0:00

Sé Reed: Thank you. 3, 2, 1.

0:06

Jason Tucker: This is episode number 479 of WPwatercooler, to bot or not to bot.

0:12

Sé Reed: That is the question. With that question mark, though, I just realized

0:16

Jason Tucker: I'm Jason Tucker. You can go to my website at jasontucker.

0:19

blog. Sé Reed: who owns that blog anyway?

0:22

Hey, I'm say Reed. I do say read things at, say read me on Media on all the things.

0:30

Jason Cosper: And y'all know who it is. It's your boy, Jason Cosper, back at it again on the world's most

0:35

influential WordPress podcast.

0:39

Jason Tucker: you can go find it wherever it is. That great podcast can be found and the best part of the whole thing.

0:44

Go hang out in our discord at watercoolerslack.

0:47

lol. Sé Reed: I was going to say, you can find us wherever the best podcasts are, and

0:54

probably wherever the worst podcasts are. Because I guess they're

0:58

Jason Cosper: We don't discriminate Sé Reed: no, a lot of yeah, in general.

1:04

So speaking of the watercoolerslack.

1:07

lol, We actually this episode today is inspired by our discord

1:14

and one of our channels that is inspired by one of our shows.

1:20

So it's Jason Cosper: It's turtles all the way down.

1:24

Sé Reed: exactly. It's just, it is its own thing.

1:28

We are the Ouroborealists or whatever that is, which I think I'm

1:32

contractually Ouroborous, which I'm now contractually obligated to mention.

1:36

At least once a show. Yeah.

1:40

So we have a channel there called DevBranch, named after the show DevBranch

1:47

which in case you don't know is the first of the month, every month.

1:54

And yeah, it'll be the next episode and it's where we get slightly geekier and

1:59

I don't ask as many dumb questions.

2:02

I try to ask the geekier questions.

2:07

And anyway, we do the same in the channel, in the Discord, and on Tuesday

2:13

of this week one of our awesome, long time listener, friend of the

2:17

show people, Rachelle was saying, hey people, who knows anything about

2:23

how do we get these pages to behave?

2:27

And I Not just procrastinating, although this is my favorite way

2:32

to procrastinate, so this is why this whole thing happened, really.

2:36

I'm literally, have been dealing with the same issue, and I had actually

2:39

brought it up previously in that channel, talking about using a CPT versus

2:46

a page in order to determine paths.

2:50

The problem with pages, it's chaos.

2:54

It's just, Jason Cosper: for the people who did not realize that they weren't tuning into

3:00

DevBranch, a custom CPT is a custom post

3:04

Sé Reed: right yeah, it's custom post type which is a choice to make between

3:10

yeah, how you want to structure it, but custom post types have a defined

3:14

path for their post type which makes sense so they don't conflict with it.

3:19

pages or posts of the same titles, which is actually a problem that happens a lot.

3:25

But, the default, the pages, the land of the pages, which, to my

3:33

knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, anyone on the chat, on the internet,

3:37

there's no name for that screen.

3:40

What do we call that screen? The pages screen?

3:44

The list of pages? Because now we have the list thing in the block list.

3:50

Pages admin? Right?

3:54

It's so forgotten, it doesn't even have a name.

3:56

That is, it's just no man's land.

4:00

It's just pages. The pages page.

4:04

Jason Cosper: Page. Sé Reed: The page is page.

4:08

Anyway, so that page is natively just almost as bad as the media library and

4:15

longtime listeners of the show know how I feel about the media library

4:19

and the chaos that ensues within it.

4:24

You know what the thing is that WordPress search is not good

4:27

enough have that level of chaos.

4:31

That is really what it's about, like the WordPress native search, if it was going

4:34

to have that level of disorganization, then the search need, needs to be better,

4:39

because that's the reason kids these days don't look for stuff because on their

4:43

Macs, or they don't put stuff in folders, this is like a generational thing, they

4:47

just use search, you just search a drive, search whatever, and Google search works

4:51

great on your drive Mac search works.

4:55

I don't know what all you Windows people are doing. Jason Cosper: On my iPhone, I have one home screen.

5:01

I have the most common what?

5:05

Eight apps and then down in like my little dock, I have another,

5:09

the four apps that I always use. And then I have a Siri

5:14

Sé Reed: Like a search bar? Jason Cosper: No. It's a Siri what apps we think you'll need given like on

5:21

Sé Reed: The time of day and, yeah, exactly.

5:23

You usually use this app. Jason Cosper: and I have no other home screens.

5:27

Everything else is shoved into the library.

5:30

And normally when I launch an app, I just, cause it's a newer version of

5:34

iOS, just pull down and get the little search thing and type in what I need.

5:39

Like Sé Reed: Exactly.

5:43

So that is the it's not just the new generation, obviously.

5:48

I feel the same way. We've been having chaotic just documents and screenshot folders since the 90s.

5:56

But when you have clients accessing their pages, the chaos

6:03

of that, and the search, again, not working in a way that is useful.

6:07

Even the search results can be so confusing with the orders

6:11

that they're in, because pages are decoupled from subpages, and

6:14

it's just like a bunch of lines. Anyway!

6:18

Long story short, we got talking about why that is how it would be better

6:24

organized and that we need it for the various, like for the actual projects

6:30

that we're working on at this week, like I had a big presentation this

6:34

week for a client and I didn't have to do the backend, but I'm thinking

6:37

about how to construct this, right?

6:40

How to make it so that they can access it in a way that makes sense

6:43

to them grouping their pages by.

6:47

Maybe it's by area, location or topic or type of page, like our,

6:53

here's our cluster of about pages. And unless you create the sub page hierarchy, there is really

7:01

no organization there natively. So we found a plugin called nested plug nested pages, which was pretty cool.

7:11

And it's one of these various, I've had this on various with various other plugins

7:16

where you can essentially You know, drag and drop your page order, right?

7:20

It's Jason Cosper: Sure. Sé Reed: using the page order, the secret page order feature of pages.

7:27

Has anyone ever used that in the past decade?

7:30

Jason Tucker: Yeah, all the time. Sé Reed: Do you really?

7:34

But it shows up on the site. It doesn't show up on the

7:37

Jason Tucker: number, the menu, whatever they call it.

7:39

Sé Reed: the backend by the menu number also? How do you like use hundreds or something?

7:45

Like a Dewey Decimal System? Because if you're just using 1 through 10 and you make

7:50

a new page, what do you do? What do you do?

7:52

Jason Tucker: just old school and do everything by hundreds.

7:55

Yeah. Sé Reed: everything by hundreds? Okay, that works.

7:58

Then you've got Jason Tucker: or hundreds, depending on how many pages I know it's going to be.

8:02

Sé Reed: Literally, that's like the Dewey Decimal System.

8:04

Jason Tucker: And then I put a go sub somewhere in there so

8:07

I can make sure I can go back. Sé Reed: On the

8:14

Jason Tucker: it. Yeah,

8:17

Sé Reed: Okay on the backend we were talking about, I've been

8:21

using Airtable a lot, which I talk about a lot on the show, and you

8:25

can group It's a database, right?

8:28

So you can group data by your by whatever category, whatever field you define it by.

8:35

And something so simple as that, I was like I'm procrastinating.

8:40

Why not hop on over to my friend ChatGPT and just see what it says.

8:46

Because this actually seems rather simple. I need a page taxonomy, and I need an admin to display something in groups.

8:53

That's not wildly complicated, right? Reasonable

8:57

Jason Cosper: would think, Sé Reed: Yeah, right? I I could clean, or I could talk to ChatGPT and make plugins.

9:04

One, one and the other. All right. So anyway, I was asking it, I was just telling it, I need to make this.

9:09

And it told me what I needed to do. And I was like, great.

9:12

Can you please write that plugin? And I'm, I don't know if you will let me share my screen.

9:17

You let me share my screen over here so I can show this to

9:19

people while I talk about it. All right. So this is a, do I hit present?

9:24

Oh, I don't think I've ever do this one. That's fun.

9:27

I don't think I've done this one before. Let's see, here we go.

9:32

Am I sharing the right one? Hopefully. Jason Tucker: of as getting a clicker and then getting the clicker

9:37

on stage and you're like, Oh, I've never used a clicker before.

9:40

Let's Sé Reed: Is this the right screen, though, that I'm doing?

9:43

Jason Tucker: Just push push command plus a couple of times

9:45

so we can read the words. Sé Reed: Oh for sizing.

9:49

Okay. Anyway, I just want to show it also so I don't have to remember it.

9:53

Hold on. I'll increase the size here.

9:55

Whoa, look at that. Okay, so basically, I was like, what should I do?

10:01

I need to group some pages with the taxonomy, and it was like,

10:04

here, do this, and I was like, cool, can you write it instead?

10:07

And it's sure, here, I wrote it for you.

10:10

It's gives me the PHP file with the plugin name, and it's just go ahead and

10:14

take that pop it in there, make sure you define these other things, right?

10:18

And I was like what if instead yeah, I was like, what should I call it?

10:22

And then I was like, what if instead you just generate the other files that I need?

10:26

And it's okay, here you go. I've generated your plugin.

10:30

And it says, if you can't, if you're listening, it says, download

10:33

custom page group display plugin. And I was like, oh,

10:36

Jason Tucker: wild to me. Sé Reed: Yeah, I was like, I didn't know I could download things.

10:40

Jason Tucker: I want to know, does chat GPT use a Mac to

10:42

make the zips or does it use Sé Reed: No.

10:45

See, so I downloaded the file, but it's unzipped.

10:48

Okay. So then I zipped the file I didn't put it on production.

10:54

This is the question we're going to get to eventually. So I zipped the file and then I uploaded it now and actually uploaded

11:00

it to Playground, WP Playground.

11:02

Cause I was like, this is the perfect use case, right?

11:04

For Playground. And it's like invalid archive.

11:09

No, cause then I went back.

11:12

Jason Tucker: is you're using Safari, right? Sé Reed: No, I'm using Chrome.

11:17

Jason Tucker: Okay. Sé Reed: Why is that funny?

11:20

Jason Tucker: Shouldn't have down, when it downloaded the zip file, it should just kept the zip file, didn't

11:23

Sé Reed: It didn't, it wasn't a zip file. Jason Tucker: it. Sé Reed: It wasn't a zip file yet.

11:28

Jason Tucker: a Sé Reed: It was a PHP file.

11:30

It was a folder with a PHP file in it. And then I asked it, can you zip that for me?

11:34

And it was like, yeah, sure, here you go.

11:37

And then I was like, oh, there's an error what should I do about this error?

11:41

But actually, I didn't even have to do anything about that error because

11:44

Rochelle was like, oh you have a plugin is, beginning of your So I just took

11:50

it out, and then it worked perfectly.

11:54

But that's what it did. It literally worked perfectly on, on Playground.

12:00

And it's a really simple plugin.

12:02

Like it's not complicated, right? This is literally popping a taxonomy onto pages, which I've done.

12:08

I'm trying to see where it is. The whole thing is like up here.

12:12

It just pops the text on me onto some pages. I've done that before.

12:15

And then it makes a new admin screen called grouped pages, and then it just

12:20

shows the pages per group on that page.

12:23

It's wildly simple. So we've got this code.

12:28

And then Cosper over here starts talking about putting memes in the chat

12:36

about not using bots on production and how I'm a terrible coder and all this.

12:42

Jason Cosper: I never said you were a terrible coder.

12:45

Sé Reed: I know, I'm just kidding. No that that I shouldn't be it's these are legitimate concerns, right?

12:54

I'm not I'm like, I actually could use this on the site that I'm using right now.

12:58

I'm just kidding. This is, it works on Playground and I was like, huh, what what, you

13:07

should put up some of the memes that you were putting up, basically, but

13:11

there's definitely I've done some cowboy coding in my day, but there's

13:17

a difference between cowboy coding yourself and literally just sticking

13:23

some code that was generated into your site, but I've been thinking about this.

13:28

Thanks. Bye. And I have been taking random people's code off the internet and sticking it

13:32

into various things for a very long time.

13:37

Like, all the time. I take things off Githubs and StackExchanges and

13:42

Jason Tucker: Yeah, Sé Reed: WordPress sites I'm,

13:46

Jason Tucker: person that just cooked up something real quick, has no idea

13:49

what you're talking about, other than I want the end result to be this.

13:52

And then they go okay, Sé Reed: but I can

13:55

Jason Tucker: the navigation walker that you need in order to be able to make

13:58

this thing show up and you're like, sure.

14:00

Okay. And then 500 lines of code later

14:04

Sé Reed: never 500 lines of Jason Tucker: The the page is active, be purple and you're like,

14:09

Sé Reed: Okay, here's the deal. I know, I can read code, right?

14:13

So it's like when you can speak a language but you can't read it, or you can

14:16

read a language but you can't speak it. I'm not great at the things I don't know, but the things that

14:23

I do know, I can totally read it and fix it and write it, whatever.

14:29

Then I have to go research whenever I see a I get caught.

14:32

This is how I learned to code. This is how I've been learning to code my entire life is

14:37

basically, do I need to do a thing?

14:39

And then I go teach myself how to do things.

14:41

That's basically how that works. So I find out the answer.

14:46

What, how do you learn to code? Jason Tucker: you weren't in like Paris or something and you pulled out chat GPT

14:51

and said, hi, I would like the following to be made for me in this restaurant

14:56

and you'd list off the type of fish you want and what thing it needs to be

15:00

and dah, and you list it all out.

15:03

And then you say, and you just hold it up to the person and say, I want this.

15:06

And it's written in French and you're like, I couldn't even read this.

15:09

I don't even know what this is here. Do this thing for me.

15:13

You didn't do that. Sé Reed: You're saying like, if I were in a restaurant with a menu,

15:17

Jason Tucker: Yeah. You can read the code and you can go, Oh, the code says that I'm going to

15:21

be using a WP query and it's going to be searching for this and I'm going

15:25

to have it isolate that, and then I'm going to have this be displayed.

15:28

Like you can read it. Sé Reed: Yeah. Okay.

15:30

So this isn't, this doesn't need to be about me specifically, but the

15:35

thing is I was like, Oh what tests are there where I could test this?

15:42

Like I can go through and read this code everything that's going on here.

15:46

Do I always know if it's coded?

15:49

To the current standards, do I know that it's cleaning AF Advanced Custom

15:55

Fields recently put out a big banner on some actual live sites that I have

16:01

that says the field is unescaped, we've detected this field being unescaped

16:06

somewhere, and we're going to stop supporting this, and then on, Then I

16:10

get another one that said actually, it's probably not a breaking change.

16:15

You're fine. I'm like, okay, what are you doing guys?

16:18

I don't know what's happening. Jason Tucker: So you could ask GPT is there something else

16:22

that's in here that I need you to like can you harden this code more?

16:28

Sé Reed: Okay. But isn't that asking an industry to regulate itself?

16:32

You're like, Jason Tucker: this? Jason Cosper: of, Sé Reed: you really should test yourself better.

16:37

Jason Tucker: and you went and got some other GPT system

16:41

Code and then tell you if it needs to change some stuff,

16:45

Sé Reed: like pit them against each other. Like I go, I put it, actually I could, cause I have a, what's the one on GitHub?

16:51

Is it copilot, I think? I didn't put this in the right repository for that, but I should

16:56

put this in a copilot repository, and then make copilot fix the chat

17:01

GPT code, and then make the robot

17:03

Jason Tucker: explain to me what this does. Sé Reed: It does what it does it's very simple, right?

17:10

This is a very simple request, and honestly, I'm shocked.

17:16

At my inability to find it in existence, in the existing plugins directory

17:23

there's lots of ordering things around, but I'm like, are we not grouping pages?

17:26

Is this not who, the problem is developers don't use websites,

17:32

this is the real problem. They don't know what we need.

17:36

ChatGPT is giving me what I need.

17:41

Jason Cosper: sure. Okay. So to I know this

17:45

Sé Reed: I'm looking for you to play devil's advocate here.

17:48

Jason, you're not helping because you're like, it sounds great, you should just

17:51

Jason Tucker: Look, if it was JavaScript, have at it Jason Cosper: right.

17:56

Now, so Jason Tucker: go wrong. It's on the browser.

17:58

Who cares? Jason Cosper: one of the things that I would do here when giving, or

18:04

when taking code from one of these large language models whether you're

18:10

using chat GPT, you're using Gemini

18:14

Sé Reed: gonna call it that. Jason Cosper: Facebook, I'm sorry.

18:18

Sé Reed: I know. Jason Cosper: Facebook has one that it released that's focused on coding

18:26

Sé Reed: What's that one called? Jason Cosper: so it's called Code Llama.

18:31

And that is you can get at that on there's a site for like

18:37

open models called Hugging Face. Sé Reed: Oh, yeah, I've seen that, but I don't want to do anything that

18:42

has anything to do with Facebook ever. Jason Cosper: sure they also

18:48

Sé Reed: over Llama. I like llamas.

18:50

Nothing against llamas. Thanks. Jason Cosper: Perplexity which is another AI tool has like a labs section

18:58

where they have some more common models and it they have a interface that will

19:05

give you access to that Codelama model.

19:09

There's no history save chat GPT or Google stuff.

19:14

Sé Reed: More like a playground instance version of it.

19:17

You

19:21

Jason Cosper: what I would do with any code that I would ask a large language

19:29

model for is I would basically run that code through like a PHP code sniffer

19:36

with the WordPress coding standards which You know, both of those things

19:43

and those are being supported and everything else through what, through

19:51

Sé Reed: mean financially? Jason Cosper: and yeah, financially through OpenCollective and

19:56

Sé Reed: 000 a month from Automatic.

20:00

Jason Cosper: great. Sé Reed: Just FYI.

20:03

Jason Cosper: Sure. Yeah. Please

20:06

Sé Reed: There's more there. There's other, there's additional stuff there.

20:08

You can go support. I'm just saying, it is, that's an investment.

20:12

Jason Cosper: Absolutely. And we need to make sure that

20:16

Sé Reed: with the bus factor. Down with the bus factor.

20:19

Jason Cosper: We need to make sure that things like match

20:23

up to the coding standards. I know that the tests that the plugin team runs are a lot more thorough.

20:32

Sé Reed: I'm not submitting it to the repo.

20:35

I, that would, I would require some I don't want to deal with that because it's

20:41

just this is why I don't make plugins.

20:44

This is really opened up a whole Pandora's box because back in the day I would build

20:48

more functionality and now I don't build functionality because I use plugins for

20:52

that because then the plugin can stay up to date and the client is not dependent

20:57

on me if they want to leave or if I don't.

21:00

We're not going to work together for a couple years, which doesn't ever happen.

21:04

So I don't know why I worry about it. They never leave.

21:08

Jason Cosper: Put the plugin up on GitHub.

21:11

Sé Reed: I did. I did put the plugin up on GitHub.

21:13

I can link to it in the show notes because I would love some some polls.

21:20

I feel like this is like a if we're going to this is a community plugin.

21:25

Like it's not only is it a collaboration between a robot and myself,

21:32

but it was also stemmed from DevBranch and collaborative procrastination.

21:37

And also, Maybe that should be the name of the developer for it.

21:43

Collaborative Procrastination. That's Jason Tucker: I love

21:46

Sé Reed: like the best term I've ever heard of. So yeah, it's really a dev branch, inspired, a Discord inspired plugin.

21:58

I think it's pretty cool. Jason Cosper: Sure.

22:01

Sé Reed: just make a bunch of plugins and solve our own problems.

22:04

Jason Cosper: Yeah. The scratch, scratching our own edge

22:09

Sé Reed: Yeah, but like then if more people are using it and supporting it

22:12

and being like, oh, we got to keep this up to date, then it's not the same thing

22:16

as I have to make sure that every client that I've ever installed this on

22:21

has up to date stuff all the time that's so much, and then you just, everyone's

22:30

got a little bit of time, someone over here has some time to do some CSS ing,

22:33

and someone over here has some time to do whatever isn't that the whole

22:37

point of the open source It's like this collaborative approach instead of this

22:43

world where we're dependent on all these plugins that we're paying people for and

22:49

still getting, I don't know, but even the nested plugins in its I'm looking at

22:56

it, it's great, but in its actual plugin description, it's got free versus pro.

23:00

It's hijack those little details, view more info.

23:04

I don't even know what you, what do you call that? The links on the Plugmin admin page?

23:10

Those get hijacked. And this one has free versus pro right there.

23:14

So it's do you buy the pro just to get rid of the upsell

23:19

inside of the free plugin? And then

23:21

Jason Tucker: now you can add that to your own plugin. Sé Reed: seriously, I could scrape it out of there.

23:26

Jason Tucker: you make the background of my plugin list in

23:28

the plugin listing rainbow color?

23:31

Can you make it do all this like extra marketing stuff?

23:34

Jason Cosper: If you're not going to you're not interested in maintaining it.

23:39

So you don't want to put it in the repo. You are going to encourage people to.

23:44

Submit patches if they find it useful.

23:47

I would argue, and I'm going to share my screen really quick.

23:51

There is a tag you can add to your repository that says and this is

23:57

something that just came across, came to my attention recently is no

24:01

maintenance intended, and you basically say Hey, use this at your own risk.

24:09

I am not maintaining this.

24:11

I'm putting this up here Sé Reed: I like that.

24:13

Jason Cosper: it useful, but no maintenance intended.

24:18

Something that I also think is

24:21

Sé Reed: that it's really clear. Stating your intentions, that's wonderful.

24:24

But also do it if happy to do it.

24:27

Jason Cosper: Yeah. Sé Reed: wanna change that because I'd be like if you do a pull request,

24:31

I actually will probably look at it, but no promises, but probably 'cause

24:35

I want it to be up to date too. But then I just have to review their stuff.

24:40

Or trust that person be like, what?

24:43

That, so then you have to actually do a code review.

24:46

It's like Jason Cosper: Oh Sé Reed: becomes not just solving a problem

24:49

Jason Tucker: are just going to look at the code. Sé Reed: Exactly.

24:52

, it's a bot. And then the pull request that someone's doing is actually also with their bot.

24:57

And so their bot writes it. Jason Tucker: generated this.

25:01

Sé Reed: Oh, is there a tag for that yet? Because I, I put it in the, I put it in the plugin notes.

25:06

Jason Cosper: It wouldn't surprise me in this is, this actually makes me

25:10

think of I don't know if the two of you are, either of the two of you are

25:16

familiar with Simon Wilson Simon Wilson does a lot of he maintains this thing

25:25

dataset and he has done something very similar Jason, your mind was blown.

25:34

At whoa, that zoomed in too much.

25:37

Sé Reed: Let me remind you that your mind was blown.

25:40

Jason Cosper: Yeah Sé Reed: Remember how your mind was blown?

25:43

Jason Cosper: that it, didn't she blow your mind this time?

25:47

Didn't Sé Reed: I? Didn't she? Didn't Simon?

25:51

Jason Tucker: Yes,

25:59

Jason Cosper: dissimilar from you, where he was taking his dog for a walk.

26:04

And he had the chat GPT mobile app, write, compile, and test a C

26:12

extension written in C to SQLite and basically shared that, but so that

26:23

he could figure out distances between two lat, latitude and longitude points.

26:28

Like Sé Reed: Havershine distances? Jason Cosper: completely wild that

26:33

Sé Reed: what is that? What does Havershine distances

26:37

Is that a term? Jason Cosper: I can't even pretend to

26:40

Sé Reed: New England? It sounds New England y

26:44

Jason Cosper: The fact Sé Reed: or British. Jason Cosper: He took and had a large language model in this

26:50

case, chat GPT turn around and make an extension to SQlite.

26:58

And compile it just like you did where it's like, Oh, also zip this

27:04

Sé Reed: Also, just make the whole thing, please, and label it, and I'll just

27:07

use whatever title you come up with. It's great.

27:09

What do you want to? Jason Cosper: This stuff I do think that this stuff is remarkable.

27:15

I do not trust the code quality.

27:18

This is like asking like a

27:22

Sé Reed: Is that you being paranoid or you being safe?

27:25

Sorry, I interrupted your analogy. Jason Cosper: No yes to both, but mostly safe.

27:30

No, Jason Tucker: What if

27:33

Sé Reed: being paranoid and safe. Wait, I want to hear the analogy.

27:36

It's like being a first year what? I'm dying to know.

27:39

I interrupted you, but I need this story.

27:41

Jason Cosper: it's like giving a coding test to like a first

27:44

year programming student. It's they will do the job, but they might get some shit wrong.

27:51

Sé Reed: Right. Jason Cosper: And you have to know what they got wrong.

27:58

I've, Sé Reed: the bot has to know. Jason Cosper: I've dabbled a little bit when I saw that CodeLlama, and

28:05

we'll make sure that the link to the interface for that is, is in the show

28:10

notes, if anyone wants to play with that I've asked CodeLlama once I heard Oh,

28:16

it's actually pretty good at this stuff.

28:18

It's better than a lot of the other models.

28:22

Sé Reed: You mean at testing or standards? Jason Cosper: Yeah, I asked it to do Oh, can you make me a

28:29

WordPress plugin that does this? Or can you give me some code that'll do this?

28:33

And Sé Reed: See, you're doing it too.

28:37

Jason Cosper: but I'm not putting it into production.

28:40

I'm not Sé Reed: didn't yet put it into production.

28:43

I, you didn't put it on GitHub. Jason Cosper: I was.

28:45

Sé Reed: irresponsible? Putting it on GitHub? Jason Cosper: If it works and you know that the code is going to be safe,

28:54

like I don't want to necessarily attach my name or my GitHub account to some

29:01

shit that a computer like tossed off.

29:04

Jason Tucker: What if, say, hire someone on Fiverr to to refactor the

29:08

Sé Reed: This is exactly what I'm saying.

29:12

Like, where this took me down an entire rabbit hole because I started

29:19

questioning all of the coding research that I've done in my entire very

29:23

much homespun dev career, right?

29:28

The, the I pay attention to WordPress and things for that reason, right?

29:35

Specifically so I know what's going on, but I have absolutely become

29:39

dependent on everyone else knowing what's going on and updating it in

29:43

their plugins so that I don't have to maintain all of this various stuff.

29:49

But the other problem I'm facing is that I feel like there's less stuff of quality

29:55

in the plugin repo than there used to be, and it's not just that there's more.

30:01

What was it? I was, oh, I was looking for a plugin that did would do a default image for

30:09

posts in various taxonomies, right?

30:11

Pretty basic. Like that's something I've done before.

30:15

I think I've written it, I've hand coded it in most of the time.

30:19

But again, I'm trying to stay on top, like I'm trying to keep things in

30:23

plugin form in order to allow for the code to be updated and isolated and

30:29

not connected to the, just trying to build it in that sort of decoupled way.

30:34

So whether I'm building a plugin, which I try not to do, or someone else does,

30:39

It's still in that modular format.

30:42

But I found that, so first of all, didn't find a lot of solutions for this.

30:48

And I'm like, I swear I've solved this problem before with more better solutions.

30:53

But you either get plugins that are like, oh, here, this does literally everything.

30:57

And it's a suite. And there's 10 versions of a tier on the pro version.

31:00

And it's up to 300 a year or whatever.

31:04

And this This category thing is like one tiny feature in

31:07

the corner in one version. And then you've got also three super basic ones that look like

31:15

they were almost exactly the same.

31:17

They had like really similar names and the way the readmes were written were

31:23

even just on the main page was like, Here's how you install it and giving

31:27

like page templates and I'm like this is that's I could just write the freaking

31:31

page template code if that's what I was doing like this is just pulling the code

31:37

that I would write anyway into a plugin that's now look hooked to whoever this

31:40

is you know with their 10, 000 installs and updated in the last three months or

31:45

whatever right so My, my trust level in the plugin directory has gone way down,

31:52

I realized, and my, my I don't know where these, now these plugins are coming

32:00

from I don't, they look cloned, they look like they've changed a couple different

32:04

things, and they're in here, a lot of them aren't being updated, a lot of them are,

32:09

like A couple WordPress versions back, so even if they might still work, they still

32:15

are, I don't know, it feels like you can't go ahead with that sort of thing, right?

32:22

Feels almost as irresponsible as, I don't know, having chatGPT write the code.

32:27

So am I downloading and using and there's nothing but arguably more

32:40

complicated linking me to who a member of this random person is linking the

32:44

site to that for however long, or reverting now back to how I used to do

32:51

it, where I'm building little bespoke plugins for all of these different

32:55

things and now having to update them.

32:58

I feel like I don't even ChatGPT makes it a lot easier to write those, and I

33:05

guess maybe to stay up to date, maybe?

33:10

If there was a WordPress AI bot, that would be pretty handy for

33:15

this, but, anyway, this is an existential dilemma that I am

33:20

facing, and I feel like I am back.

33:23

To how I started building out WordPress sites, and even with, I don't even want

33:29

to get started on how the site editor makes me feel like that, because I

33:32

have to start controlling and building out page templates, which I haven't

33:35

been dealing with in a long time. Jason Cosper: Sure.

33:37

Sé Reed: Dealing with page template files again, I'm like, just parts and templates,

33:42

like I haven't had to deal with that. So now I, I'm both advancing over here on the chat GPT side, able to

33:50

make custom code, but at the same time, now I'm responsible for even

33:55

all the CSS and what's the we've got safety considerations, we've

34:02

got aesthetic considerations, we've got maintenance considerations,

34:06

Jason Tucker: always had safety considerations. That's the thing.

34:10

Sé Reed: Yeah, I guess I just trusted the plugin repo more.

34:16

Like I and I, it's useless now.

34:19

I don't trust that they'll stay updated. Jason Cosper: This makes me, this reminds me, this makes me think of something

34:27

that grandpa Simpson said in the Simpsons, which is, I used to be with

34:32

it, but then they changed what it was.

34:35

Now what I'm with, isn't it anymore?

34:37

And what's, it seems weird and scary.

34:40

happen to Jason Tucker: Dang. Sé Reed: I think you just called me old first of all.

34:44

And second of all, what is the it that we're even talking about?

34:48

Are we just back to what's the it

34:50

Jason Tucker: it's all of it. Jason Cosper: Yeah.

34:53

Sé Reed: are, I'm wondering if it is WordPress.

34:58

Oh, Jason Tucker: I don't know.

35:01

The GPT stuff has been changing in like my tool set at work quite a bit,

35:08

having one liners written where you have one line of code, that's

35:13

going to do a thing for you. It, I just type in, Hey, I want to do this thing.

35:18

Can you make it happen? And it's sure. I'll create a new user.

35:22

I'll add them to a group and I will give them these permissions.

35:25

It's. And I can read it and I can see that it's doing that thing, but

35:29

I didn't have to write any of it. Just did it.

35:33

Jason Cosper: I use AI stuff very sparingly and what I use it for,

35:38

yes, is one liners like that, Hey I need otherwise inscrutable

35:46

program that does everything FFmpeg, which Tucker I already see

35:53

nodding FFmpeg is a command line

35:56

Jason Tucker: Midos will be written in regular expression the entire way through.

36:00

Yeah.

36:03

Jason Cosper: any media file into basically any other media file.

36:07

Like you can give it a video and it'll just strip out and

36:12

make it into an MP3 for you. You want the video it's a MOV and you want it to be an MP4.

36:20

You want it to be an AVI, like it'll do it for

36:25

Sé Reed: I think I've used this back in the day. This is an old thing, like Napster days, like Livewire, Limewire.

36:32

Jason Cosper: Yeah you need to be able to speak FFmpeg and yeah,

36:40

it's a whole language unto itself.

36:42

Tucker said, it may as well be regular expressions in

36:45

Jason Tucker: Dash this, dash that. You end up with 900 different things you have to string along.

36:52

Jason Cosper: You can tell FFmpeg, you, you give it a URL of some like

36:58

playlist on like the BBC website, and it'll download episodes of

37:03

like the BBC radio shows for you.

37:06

Like you don't have to install like a special downloader.

37:09

It's a wild Sé Reed: But is this AI or is this just

37:13

Jason Tucker: No, it's Jason Cosper: This Sé Reed: This is just computers, right?

37:16

Jason Tucker: your computer. It's just Sé Reed: So really, what's the difference between AI and computers?

37:20

We're talking gendered, really. Jason Cosper: know that FFmpeg can do the thing that I'm looking for.

37:26

So this is what I've been using AI for is, Hey, how do I get FFmpeg to download

37:36

something based off this playlist URL

37:38

Sé Reed: it's your Rosetta Stone. That's how you're using it.

37:41

Jason Cosper: Exactly. Sé Reed: It's like your, or your Philosopher's Stone.

37:44

Or maybe I'm using it as a Philosopher's Stone and you're

37:46

using it as a Rosetta Stone. Jason Cosper: I'm basically using it to not have to spend half an hour reading

37:52

a man page on the Unix command line.

37:57

And just tell me the command I need to run so I can move on with my day.

38:01

Sé Reed: But that's exactly what this is. That's exactly what I asked ChatGPT to do in this case, right?

38:09

Jason Cosper: You're, you need something that will

38:12

Sé Reed: it yeah I'm deploying it in the long term on the internet

38:15

as opposed to a little utility on my computer for one time.

38:19

Jason Cosper: exactly. Sé Reed: So it needs to be able to withstand the waves of

38:26

the ocean that is the internet. My ship must be seaworthy.

38:30

Jason Cosper: If my Jason Tucker: All the other code that you copied and pasted off of

38:33

every other website on the internet. That's the thing.

38:35

Jason Cosper: Every everything else that you put into your

38:38

themes functions dot PHP, it's

38:41

Sé Reed: I've never put anything weird in there.

38:43

I've never done that. And no, I've never white screen to site doing that ever.

38:48

Jason Cosper: no, not once, Jason Tucker: Nope.

38:50

Nope. Sé Reed: Not last week, not the week before that.

38:55

Hey, look, it's staging sites, okay? And now I've got Playground to break too, so it's not even a big deal.

39:01

Break it, fix it, break it to fix it, or whatever,

39:04

Jason Tucker: yeah. So

39:06

Sé Reed: All right Jason Tucker: so what's right then? We went in circles a few times here, but what's right.

39:13

So it's okay to go take random code that's a code off the internet and paste

39:18

Sé Reed: or use it for FFmpeg. Jason Tucker: that could have been broken wrote it.

39:23

Or you have a, you have code that was derived from a bunch of humans

39:27

that was stolen off the internet and then put into a plugin that

39:32

Sé just asked the robot to make, Sé Reed: Yeah the robot is just taking it off the internet anyway, right?

39:38

In theory, it's just using the docs and all this stuff.

39:41

Jason Tucker: The copy and paste. Jason Cosper: You're taking,

39:44

Sé Reed: in, in between the WP beginners and the whatever other all the different

39:50

stack exchanges, the code that I usually end up with, And in the past, let's

39:55

say, is really often the same code.

39:57

And that's part of how I would compare it, right?

39:59

Be like, oh, they're saying this solution, they're saying this solution, neither

40:03

of those work, what if I combine this, Jason Cosper: sure, you're taking money out of the hands of the people

40:12

on Fiverr who will just use AI to write the code for you anyway.

40:18

So you are taking money out of the marketplace and

40:22

Sé Reed: Really, that's the problem here. Is I am not propping, I've never used Fiverr for I'm if

40:28

I'm gonna, I'm just, I Fiverr Jason Cosper: You are better for that.

40:33

But now you are using the Fiverr that just makes a bunch of VCs money.

40:40

Sorry. Jason Tucker: can do now is she can now make a Udemy course on how to do chat

40:45

GPT coding, and then she can be the one that's telling other people to do it.

40:50

Sé Reed: No, dear God. Jason Tucker: into the

40:53

Sé Reed: It's a circle. It's a circle of tech.

40:58

Jason Tucker: Yeah. I don't know what the, I don't know what the the answer is here and I

41:02

don't think we can find that answer. It's, it just,

41:06

Sé Reed: But I do want to know, I'm just going to run this through PHP

41:09

code sniffer and make sure I don't have any open ends anywhere, basically,

41:13

and then I think I'm going to use it. Jason Cosper: yeah.

41:16

And Sé Reed: I can read it.

41:19

I know what it's doing. I'm going to clean it up a little, maybe put a little some spacing.

41:24

I, Jason Cosper: needed ChatGPT to write the code for you, you might

41:30

actually need ChatGPT to help you set up PHP code sniffer because

41:37

Sé Reed: were to write this myself, which I could, by the way,

41:39

and I started to do, I was like, oh, let's open a GitHub of this.

41:43

I don't know, sorry if you can hear my dog, because now I have a barking puppy.

41:46

Sorry, everyone. I don't know what to do about that yet, because it's new.

41:50

But in the old, I would just be like, Oh, I'm going to figure out how to do this.

41:53

And I'd be like what do I need? I need to how do I make my page taxonomy?

41:58

And I'd go look that up. And then I cause I don't keep it all up here, even though I've done it before.

42:03

So I'd go look that up and then I'd go look up. All right I got to put a new screen in my admin.

42:07

That's this, I vaguely remember. So I need to go look that up also.

42:11

And then I'm just pulling stuff from what is the docs now and what's the codecs?

42:17

So just asking the bot is doing something I know how to do.

42:21

It's just honestly, I wasn't expecting the file.

42:24

It really Jason Tucker: Yeah. But the whole thing, thanks for writing this code for me.

42:27

Now I need you to test it. Jason Cosper: Yeah I was going to say,

42:32

Jason Tucker: it's like Volkswagen trying to do the the smog test,

42:36

Jason Cosper: see. See if you can, it zipped it for you.

42:39

And that was a surprise. Simon Wilson is saying compile this C code for me

42:46

and write an SQLite extension.

42:49

Like the next step, let's see, say go on, keep doing this and

42:57

see if it will run phpcs for you.

43:02

I, Sé Reed: oh my God, that's a great idea.

43:06

Jason Tucker: Just load that bad boy up and type it Sé Reed: love this idea.

43:09

Jason Cosper: Yeah, you just have to engineer the prompt, right?

43:14

I would not trust it would do it myself, but I understand that

43:22

not everybody has the same free time and priorities that I do.

43:28

Sé Reed: Okay, so what you're saying is you're going to go look at my code and

43:31

do a pull request if you see a problem? Jason Cosper: no.

43:35

Sé Reed: Okay, I guess the bot will do it for me, so there you go.

43:39

Jason Tucker: Yeah I think as long as Sé does a challenging and tells it that

43:43

I need you to get a PHP code sniffer, the source code of it, and then compile it for

43:48

Ruby and then have it run it against it.

43:52

Then I'll be impressed. Jason Cosper: Sure.

43:56

Sé Reed: Anyone wants to, I'm so sorry about this dog, but if

43:58

anyone wants to hop in the discord and come look at it, we'll put

44:01

Jason Tucker: Yeah, I'm Sé Reed: github in the show notes. Feel free to do a pull request and I really haven't done a lot with the code.

44:09

I don't think I've done anything with the code except for fix the The naming

44:12

and take out the initial space, so it's literally from the robot's mouth.

44:19

Feel free to go in there and we can build this together and make it nice.

44:23

Sure, why not? Jason Tucker: We will all bring our robots to the party

44:26

and they will all code for us. Sé Reed: Yeah, bring me your robot.

44:30

Tell Jason Cosper: Ain't nothing better. Robot party.

44:33

Party. Sé Reed: Come be not chatbots with us on our channel.

44:37

Oh, and see my puppy. Jason Tucker: Hey, thank you very much for the two of you to come hang out as always.

44:44

And come hang out with us in our discord. Please do.

44:48

It's fun. We have a great time and people are really enjoying URL down below.

44:54

Talk to y'all later. You have a good one. Here's our outro.

45:00

Oh, that outro that I talked about.

45:06

com slash subscribe to this content.

45:09

We'd really appreciate it. There's plenty of ways you can listen to us and watch us and all that fun

45:14

Sé Reed: swear I'll get Jason Tucker: go find those places and go do that.

45:17

And find us over on discord.

45:20

Talk to y'all later.