Vibe Coding: Building WP Plugins with AI

What Works, What Fails, and How to Do It Safely
AI tools have fundamentally changed how people write code, giving rise to "vibe coding"—describing a problem to an AI in plain English and letting it generate a functional solution on the fly. But when it comes to WordPress plugins, can you really prompt your way to a working, safe tool without breaking your site?
At our next meetup, we’ll explore the real-world practicalities of using AI to build micro-plugins. Inspired by a recent project where an AI assistant was tasked with building small custom plugins to fight off aggressive form spammers and card-checkers, this session will look at what AI handles well, where it hits a wall, and how to bridge the gap safely.
This isn't just a presentation—it’s an interactive round-table discussion! Whether you're an experienced developer using AI tools in your workflow or a beginner who wants to solve a specific problem on your site without hiring a developer, we want to hear your experiences, successes, and horror stories.
What we’ll discuss together:

• The "Micro-Plugin" Sweet Spot: Why AI excels at small, single-file utilities (like blocking spammers or adding custom site hooks), but struggles when projects grow into complex, multi-file codebases.
• WordPress Plugin Must-Haves: The non-negotiable security standards every AI-generated plugin needs before you install it (nonces, data sanitization, escaping, and proper function prefixing).
• Free vs. Paid AI Tools: How free models perform compared to paid, developer-focused environments when writing PHP and JavaScript.
• Testing & Safe Workflows: How to test custom code safely in local staging environments, read error logs, and feed stack traces back into the AI to fix bugs without crashing a live site.