Fun times, indeed. Using AI in coding is like fast-tracking research and development. You think of something and can have it hashed out in minutes. At least, a basic framework for it. I can’t begin to explain how complicated it gets though, when the autocomplete model you’re using only “gets” part of what you’re doing, and starts auto-filling nonsense, or something that is not really what you need. It shifts your perspective from finding the right code to discerning what code is going to be useful and how to properly slot it into the workflow you’re trying to achieve.
Most of our plugins are built from necessity or from a point of view of fast, light, simple, and handles a specific function really well, in order to make my life easier or make developing a site or project faster. I used to spend more time developing something to automate a process than the manual process itself, but not anymore, thanks AI!
I started building this AVIF plugin, for instance. I already had the backend set up, I had built it back when Claude.ai was in its infancy, and set up Squish.Pics as the face of the service. It worked, kind of. I was able to use it to convert images to the avif format, after a bunch of tinkering on the server, and used a built in function of PHP to facilitate the whole process. The idea was that I wanted to transparently be able to convert an entire site to AVIF to help with load times and disk usage. Theoretically, that should be straightforward, but practically it was a lot of effort.
Where did AI shine? Setting out the roadmap – I started writing and it gave me a breakdown of what it thought the next steps would be. It came up with a few ideas I didn’t, and between us this was fleshed out in minutes. As I worked through each of the features, I had to flip between ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and Qwen, depending on my use case and their strengths. Turns out ChatGPT isn’t always the same, sometimes it is ON IT and gives you more than what you need, other times it’s limited and won’t follow simple steps or instructions. Claude is more reliable from both of those points of view, and I have used one or the other to fix the other’s mistakes. Qwen handles my autocomplete, and occasionally I throw larger things at it and it’s able to work with that, too.
It’s interesting though, I am using another plugin I just posted on our plugins page to finish up the htaccess handling, definitely a win!
