Deep-Diving Into AI Automations

Zack Katz
00:01-00:28
Hello, everybody. Today we are talking about AI. Now, AI isn't just hype anymore. It's quickly becoming one of the most powerful tools in a product maker's toolkit. But how do you move beyond experimenting with ChatGPT prompts and actually build automations that save time, scale your support, even unlock new revenue? That's exactly what we're exploring today on WP Product Talk.

Intro
00:32-00:53
This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show.

Zack Katz
00:58-01:15
Hello, I'm Zack Katz from GravityKit, and today we're talking about AI, and that's why we've invited Jack Arturo today. Jack, welcome to the show. Welcome back. Hey, Zack. Thanks. So tell the world a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Jack Arturo
01:17-02:42
Yeah, my name is Jack. I have been developing software since I was 12 years old, so that's most of my life. I started in WordPress probably about 16 or 18 years ago. And for the last 12 years, I've been running my company Very Good Plugins. And we're most known for WP Fusion, which is an integration tool between all of your WordPress plugins. we support over 100 and your CRM or email marketing system, for example, HubSpot, MailChimp, Salesforce, we go from enterprise all the way down to like really basic free systems. We support self hosted platforms like Fluency Ram and Groundhog. So that's our bread and butter. We have a team of eight people working on that. And I'm really lucky that that's freed up a lot of my time to work on other projects. So I'm launching a SaaS product in the AI space called Echo Dash. And now with these new tools we're going to talk about today, I've been releasing at least one free plugin a week for the open source community. I scratched a lot of my itches and now I'm just taking, if somebody wants something, I just whip it up in 30 minutes and give it away for free. So Very Good Plugins is really living up to the name. I think by the end of this year, we'll probably have dozens or maybe even hundreds of them. So that's been really, really fun.

Zack Katz
02:43-03:22
It's been so cool watching you do this. Thanks. Yeah. We're going to mastermind Slack together, which is great. We have been for years. Six years now? Seven years? I guess. Yeah. It's also a big part of my adult life now. Yeah. Which is wonderful. And then you're also on X, right? Like talking about this stuff and it's, you've been doing so much so quickly that it's hard to keep up. I can't even keep track. So I want to, we're going to get into it. We're going to dive into it. But first I want to ask you, Jack, why is this an important topic for

Jack Arturo
03:23-05:42
WordPress product owners? Well, I can talk about for me and I think it applies to a lot of product owners, maybe yourself included, working on the same code base for 12 years. It makes us a lot of money. We make almost a million dollars a year off of it. Our customers love it. I'm happy that we work on it, but it's frustrating and time consuming. And I can't possibly fix all the mistakes I made when I was 25. Maybe now I can. That just occurred to me. I'll do that later this evening. But, but, you know, it just became kind of a drag and I didn't look forward to going to work each day. And I mean, you and I have had this conversation for years. It's like, I got to get up and fix that support ticket that nobody else understood. Or I have to write a blog post because I haven't had any social engagement this week and hiring people is difficult and then spending time training them. And then, you know, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. So what I really love doing is building software that solves problems. And what I ended up doing was a lot of accounting and legal and HR. And I really started to loathe it. And just in the last few months, but especially in the last since Friday, I think it's been intense. Yeah. I would say like, I've kind of reached an inflection point where I love work again. Like working too much. And I'm like, this is the most exciting thing I've been part of in a long time. I love this. Like, I'm happy. I broke my ankle in a horrible way about a month ago. So part of what got me started on this has been being mostly confined to bed. And, you know, when I'm working on this, I don't feel any pain. Like fully, you know, the flow state you get in, you're just in the computer, like your brain is code. You don't feel your body kind of. So that's been nice. Yeah. So that, that's kind of my journey is like sort of rediscovering my passion for software development and open source products and, and having time to re-engage with the community, which I never had time before because I was just trying to do the minimum to keep, to keep the development and support line pipeline going. So yeah, it's, it's been a big,

Zack Katz
05:43-06:16
big transformation for me. Yeah. And you know, you make a good point and I've, I've had more of this urge than I have in a long time where when you're manually doing a bunch of stuff and you're manually creating GitHub issues and you're taking a support ticket and manually converting it into a GitHub issue, that requires a lot of time. And then fixing the bug, that requires a lot of time. Even if you know exactly what it is, you have the error. Even if you know exactly what it is, where the code is. You have to test it and confirm it.

Jack Arturo
06:17-06:19
You can't send out something that's not confirmed. And that's 30 minutes.

Zack Katz
06:20-06:21
That's 30 minutes if you're lucky.

Jack Arturo
06:22-06:24
If you know what it is, yeah.

Zack Katz
06:24-06:33
Yeah. And instead, you can have a background process building a plugin that you're going to share with the community while you're having another system automate that whole process.

Jack Arturo
06:34-07:02
Yeah, I have a couple systems building plugins right now because I knew I would be occupied. Right. So let's dive in, Jack. What have you been doing? um yeah i guess would you like to start as kind of like the timeline because we have our ai channel in our slack group which is we've kind of seen the journey i guess i could start with the first plugins i created a few months ago and and how i started using ai or maybe instead of that

Zack Katz
07:02-07:12
like maybe describe some of the process like because the output is a lot of code a lot of plugins, a lot of things that help you help others.

Jack Arturo
07:12-07:12
Yeah.

Zack Katz
07:13-07:27
But how do you get to that output? Like, can you kind of break down what are we looking at in terms of how the, all these agents that you have running in the background, what are you talking, what are we talking about when we're talking about the agents? Sure.

Jack Arturo
07:29-08:51
So my tool set at the moment is ChatGPT, of course, which everybody's familiar with, and which I've used exclusively up until now. And they would release an update and I would be frustrated with it. And it can't really code, but it helps a lot with my personal life, especially since my injury. I'm in Germany, so interpreting doctor's reports in German and x-rays. It's good for that, but it didn't help a lot with software development. I started then using Claude Code, which I think you're using as well. Yeah. And that's that's a tool that runs in the terminal. So it's a little more technical, but quite powerful. And then I'm also using cursor, which is it's a sort of a fancy text editor for writing software projects. It's inspired by Visual Studio Code, which is quite popular. I think it's developed by Microsoft. Yeah, but it's AI integrated and AI powered. So you can the agents and models that you work with are optimized for working on your code base. So I was using that maybe since a year ago and that sped things up a lot. And then since Friday, I've now integrated Claude Code desktop and that I can't believe I didn't try this six months ago.

Zack Katz
08:51-08:51
Claude Desktop.

Jack Arturo
08:52-09:32
Oh, sorry. Claude Desktop. Yeah. And now I'm wondering the people who did integrate this six months ago, what have they accomplished? Like I'm picturing Sam Altman, like sitting in a room connected to wires in like attending virtual meetings 10 at a time. Like when he appears in Fort Honduras, is that really him? I feel like I've seen a taste of what's possible. And now I'm wondering the people who have access to the full models or even the people who've been doing this for longer than five days, what are they capable of? So that's where I'm at in the journey. And those are the kind of the four main tools that I'm using.

Zack Katz
09:32-09:40
Okay. Can we take a look at one of your processes? Like what, I know you've prepared a few different things.

Jack Arturo
09:40-09:40
Sure.

Zack Katz
09:41-09:41
Yeah.

Jack Arturo
09:42-09:45
So simple one would be, do you want to see how I prepared for this show?

Zack Katz
09:45-09:46
Let's do it.

Jack Arturo
09:46-09:46
Okay.

Zack Katz
09:48-09:51
And I'm going to be narrating because people listen to the show as well.

Jack Arturo
09:51-10:59
And ask questions and yeah, definitely. So let's just share my screen. Leave the entire screen. Yeah. Okay. All right. So a big thing that's changed in the last five days, you know, it used to be we would create products to process this internally and they worked, but it's just too much work to make it consumable by the public or even to publish a readme or take screenshots. And so a lot of the stuff we made just stayed internal. But now for everything that I work on, it automatically gets a GitHub repo. And as it changes over time, Git is a system. It's called version control. So it's basically like when you edit a Google Doc and you see a history of your changes. It's like that, but for groups of text files or code. I know I have a friend who's using it to write his novel, but mostly used for code. So everything I create now becomes a GitHub repository. So I've published this one for free with all the resources we'll talk about in the show. Well, Claude published it.

Zack Katz
10:59-11:03
And we're looking at a GitHub repo right now with the title, From Manual to Magical,

Jack Arturo
11:03-12:19
How We Automated Our WordPress Support Pipeline with AI. and I did this in about the 15 minutes before you and I got on before the show so um anyway so how I how I kind of started this um an hour and a half ago I just opened up Claude Desktop um which is um it's previously I thought it was just the Claude chat app um kind of like chat gpt from a website, but like in a, you know, a little window. But it's completely different. So I opened the Claude desktop app, and I've got a little project here for the show prep. And I just said the show is starting soon. Can you do a deep dive on W product talk? I let it know where the project is that we're working on. I said, Can you index that and create a read me for the show viewers? So then it did that and created this with also um it went ahead and took these screenshots of the um products i'm going to discuss uh it opened the um chrome extensions it did everything we needed to get a good screenshot um and it published that uh for me in the background while i was doing my hair um you'll notice here i say think hard uh Zack you introduced me to that these are um think hard

Zack Katz
12:20-12:35
Yeah, this is like, we often end with best advice. If you're using Claude, use Ultra Think is their deepest. Think Hard is like a medium thinking. But use the keyword Ultra Think and you're going to have it work a lot harder on your problem.

Jack Arturo
12:35-12:39
And that's a great way to understand yourself. Hard, Think Hard, and Ultra Think.

Zack Katz
12:39-12:40
Yeah.

Jack Arturo
12:41-13:26
And I also like to, I feel like I get better responses when I say, take your time on this, especially when I'm doing multiple tool calls. I don't know if there's any evidence for that. And then I just pasted in our conversation from Slack. It actually has access to our whole Slack history, so it uses that as well. But I wanted to highlight this and just some bullet points I've made about the show. So the big difference with Claw Desktop, which has been a game changer for me, is that because it runs on your computer, you can control the data sources that it uses. So for anyone who's used ChatGPT, you can know that it could search the web somewhat recently. And now I think it can connect to your GitHub. So that--

Zack Katz
13:26-13:30
Can you maximize that screen and maybe zoom in a little bit so we can see the different tool calls?

Jack Arturo
13:30-14:46
The cloud? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then we can do-- actually, here, I got it. This is another thing I can talk about later. new window manager that Claude set up for me. Anyway, so tool calls are, they use a system called MCP, which is called a model context protocol. And it's relatively new. It was developed by Anthropic, which is the company that makes Claude. Anthropic is actually a spinoff from OpenAI, from researchers and engineers who felt like OpenAI wasn't being responsible with their data and they were going after money too much, which I like. And I think it's a superior product, especially for developers, but we can get into that later. So these things basically say, I'm allowing Claude, the agent, to access kind of like an API if you're a developer, but specific to these kinds of large language models. can call certain tools and the tools run very specific processes to give it output. So I have a memory system hooked up. So we start by looking at my memories.

Zack Katz
14:47-14:49
Can you zoom in to make the text bigger?

Jack Arturo
14:49-14:53
Oh yeah, definitely. Let's do that. How's that looking?

Zack Katz
14:53-15:00
Yeah, that's good. And we're looking at a Claude Code window right now and there's a tool call that says search memories.

Jack Arturo
15:01-15:39
Mm-hmm. And let's see, there are no memories found for this one. relatively recent. So then it's loading the project directory and it, oh, I see. I asked it to read my blog post from earlier and let's see, I don't, I guess it's not showing the full response, but basically I went to my website and read the whole blog post and it understands it. And the blog post was we built four tools to fix our support pipeline and you can have them for free yep um i mentioned the directory i'm using to work on this um and it's so this is

Zack Katz
15:39-15:43
connecting to your actual it's connected to the internet and it's also connecting to your own

Jack Arturo
15:43-18:43
computer files on your computer exactly um it's doing research on wb product talk and it's loading all of these urls um and then doing the same thing it did on my blog uh to understand them It's figuring out the details of this podcast. It's a weekly podcast focused on product owners. The hosts rotate but include Matt Cromwell, Katie Keith, Amber Hines, and yourself, Zack. In the show notes, I mentioned these GitHub repositories. It's loaded them and understands everything, all of the code in it. The cool thing about Claude and Anthropik's model or their new technology is the amount of text that it can think about at the same time is equivalent to about 150,000 words. By comparison, I think even a year ago, that was maybe 10,000 words. It's exponentially grown. So it can read 20 websites, all the code I've ever written, my writing style. basically a full novel and understand that in about a minute. Anyway, so great. So then we're looking up some more info about you specifically. So it's read your blog. It's read some interviews with you to understand you a little bit better. Your WordPress.org profile, some WB product talk interviews. It parsed your LinkedIn. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. It synthesizes all this. And then I created a memory system. If we have time, we can get into that. But it's now added all of this to permanent memory, which syncs across not just this desktop app, but the cursor, which I use for development, and now also my phone and the web interfaces, and actually any of these tools. So ChatGPT can use the memory. Google's Gemini can use the memory. - I would like to get into that. - Yeah. A big part of this process for me is I've seen a lot of product founders over the last year who are excited about these tools and they get really deep into a new feature and they do stuff like this. They spend a day or two setting it up and it's really powerful. But then, for example, then ChatGPT becomes not cool again and they switch to Anthropic and they have to start everything all over. So from the beginning, everything that I'm doing is platform agnostic. If a new tool comes out, I don't know, DeepSeek out of China, I can just instantly switch all of this stuff now. So it was a lot of work to set up, but it's not tied to any one platform. So anyway, this is going to memory, which now is permanent across all of basically all of my tools that I might want to use in the future. I can show you sort of briefly if I can find it.

Zack Katz
18:46-19:06
and so jack's screen with claude uh goes through all these steps all these tool calls and then in the output it says wp product talk august 2025 complete show notes and that generated show notes that then jack shared with me uh in advance and that's pushed to github right that's those are

Jack Arturo
19:06-19:39
the show notes that yeah and it did that automatically it did the push to github um I can, let's see. Fine. Anyway, so the memories all exist in the cloud, and there's a website I can go to to manage them and edit them and review them. So, right, this is the output. It's quite long, but we can just sort of scroll through. So this is the internal output for my information, and then it also created a summarized output to share with Zack and another output that we can publish publicly.

Zack Katz
19:39-20:11
One of the problems that I've had with AI, and I think a lot of people have this problem, is the amount of content it creates and the amount of the lack of understanding that I have about all the content that it creates sometimes when I ask it to review and analyze code and it creates a markdown file with like, here's my plan for how to do what you asked me to do. And I scroll through and it looks fine. But then like, if I ask it to actually implement it, sometimes it has errors. How are you doing error checking in terms of making sure that what it outputs is what you expected?

Jack Arturo
20:12-21:25
Right. So that's a great question. That's part of our GitHub flow that I just published the blog post about on our WP Fusion site. A key for me has been not just trusting the output of one interaction or one model. For our development pipeline, we use Claude here on my computer to develop new features. And then when we send it into the cloud, a different Claude model that's trained on fixing bugs runs through automated testing and unit testing on our code and also does user interface testing. So Claude on GitHub will open up a browser and navigate through our plugin settings and make sure all the clicks work as expected, that it's accessibility compatible, that it works for people with languages that read from right to left, all this stuff. And then that agent will provide a summary criticizing the first agent. And at the moment, we review those manually, but in theory, we could have the first agent step back in and say, oh, I'm sorry about that. Let me go and fix those points. So that's been a big game changer.

Zack Katz
21:26-21:35
- Right, and so this is all really cool. - Yeah. - And I just, I still don't have any idea how you've actually set this up.

Jack Arturo
21:35-21:48
- Right, so I think the Claw desktop is the most accessible kind of for the end user. It still requires a little bit more technical knowledge but I can show what that looks like in the app at least.

Zack Katz
21:49-21:49
- Yeah.

Jack Arturo
21:50-22:46
So we can go to the settings over here. And we'll go to even upgrading to the max plan, just $200 a month. And I thought it was expensive, but it's worth it. It really is. I'm on the max plan as well. So the desktop app-- on the web, you can use four or five things. This is similar to ChatGPT. These are very mainstream-- Google Drive, email search, calendar, and GitHub. But on the desktop app, you can connect to local data sources, which A, is a lot faster, and B, lets you customize the behavior or even create your own. So most of my time over the last few days has been setting up and integrating these and getting the kind of outputs that I want that are usable. But again, now that it's set up, I can use it indefinitely, in theory.

Zack Katz
22:47-23:04
And we're currently looking at the Claude desktop app settings screen with the connectors tab activated. And we're seeing things like Google Calendar, Gmail, GitHub, Stripe, Apple Reminder. And then those are all the built-in ones. And then it seems like Jack has added a bunch more.

Jack Arturo
23:05-23:13
Yeah, below Stripe. So Apple Reminders was a big one for me and took some time to set up. I know there are better reminders apps.

Zack Katz
23:13-23:15
I use Reminders app by Apple, yeah.

Jack Arturo
23:15-23:58
Yeah, it works. It syncs everywhere. But I have a lot of my just my personal life in there, like my grocery shopping list and my movies I want to watch and TV shows. So I wanted to get that integrated. It's a little bit tricky because of Apple's privacy rules, but that's working. Brave, it can control my browser. Browser MCP is a development tool for doing diagnostics in the browser. Again, I have a blog post and a list of these with more description and kind of the top five. But Context 7, if you mention it in a chat, it will force the chat to go look up the latest API or developer documentation about the subject and then use that.

Zack Katz
23:58-24:56
And Context 7 has, Mark Westgard says, next step, virtual Jack. I think that is the next step. Hey, Mark. Welcome. and Tendaro says hi Jack. Contact 7 for those who aren't aware is like so MCPs allow integrating with a bunch of different stuff or using it as a lookup like a search and returning the documentation for how to do something. Contact 7 is one entry point where you can say use contact 7 and contact 7 will then fork off and say like, okay, you're asking me about Tailwind CSS. I know all about Tailwind CSS. You're asking me about Bootstrap. I know all about Bootstrap. It uses the context of your request to look up the correct documentation. So you can use that one entry point as the solution for how to

Jack Arturo
24:57-25:10
interact with all those different code bases. Exactly. So another thing is for each of these, when you click on them, this is the name of the tool, but each tool has things that it can do.

Zack Katz
25:10-25:17
So the Apple Reminders tool. Yeah. Apple Reminders MCP has different tools. Exactly.

Jack Arturo
25:19-26:42
So for example, creating reminders, listing existing ones, deleting them, moving them. Oh, that's interesting. I haven't seen this before. I'll read that later. But so much to learn. But for each one, I need to, for privacy reasons, grant specific explicit permission in Claude for it to use it. So for this, I've just said, for creating minders, check with me. But I'm going to allow it to list my existing ones, move them, and list all the lists without checking. So now it can do that in the background, like those two calls I showed earlier when I was prepping for the show. All those run on supervised, so I don't have to say, yes, it's okay to load my website. So we can do this for all of them, but that's an example. There's a few, so I'll just point out the highlights. I'm aware of the time already. File system lets it read and update files on my computer. FreeScout we use for support tickets, so we can get tickets, add notes, assign, update tickets, understand the customer's context and history with us. Our Slack mastermind, which is where Zack and I hang out, we're allowed to send messages to people directly, read conversation history for context, all this, which is very helpful.

Zack Katz
26:42-26:47
And there is a working theory that you are using Claude to communicate with us.

Zack Katz
26:47-26:47
Sometimes.

Jack Arturo
26:50-26:59
I do approve of it. Open memory, I mentioned earlier, I just added that on Monday. So that's bringing in our memory bank.

Zack Katz
26:59-27:29
um if i let's see well and where do these mcps get added like what what are we looking at in terms of um how to take how does this actually work like uh could you show people what that means when you add mcps like how does that uh how do you add an mcp to claude where do you have these agents

Jack Arturo
27:29-28:09
living. Oh, it's windy here. Yes. Right. So these MCPs, well, my WhatsApp connection is great. I get a morning summary of my messages. And these two let me update and publish blog posts. So the MCPs live in a configuration file. So I'll bring up our website because it's a little bit less, or our GitHub repo because is a little less technical. We can just look at that. So let's see. Switch over here.

Zack Katz
28:09-28:16
And for those of you who are listening and you're like, this is just way beyond me, it is overwhelming.

Jack Arturo
28:16-28:17
Jack is overwhelmed.

Zack Katz
28:17-28:20
I'm overwhelmed. Like, we're all overwhelmed.

Jack Arturo
28:20-28:55
You're not alone in feeling overwhelmed. Exactly. My goal with all of this is ideally to open source everything that I'm learning And I've got processes in place that when I add something, it now automatically updates this GitHub repository with detailed testing and setup instructions. So I'm hoping what I'm figuring out here can be used by people who aren't as technical. Oh, this is what I mentioned earlier. So these are my memories. So we have 12 now since yesterday. But as I work on stuff, it shows which app it came from, Claude versus Cursor.

Zack Katz
28:56-29:08
We're looking at app.openmemory.dev, the dashboard there. And is this stored? Like, what is this? Is it actually open? Is it connected to a GitHub repo?

Jack Arturo
29:08-30:12
Or is it a service that you're paying for? It is free for now while I test it out. It's a cloud service, so data privacy is a concern. It's just connected to the agents that I'm using. So it would be Claude Desktop or cursor, or if I use open chat GPT. But my goal eventually would be to move everything I'm doing off of my computer and into a cloud server where I can access it on any device. And it can also message me from the cloud. And in that case, I can run this. It's open source, so I can install that on the server and then it's free and instant. Nice. Yeah. So we can do... Right, so how did we set up the tools? I think we, well, even that's a little technical, but, and also this is good because it doesn't, actually, I haven't put that one in there.

Zack Katz
30:12-30:21
We're looking at good hub right now where Jack's going to repo. - Oh, very good plugin slash cloud hyphen automation hyphen hub.

Jack Arturo
30:22-30:26
- It's actually good. I didn't show you the one on my computer because it has all my secret keys,

Zack Katz
30:27-30:32
my API credentials for all of my apps. I have to remind myself that we're sharing all this.

Jack Arturo
30:33-31:02
So this is also publicly available and anyone can copy what I'm doing. This is the one I update every day. And this includes all my configuration files, my MCPs. These files look scary because they look like code, But if you just click on it, you get a nice, mostly readable copy and pasteable set of instructions on how to implement it. So when we talk about how to configure Claude Desktop, we can look at this file.

Zack Katz
31:03-31:08
Which is cloud underscore desktop underscore config dash example dot JSON. Yep.

Jack Arturo
31:10-31:14
And basically this just defines what the MC.

Zack Katz
31:14-31:15
Can you zoom in there?

Jack Arturo
31:15-31:20
Sorry? Oh, zoom in. Yeah, of course. My screen's really big. I forget sometimes.

Zack Katz
31:20-31:24
So we have a question from Idle Herb. Great stuff, Jack. Is Claude Desktop related to Claude

Jack Arturo
31:25-32:37
Code? Can they share memories? Yes. Yes and no. Claude Code, the way that each of these tools, the way they use the Anthropics services or Claude services are optimized for that specific app. So Claude code writes better code. But other than that, I'm sharing this configuration across Claude desktop, Claude code and cursor, which we use for development. In the future, if I add any other API apps, this is now universal or AI apps. This is now a universal standard and they can all use everything that I add automatically. Again, took a little bit of setup, but worth it. These are all the tools I showed you earlier, FreeScout. A lot of these are actually, even with this one, we open source that in the cloud on what's called the node package repository. So you don't have to set this configuration file. You would type a single line into your terminal, which we have here, and it will automatically load this from our public code, install it for you and can configure it. So it's not so scary.

Zack Katz
32:38-33:43
- Right. A lot of these services require usernames and passwords and secrets and things like that. This is a really important thing for people to get right while they're playing around with this stuff. Because it's really easy to share your keys accidentally, publish them in a GitHub repo. There are correct ways to do this and there are incorrect ways to do this. One of the most important things to learn is environment variables and how to set them and how to ignore them from being committed to your GitHub repository. Make sure that you're not publishing the settings. And MCPs, if you're looking at the screen, the FreeScout or the WordPress MCP has WordPress API URL, username and password. That's dangerous. That's dangerous. So what you would do is you would set those on your local, on your computer, you would set those in a separate file or hard code them in the environment variables of your Claw desktop configuration.

Jack Arturo
33:44-34:27
Yeah, and I made that mistake in the beginning because I was so excited about sharing everything. I had Claw to auto publishing it, and I did publish some, and it's not easy to delete that data off of GitHub. So I had to then go in and change all the usernames and passwords, and that took some time. Right. To solve that, I've added an instruction that it should never publish that kind of thing without checking with me. But also for this project, because I want to share everything we're doing in real time, these are my real configuration files, but I have, you're right, a.env file, an environment file that lives in here that doesn't go on GitHub. So this is my real configuration, but when I run it, this stuff is replaced by the secure credentials on my computer.

Zack Katz
34:27-34:35
Right. And when you say you told it to never do this again, don't share my stuff. Yeah. Where did you tell it to do that? Right.

Jack Arturo
34:36-35:03
So we can get into. So this is called desktop, which is kind of the let's bring in our information over the Internet and create deep analysis of your relationships with people like I was sending you yesterday. So we move over to the development environment. via Claude code. And that looks like that looks like

Zack Katz
35:03-35:06
this. Can you increase the text size on this as well? Yes. I'm just

Jack Arturo
35:07-35:08
going to start a new session. It looks like you're

Zack Katz
35:09-36:00
using warp as well. So terminal oh boy. Command line interface is the is how Claude code works. It uses a prompt on your computer and you type in text and it responds with text. So Terminal is the built-in Mac app that is the command line interface for your Apple computer. There's also an application called Warp, which Jack and I both apparently use, that is just another way to access the command line on your computer, which is to give your computer direct commands for it to run code or do processes. Claude code is a command line application that you start by typing the word Claude after you install it.

Jack Arturo
36:03-36:26
And to add to that, warp is also an AI-powered terminal. So if you don't know how to use terminal commands, you can just ask the AI. Yeah, you can just type in install Claude and it'll figure out how to install Claude. And then you can write Claude and then it'll work. Because I'm, yeah, I'm a developer for a long time and I get confused in the terminal with, especially with get stuff. So warp has been helpful with that.

Zack Katz
36:26-36:30
Even I accidentally sent my WordPress password to GitHub.

Jack Arturo
36:30-36:32
Can you fix it? And warp will do that kind of thing. So that's nice.

Zack Katz
36:33-37:03
And you can do things in warp. Like once you install a command line tool like FFmpeg, which is a way to encode video and audio, you can just type in convert this MP3, which we're going to be doing after our call today. I'm going to say convert this into 160 kilohertz mono MP3, and it will do it. It'll create the auto. It'll create the conversion script for me and do it for me instead of having to remember how to do that.

Jack Arturo
37:04-37:04
Exactly.

Zack Katz
37:04-37:07
Yeah. So you typed Claude into warp.

Jack Arturo
37:08-37:08
Exactly.

Zack Katz
37:08-37:11
Yep. And I see, welcome to Claude code. Yep.

Jack Arturo
37:12-37:15
And we're inside WP Fusion now.

Zack Katz
37:16-37:26
And by inside WP fusion, the terminal was pointed at the folder on your computer called WP fusion, which is where your plugin lives on your computer. Exactly. Okay.

Jack Arturo
37:28-38:33
So Claude has built in commands, which you can just, which you can access by putting a slash key in. So we'll do that. And to look at, we want to look at the configuration files, basically. And let's see, that's going to be... Actually, let's look at permissions. Yeah. So... Right. Okay. It's... I don't usually do this via the thing. Anyway, Claude Code can have access to my memories. And also what it does is it uses a file called Claude.md, which is just an instructions file in your workspace. I can show you what that looks like. And it tells Claude what it should and shouldn't do when it's working on your projects. So we can go to that.

Zack Katz
38:34-38:38
Right, like you can add a file, you can edit a file, but don't ever delete a file.

Zack Katz
38:39-38:39
Right, exactly.

Zack Katz
38:40-38:47
it will always ask permission before it does it if you don't have it in the list of things that it is allowed to do.

Jack Arturo
38:50-39:03
- And there's a way to set that up globally too, but I'm not sure how to show it without showing credentials. So anyway, for WP Fusion--

Zack Katz
39:03-39:04
- Can we zoom in as well?

Jack Arturo
39:04-39:08
- Yeah, let's see. My eyesight is very good.

Zack Katz
39:09-39:10
Congratulations.

Jack Arturo
39:11-39:14
How's that looking, Eric? Yeah, it looks better. OK.

Zack Katz
39:14-39:15
Bigger again, please.

Jack Arturo
39:15-40:15
Sure. Let's see that. I can close this. So there are two ways to work with this. For one, that configuration file I shared earlier that works with all of Claude, you can also do that per project if you want unique capabilities or rules for projects. This tells Claude specifically for WP Fusion what it's allowed to do and not do. So it can edit files, write to files, PHP. These things are automated testing, and it's allowed to update our documentation. It's not allowed to take over the system, delete anything, or format my hard disk. I've seen some horror stories about this on Reddit, so we want to be careful with that. And then we can look at the... So this file...

Zack Katz
40:16-40:20
And Jack is opening up a couple of Markdown files.

Jack Arturo
40:21-41:01
Yeah. When you first start Claude, it will prompt you to generate this for your project, and it will scan all of your files. It takes a while. And then it creates this document for itself to teach itself how to work with your specific plugin or even like your book you're writing or anything you're doing. So it, again, is quite long. I found that it's helpful with Claude to use these, these are called XML tags and it's how Claude was trained and it lets Claude know what's important and what isn't. These are the most important things to follow. So when you're starting the example

Zack Katz
41:01-41:21
of what you want, like wrapping text in blocks that say, start of critical note, end of critical note is a good way to structure things for Claude. ChatTBT is trained in a different setup, so that's not how you necessarily want to interact with ChatTBT.

Jack Arturo
41:21-41:26
Yeah, and again, you don't have to understand this. You can just ask for it.

Zack Katz
41:28-42:04
So Jack is typing into Cursor, which is the development environment that has its own AI, kind of like warp. Can you evaluate my use of XML tags for Claude Code instructions in this file based on the latest Anthropic docs? Use context 7. So we talked about context 7 before as the interface that knows all these other docs, so you don't have to keep updated with all the docs. And then now you're asking it to review your code, use that MCP to look up the right way to do it, analyze whether you're doing it the right way.

Jack Arturo
42:05-42:40
Yeah. And I like this looks complicated, but I didn't write any of this. I don't understand how the XML tags work. I just asked for it. And if we weren't recording right now, I would push a button on my computer and just speak into it and it would do this for me. So it's really non-technical. Our support team lead who knows our product very well, but is not a developer, has now been creating new features and fixing bugs using these tools in the cloud just with a one-click fix button in GitHub. And it works. He's really happy because he can actually build things.

Zack Katz
42:41-42:54
And a lot of what is required for that to be successful is having the setup where you have automated tests that are running to make sure things don't break. You have documentation generated that make sure that those are updated.

Jack Arturo
42:54-43:20
And multiple levels of review. You're using CodeRabbit as well? Yeah. So that's another tool that then checks everything after Claude does. And that lets the support rep know the areas to test, which are important, where things that might go wrong and also things that might or might not work. So that's been very helpful. By the time that I see the code, I see a bunch of green check marks knowing that everything is passed and I don't have to test anything.

Zack Katz
43:21-43:28
I still do. If an integration breaks, then you'll see a red checkmark or red X instead of a green checkmark.

Jack Arturo
43:29-44:49
And you'll know that something's wrong and needs to be fixed. So while we're talking about that, Claude over here said, I'm doing this well, but it would like to make these changes. Oh, that's interesting. So actually the tag should be indented. If I wanted to, I could one click make all these changes and improve the way Claude code works with it. So this is letting it know how the files are structured in the plugin, the kind of a template for the way we write our code, the way that we document things, which is very important. Even more so than ever, AIs read and understand documentation. So our code already had a lot of documentation, but that's increased significantly because it helps them work faster. Our integrations, these are processes for developing new features based on the type of feature, integrating with a new CRM or creating a new integration with another WordPress plugin. These are tasks that we use often and it tells them how to do them. This is how we test everything. This is what we consider for performance. These are the security requirements, which are very important for WordPress. We get these off of the WordPress documentation. And some common issues down here, which is missing formatting. So that's how we instruct Claude how to work with that project.

Zack Katz
44:50-45:18
Right. And if there are multiple, like GravityKit, we have a ton of different products. And some of them, like they've been developed over the course of 11 years. So some of the coding standards have changed over time. And like some of the naming conventions that we've used have changed over time. So having one of these per plugin lets the AI know, hey, when I'm working on this plugin, this is the way I should deal with this. code base and if i'm working on this other plugin these are the rules that i should follow in this

Jack Arturo
45:18-45:52
other code and um even since uh last week um like i mentioned earlier maintaining this old code is frustrating sometimes um because claude can now fit a whole novel into the context of one conversation i asked it to start um just go through every file i think we have about a thousand of them And some of them are a few thousand lines long. And just write documentation following our style. You know, explain what each function does. And for every filter, explain to other developers how they can use it.

Zack Katz
45:52-45:54
And it ran for maybe about 40 minutes.

Jack Arturo
45:54-45:57
It was a big job, but it did it all perfectly. So that was nice.

Zack Katz
45:57-46:50
Yeah, I've had mixed success with that. It doesn't always understand the intention of the functionality that you write. I asked it to write up, for example, documentation on a new feature I was building and think about each step for how it would work and how the user would go ahead and implement it. And it made up some stuff as to why people might want to use it or how it could be used. So it does require some manual review. But that's where QA, we're finding GravityKit, is becoming more important, including documentation. but QA to make sure that everything that it says it can do, it does, and everything and nothing like and the things that it can't do aren't being lied about by our documentation.

Jack Arturo
46:51-47:12
Exactly. That also, I think, comes down to the context window, which we mentioned, like how many words it can fit. The more words that are in there, the less time it has to to understand what's happening. We solve that by splitting tasks off into smaller task-focused, they call them sub-agents,

Zack Katz
47:12-47:14
which one might run on each file at a time.

Jack Arturo
47:15-47:20
And when you do that, each sub-agent has that full 150,000 words to work with.

Zack Katz
47:21-48:11
So it takes longer, but. - So there could be, for example, a sub-agent, like one of the things that I use is called SuperClaud, and you can look it up, and that makes it so that you can have, They have a tool called Spawn. And you use Claude code to trigger SuperClaud Spawn. And Spawn then plans functionality, analyzes the existing functionality, identifies and implements how the code will be added, writes tests, runs the tests, and all this stuff happens at the same time unless you say parallel. And then SuperClaud can break it into parallel agents and have all that stuff running in parallel if it's something that could be parallelized. Parallelized. That's a good word. So there's a lot to learn, Jack.

Zack Katz
48:12-48:12
Yeah.

Zack Katz
48:12-48:40
And we're unfortunately out of time. All that we've talked about today, like you've talked about a GitHub repo. I'm going to share the link in the show notes. So anybody who's interested can check out WP Product Talk, find our episode, Deep Diving into AI Automation. and find your GitHub repos. Where should people start though? Like how, where should people start?

Jack Arturo
48:40-49:44
What's your best advice? I would say the most powerful tool now for beginners, Claude Desktop. I believe you can use it for free, but I think once you start using it, $200 a month will be very reasonable. And what was most powerful for me was even if you don't have any integrations or any technical knowledge, just ask it. Here's my name, Google what you know about me, and suggest how we can optimize you to help me work better. And it will come up with a detailed plan about the kind of data that it would like access to based on your web presence. And it will ask you if you'd like to create those integrations and just spend an hour with it and say, yes no i have some questions about that and um it will like most of this stuff claude desktop uh invented and and then integrated for me and then taught me how to use um so i no i i didn't know how these model context protocol servers worked when i started claude just set it up for me

Zack Katz
49:45-50:55
yeah and mine is similar in the sense that um okay so you're using chat gpt right now if you're probably should as well yeah definitely using that one but like okay so open up claude like even claude.ai open up their website chat with claude about how to get claude's desktop installed or chat with claude about how to get claude code installed i ask each one of you who is listening spend a day on this just a day dedicate a day of your life to getting set up with something that does something for you, anything, and you will find that it is the entry point. It's the gateway drug to automation and AI optimization. You will find that everything that you're doing right now without AI feels antiquated and that it feels like yesterday's technology because my wife, Juniper, she compared it to using an old candy bar phone versus getting the first iPhone. It unlocks a whole world of functionality in a way that didn't exist before.

Jack Arturo
50:56-51:03
The old paradigm's gone. And I think it's going to be more equivalent to the printing press or maybe even the invention of the wheel.

Zack Katz
51:03-51:25
Yeah, it's like going from monks in a castle transcribing the Bible to rocket science. Yeah, everything changed. Everything changes. So spend a day. You will thank yourself for getting set up. And don't give up because if you keep on asking Claude how to do things,

Jack Arturo
51:25-51:27
it'll keep on telling you how to do things.

Zack Katz
51:27-51:28
It is your best friend.

Zack Katz
51:28-51:29
You don't have to be a developer.

Jack Arturo
51:29-51:41
Daniel shared in our Slack. He connected it to his Gmail and asked it to go through all of his old newsletters, the ones he's never read, and unsubscribed to them. And it did that for like 40 different newsletters.

Zack Katz
51:41-51:43
That terrifies me, and I will not do that.

Jack Arturo
51:43-51:47
The ones he hasn't opened in a while. But anyway, sure.

Zack Katz
51:47-51:50
Maybe you'd want to grant permission, but yeah, he wanted to get rid of them.

Jack Arturo
51:50-52:11
And it proposed that as something that it could help him with. So you don't have to be a developer. It now manages my shopping list. It reads my WhatsApps and sends me a text message every morning with a summary of everybody I need to get back to. When my mom emails me travel plans, it researches flights and sends me a summary. Everything that I do now is connected.

Zack Katz
52:12-52:48
Yeah, and it's one of those things where I haven't done enough yet. I look at Jack's progress in terms of setting up these systems, and I'm envious of all the work that he's put into it. I've put in some work. I haven't put in that much work. I, for example, want to have team calls and all the things we talk about on Slack. I want to have agendas automatically created based on the things that AI knows we need to talk about. These are things that can unlock my productivity as a manager, unlock the development team, the support team, the marketing team, unlock all of it.

Jack Arturo
52:48-53:46
Yeah. Yeah. And my goal would be for all these tools that you can basically click a button and it will set it up for you. My solutions aren't going to be your solutions, but my hope would be that you get excited enough about it that you then get stuck in this flywheel trying to improve it. What you discussed, so this messages me 30 minutes before every meeting on my Google calendar, and it gets all the details. It uses all of these tools, FreeScout, Gmail, Apple Reminders, and it prepares all of these details, background information on the attendees, what I need to know about them, our previous meetings, if there are any notes, exactly what I should talk about in the meeting based on the subject of the meeting. So yeah, I've solved that one. It also adds reminders to my calendar, my reminders app, when to get ready, when to prep, when to do my hair. So yeah, that's ready to go.

Zack Katz
53:47-53:53
That's awesome. And that's your Claude Automation Hub, a very good plugin slash Claude-Automation-Hub. Yeah.

Jack Arturo
53:53-54:02
And that's all public and open source. It requires a little bit of setup now. But again, my goal would be to create a nice looking visual tool where you can just click a button and it happens for you.

Zack Katz
54:03-54:08
Right. And we have a question from the audience. Jack, are you using AI for product marketing?

Jack Arturo
54:08-55:23
Asks Maria Ansari. Yes. So actually, while we were on the show today, I was taking screenshots for this episode for the GitHub, and I wanted to publish a blog post also. So while we've been talking, I asked Claude and Cursor to work on this blog post and use the screenshots that I'd already taken. And it looks like it's done. It copies my writing style by analyzing every blog post I've ever written on this site. And it does sound pretty much exactly like me. It uses emojis like me. And this looks like, yeah, this is a screenshot of, so it loaded up my browser while we were talking, went to the right page, minimized the admin, took the screenshot. I think there's accessibility text added. It's supposed to do that. Yes, accessibility text is there. So again, this all happened in the hour that we've been speaking. And yeah, this looks like a nice little blog post. We even have some things that went hilariously wrong with Claude. Yep. This is all stuff that happened. They read my GitHub and saw the loop happened. There was an infinite loop.

Zack Katz
55:23-55:23
Yep.

Jack Arturo
55:24-55:27
Yeah. This didn't happen.

Zack Katz
55:28-55:29
So it just made up something.

Jack Arturo
55:30-55:59
We did. No, it did fix it and it didn't work, but it was not automatically deployed to customers. So don't worry, I'm going to review this. But again, so multitasking has changed a lot. I'm working more than ever before, but I'm enjoying it. Because while I'm doing this, or while I'm waiting for my new short film to render, which is another topic, it's publishing blog posts, publishing GitHub repositories, preparing my meeting notes, and then messaging me whenever

Zack Katz
55:59-56:29
it's done or needs some input. And I often load up a big prompt before I stop work for the day and just keep it working on that. And I'm sure near future, it's going to be constantly doing stuff in the background at all times. And that's a topic for another conversation, I think, is future of AI. Exactly. Yeah. There's so many conversations. Well, Jack, that's a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jack Arturo
56:30-57:21
Where can people find you online? Yes. So you can find me on X at VeryGoodPlugins. Our main product is at WPFusion.com. And you can also find my personal website at VeryGoodPlugins.com. That's where I'll be publishing all of these free code solutions. And I'm also starting a 12-week challenge where I create a free plugin or solution based on community requests and release it for free. And I'm using it to raise money for the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund to help kids in Gaza. So our goal is to raise $12,000 in 12 weeks from the open source community. So I'll be announcing that and publishing it probably tomorrow.

Zack Katz
57:21-58:07
That's exciting. That's a great initiative. And thank you for coming on. And for those listening and watching, if you're enjoying these shows, please do us a favor, hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, reference the show in your newsletters, and don't forget to tune in again next week. Bye. Bye.