• CodeRevolution
• WPBay

Not long ago, if you wanted to build a plugin, you actually needed to know how to code in PHP, you needed to know also JS, CSS, HTML. Today, almost anyone can open ChatGPT or Claude, type a prompt and get a plugin back in seconds.

And yes… there are many cases when it works. That is exactly why the topic of this post is important.

Because from the outside, it is easy to think this changes everything. If AI can generate plugins this fast, why even bother reviewing code? Why not just let anything in? … The answer is simple.

Because working code is not always good code.

I am saying this as someone who builds AI products myself. I love this technology. It saves a lot of time, helps with ideas, helps with debugging, helps me move many times faster. I use it, maybe a bit too much than I should…

But I also spent years building WordPress products, selling them, supporting customers, fixing bugs at stupid hours, dealing with weird hosting environments, plugin conflicts, broken updates, all the fun stuff that comes with real software…

That experience changes how you look at generated code. A plugin can install fine. It can activate fine. It can even seem to do exactly what it promises. And still be a problem.

Maybe it forgot a security check. Maybe it trusts user input when it should not. Maybe it works until another plugin changes something. Maybe it is slow. Maybe it breaks on a different PHP version. Maybe the person selling it has no idea how the code actually works. And trust me, that last one is the scary part!

Because AI makes it very easy to create something that looks real. It gives you in seconds a nice settings page with a few buttons, of which you can do some nice looking screenshots. It also adds a confident product description.

To a buyer, that can look exactly like a serious product… But sometimes it is just generated code that was tested for five minutes and uploaded to WPBay. That is not something I am comfortable with.

Maybe I am old school here, but if someone buys a plugin, they are trusting that product on their website. Sometimes on a business they depend on. Sometimes on a store making them money. And that trust means a lot.

So yes, we manually review code at WPBay. And not because AI reviews are bad and neither because human developers are perfect, oh they are far from perfect (myself included)… But because someone has to care about quality and someone has to stop the obvious junk, asking “does this actually make sense?”

I personally think this matters more now than ever, as AI is making development faster. That is a good thing… But it is also making it easier to create products without really understanding what was created.

I am sure that the best developers will use AI and build amazing things faster. While the worst ones will use AI to push out products they cannot support, cannot fix and never fully understood.

In the submissions sent to WPBay for review, I see both are already happening, as I write here.

So no, WPBay is not anti-AI. Far from it. If you have read this far, you probably already understand that this is not me complaining about technology or pretending we should go back to doing everything the hard way. AI is here and honestly, that is exciting. It is changing how products are built and in many ways, for the better.

The easier it becomes to generate software, the easier it becomes to flood a marketplace with products that look polished but are held together by assumptions and luck. I do not want WPBay to become that kind of place. I would rather review fewer products and sleep well knowing we tried to keep the obvious junk out, than open the gates and hope for the best. AI will absolutely help build the next generation of great WordPress products. I believe that. But human judgment, responsibility and actual experience still matter, maybe now more than it ever did!