.

Derek Hanson:
Yeah. That sounds awesome. What’s the best way to join that Slack channel?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, for anything, if you’re building with Woo, if you’re doing anything like this, you’re at an agency or whatever, develop.woo.com or sorry, developer.woo.com is the place to go. That’ll take you to the WooCommerce developer blog, but we have links to our community Slack, our social media, all that sort of stuff. Um, but I would say start there. Um, we have a newsletter that you can subscribe to, comes out just once a month with just things that we think are, uh, useful. Um, and yeah, there’s a link to the community Slack in the footer of the developer blog.

Derek Hanson:
Awesome. One-stop shop, everybody. Go to the, the Woo developer blog. Brian, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Open Makers for Open Channels FM. And remember, like and subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thanks.