How WooCommerce MCP Unlocks the Next Wave of Product Innovation

[00:00:00] Zack Katz: Is promoting MCP as a new way for apps, tools, and AI models to communicate. But WooCommerce product builders, uh, what do you do with that? What is, what doors does this open? Uh, is this ready for real world use? What does it take to make a woo product MCP aware and is the hype worth the investment right now?

[00:00:21] These questions will be answered on this episode of WP Product Talk.

[00:00:30] Matt Cromwell: 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. Buy WordPress product owners and now enjoy the show.

[00:00:57] Zack Katz: Hello everybody. I'm Zach Katz from Gravity Kit.

[00:01:01] Ian Misner: And I'm Ian Meisner from Kestrel.

[00:01:03] Zack Katz: And, uh, before we get started, a huge thanks to Freemius for sponsoring WP Product Talk. Uh, if you don't know, Freemius takes care of everything from licensing and payments to tax compliance, so you can focus on building products that people love.

[00:01:18] Ian Misner: And, uh, don't forget, if you're watching live right now, hit subscribe. Literally stop right now. Hit the button. Uh, it helps us reach more WordPress builders and shows. The show makes the show strong. Thank you.

[00:01:28] Zack Katz: Yeah. Uh, and today we're joined by Nik McLaughlin from SkyVerge, who's been digging deep into WooCommerce MCP prototyping, real integrations, and trying to figure out if it's worth the investment for product teams.

[00:01:42] Nik, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

[00:01:45] Nik McLaughlin: Hey. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:47] Ian Misner: Yeah. And, uh, for anyone who doesn't know you yet, Nik, uh, can you tell us a little bit about your background, what you've been working on?

[00:01:53] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, yeah, so Zach mentioned I'm over on the SkyVerge team at GoDaddy. Um, so I've been there for about five years.

[00:02:00] Came along about the same time that, uh, we got acquired. Uh, so that's been, you know, all the, all the big journey things there. I've been, uh, working with. Woo and WordPress for about 10 years. Um, and then really started in kind of getting deeper into it with SkyVerge, uh, on the support side and have since kind of bounced roles, done some engineering stuff, done some product stuff, uh, and am now, uh, you know, kind of taking the lead on product direction and strategy for, for the brand.

[00:02:31] Zack Katz: Uh, that's really cool. And, uh, for those who are watching live, please throw your questions into the chat and we will pull some in as we go. Um, there, I'm sure are gonna be a lot of questions I think around, uh, MCP because, uh, the first question, uh, that people might ask is. Nik, what's, what's an MCP? What is m what is it?

[00:02:54] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, what is this new acronym? Yeah. Uh, yeah, I mean, it's fair, like MCP, a lot of the work in MCP has really happened in the last four or five months really, um, as far as like actually getting things out there. So it's, it's definitely something new to, to figure out. Uh, so high level, like the, the m, the C, the P is model context, protocol.

[00:03:16] So it's like really roughly like a way for LLMs to actually do things, uh, to, to interact with applications that are like external to the chat bot itself, right? Um, so you have your, your chat bot that can talk and make up answers and lie to you. Um, MCP is like the way to connect that to external tools.

[00:03:37] Uh, that's like this open standard protocol. So, uh, being a, a protocol like folks working in web space are familiar with like HTTP, um, being the way that the web works. Uh, it's, it's like that. But for AI and apps, uh, the, the HTTP dynamic is like browser or like, um, like server and client, right? Um, and you have the exact same dynamic with MCP, where you're setting up MCP servers.

[00:04:04] Uh, that serve to an LLM, which is acting as part of an MCP client. Um, so it's, it's a really similar relationship to that. Uh, you can think of it kind of in the same way the mental model sort of holds up. Uh, but, uh, yeah, yeah. So that's, that's sort of the, the Bay Baseline intro to MCP. Um. It can get more into like, you know, the exciting stuff, but Yeah.

[00:04:28] Zack Katz: Yeah. So there's, that's when you're using an LLM when, let's just say AI because like, that's what everybody says, so,

[00:04:36] Nik McLaughlin: yeah.

[00:04:36] Zack Katz: When you're using AI to use, like, and you're connecting it to an MCP, what does that allow, like what, what functionality does that allow you to do? Like why, how is that different from just saying.

[00:04:47] Or what would you even say to an MCP that's connected to WooCommerce?

[00:04:51] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. So the, the magic is really that you're, you're not leaving the chat interface that, like for a, for the user on the client side. You really are just talking and it just kind of. Sometimes two magically gives your, gives your chatbot superpowers behind the scenes, right?

[00:05:08] Um, but it, but it allows you to ask about, in, in natural language about things that, uh, you know, that only that service would know about. So chat, GPT doesn't know about your sales last month, but if you hook up a WooCommerce MCP, it can generate really complicated reports for you that you didn't have to learn SQL for.

[00:05:28] You can just type the words in like you would talking to a business partner of something, right? You can ask the question as it occurs to you and it'll kind of piece together and figure out what tools to use, and then you, that's where MCP comes in, is like teaching it what tools are available. Um, and how, and then handling in a more deterministic way, like once it decides to use those tools, what happens?

[00:05:50] There's like an API call, basically that happens on the server side, that the LOM says, Hey, I wanna use this tool. And then whoever made that server controls what the code does at that point. Um, yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:03] Zack Katz: And just to, just to make sure we have definitions for the different terms, can you, can you explain what a tool is?

[00:06:08] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Right? Yes. That is like jargon now, unfortunately, I took some simple words here. Uh, yeah. I mean the, the tool is the, the, the functionality I guess, that's exposed to the LOM specifically. MCP can broadly be broken down as far as like the things that exist on the server side that the LOM can see, that the AI can see, um, are like tools and resources.

[00:06:35] Um, resources is more of like a static document for reference. A tool is, uh, is like a certain, has a certain schema that the LLM knows how to use it to actually do things. Um, so that can be performing actions like in a WooCommerce concept context. Performing actual actions on your site, like products updating or, uh, inventory levels, changing inventory levels or something like that.

[00:07:00] Or it can be like more of a read of, you know, getting historical sales data and stuff like that.

[00:07:06] Ian Misner: Can I try to translate this into dumb guy for a second and you tell me if Yes.

[00:07:10] Nik McLaughlin: I keep trying. Yeah.

[00:07:11] Ian Misner: Very simple on my end and tell me if this is wrong or overly simplistic. Basically, Claude's a really smart dude.

[00:07:17] And the MCP server is a book he can read to teach him how to do a thing, and he just never puts it down once he give it to him, basically.

[00:07:27] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah.

[00:07:29] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:07:29] Nik McLaughlin: For better or worse, he doesn't put it down. Yeah,

[00:07:31] Ian Misner: yeah, yeah. The he doesn't put it down part is actually important actually.

[00:07:34] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah.

[00:07:34] Ian Misner: That's, uh,

[00:07:35] Nik McLaughlin: turns out

[00:07:36] Ian Misner: we can get into that later, I guess, right?

[00:07:38] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'd say it's like, it's a, it's a, the, the book he can read and it, it also like, there's, there's an action there too, right? Like it's, it's a how to do things, so.

[00:07:48] Zack Katz: As an old person in web dev uh, terms, I, there's an application concept called CRUD application where you create, you read, update, and delete information.

[00:08:01] So when WooCommerce you have, you have products, you have orders, you have customers, uh, those are each objects that I imagine, and Nik, correct me if I'm wrong, the WooCommerce, MCP will be able to read. Uh, product, create a product, update a product, or delete a product. You probably don't want to enable that in your MCP, um, but like those are some of the functionalities for each of the objects on your website that an MCP can interact with once you enable that by connecting it to your ai.

[00:08:33] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. So the MCP like server side, um, as far as like what LLM has access to. Or I guess like the other side of what the LM has access to right? Is an API, right? Like you're, you're setting up an API that serves to that server or connects to that server and saying, okay, when the LLM tries to do, use this tool, call this function.

[00:08:54] So that's basically like your, your cred, that can be your crud. API layer there. Um, the magic of the MCP is that then somebody doesn't have to know what your tool is. They don't have to write code to call it. They can just like. Type like they do to clot all the time and it, and it just kind of takes care of it.

[00:09:12] Zack Katz: Yeah. So what does this allow product owners to do, like now? So there's an MCP for WooCommerce. Great. Uh, how does this unlock for our, our listeners, like something for, uh, for p product owners to build, or like what, how can they take advantage of this MCP technology?

[00:09:29] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. So I think the, the, the most available is like, you know, if we're extending WooCommerce or even like at the WordPress level, uh, the abilities API, um, is kind of where this integration of like WordPress and MCP kind of comes together.

[00:09:47] So getting started on integrating with Abilities API, exposing your existing product functionality to that, um, is kind of a quick unlock just to make your things work. It's how you kind of continue the sort of plugin extension model, um, of, of WordPress and woo into, uh, uh, the AI context, the MCP context.

[00:10:10] Um, so. Sorry. Context is maybe a loaded word there, but we're drying, we can't say tool, we can't say context. Like I

[00:10:18] Ian Misner: we're taking all our words, man. Yeah. But the, um, the, the thing I was, um, hoping to, to dig into from your explanation, like I get it, but can you maybe give an example, like using like maybe a SkyVerge product.

[00:10:30] Like, what, what are you actually gonna do? You know? Like a, like a real world pick a product.

[00:10:36] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that like the two, it

[00:10:38] Ian Misner: doesn't have to be a roadmap, but you know.

[00:10:40] Nik McLaughlin: Sure. Yeah. It's like I can get into the roadmap if you want me to, uh, the, I think the two, uh. The, the two big areas in Woo that this comes in are, it's, it's kind of two face, there's, there's a agentic commerce, uh, which is more like customer facing.

[00:10:56] The customer doesn't have to visit the website to purchase a product. Um, that's going to be less of a thing or less of a concern at the, maybe like extension and product level, because Woo is gonna handle a lot of that. It's kind of the already woo facing side, but we can talk more about how maybe. Edge cases and room to for opportunity there.

[00:11:15] Um, the other side is more like store management is like the, the ad WP admin is, is, you know, this whole bespoke UI that you have to n learn how to navigate to turn things on and off and to create reports and uh, and view different things. So I like the MCP magic to sprinkle on top of that is, is that you no longer have to learn your way around there.

[00:11:38] Um, so I mean, some of the specific examples, like I remember, uh, James Kemp shared some early examples of Woo, MCP being, uh, you know, a just, you know, a chat bot that you can ask really complicated questions about your store. Um, and, and saying like, Hey. How many customers have bought more than five of this product in the last three months?

[00:12:01] You know, something that would be really hard to piece together all of those little pieces, even in a UI that was designed for it. Um, and you can just type those words and, and it, it will spit out an answer. Uh, there's also room for UI improvements here. Um, so this is like a lot of the future room for, uh, MCP growth, I think is for, uh, oh.

[00:12:21] James,

[00:12:23] Zack Katz: James has entered the chat. Uh, watch out everybody.

[00:12:26] Nik McLaughlin: Okay. Uh, future room for MCP growth is on the client side. Um, and, and I think getting more than text in those responses and being able to, to see a chart, click a button, uh, have it be interactive in in smaller ways that really make sense. Still in the.

[00:12:43] The chat flow. Um, but uh, I think that's where a lot of the opportunity for product people come in. Sorry, to finally get to the point, um, that, uh, how we present the information there that we're connecting in, that folks are connecting into WooCommerce to find out, uh, is, is going to take some figuring out at this point.

[00:13:03] It's, it's really a, a new paradigm, a new interaction interface.

[00:13:09] Zack Katz: Yeah, so some of the stuff that we've been doing at Gravity Kit, uh, we released a Gravity Forms MCP or an MCP for gravity forms. That is, um, because it's a lot easier to describe the form you want than it is to. Uh, click into each field and add it to your form and configure whether or not it's required.

[00:13:27] And then set up an address field and say whether it's US or international, and just say like, I want a contact form, but people can buy, I don't know, socks. And it'll create a form for you. And then you can say, you know, populate that form with sample entries and then it will create a sample entries. So CPS have unlock a lot of, um, you know, shortcuts for ui.

[00:13:51] How does that translate to something? And Nik, I know you said that you don't have the answer to this 'cause it's like a new tool set, but like, Ian, what do you think like in terms of, uh, product opportunities that CPS unlock, uh, with this new tool set?

[00:14:06] Ian Misner: Well, yeah, if you're asking me, I'll start with, uh, a little bit of context that I was a pretty strong AI skeptic still like three weeks ago.

[00:14:13] Uh, so over the holidays I dug in a little bit and I'm all in, man. I'm gonna give philanthropic all my money the second time, actually. Um, so

[00:14:21] Zack Katz: are you an AI Grinch that whose heart grew, uh, over the holidays?

[00:14:27] Ian Misner: Yeah, basically. Uh, I actually, um. Yeah, as far as like, what I think we can do with it is that, uh, I'm already using it a great deal in a lot of our support flows.

[00:14:37] So know we've started using, you know, in the company itself, um, you know, creating, uh, tools that are actually investigating the issue. But it's, it's literally like, it's reading the support conversation, it's checking the functionality of the product should have, it's then using my local site to go create products, configure testing, and.

[00:14:58] Tell me what's wrong. Obviously I'm gonna do it myself still for now, but I think there's opportunity here for us to enable the functionality in the plugin to make it so it's even more effective. And we haven't opened that up yet. Haven't even started yet.

[00:15:12] Zack Katz: So, here's the thing though, for cps, for me, uh, when I get to the point of, uh, enough complexity, I say to myself, I personally as the, as a developer, as a product owner, I don't want just a query that people use natural language for as the product interface.

[00:15:29] Uh, ideally, um, or for Ian, for your, uh, example, if I have a support dashboard and I have recurring questions about support quality or. Uh, revenue or, you know, business questions. I just have Claude write a dashboard for me. Rather than having an MCP have to do all the queries and build, build all the context and, and generate the report, it's a lot slower than actually just writing some code and having it do it.

[00:15:56] So Nik, why is MCP What is MCP good for? If that's, if that's what I'm seeing.

[00:16:02] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, yeah. No, this is like, one of the key problems with MCP so far is that it's a developer tool, but it, it's, it's not, it it,

[00:16:11] Zack Katz: right,

[00:16:12] Nik McLaughlin: like the, all of the MCP clients and the way that you have to set them up and everything is all very like.

[00:16:18] Dev centric right now. Like I think, uh, Google rolled out, uh, MCP support for Gemini in December, and it was only through CLI. Um, and, uh, same deal with, uh, open ai. They added it to chat, chat, GPT, but you have to enable developer mode. Right. Um, and this is not who benefits from MCP, like developers like yourself can look at a problem and say, well, I don't want to have to ask about it.

[00:16:47] I can write code

[00:16:48] Zack Katz: for that.

[00:16:48] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. I, I've been writing the code for that. I, I've built that. API, I don't need to send it to anybody. Uh, and, and I, I think there's a lot that developers can benefit from here. Like we do a lot of things other than sit in cloud code all day. So like there are other things we need to do that we would be nice if those had an MCP server.

[00:17:07] Um, but, uh, the, the real magic is, is more outside of that, like, is that the MCP doesn't. It's, this is the whole, is it just an API? Is it just another thing I have to expose code for, uh, is like, it, it, it's an API, but it's for your customers, it's for your users. It's like, it's for the end user to be able to interact with no onboarding, to whatever system you're exposing to them.

[00:17:32] Um. So the real limitations there are exactly what I said, like that the, on the client side, like the MCP clients aren't really there at a consumer level right now. Right. Um, I think there's it, good development's happening anyways, you know, but I, the biggest thing will be like landing MCP clients for where regular users can use them.

[00:17:53] Um, and, and that's the, that's the biggest unlock. So I I, it's helpful to, to kind of. Form your opinions now, but with that in in mind that like the point of this thing is to get it in front of normal people who want to buy something from your store or read the WP admin who are a store owner. Like I think this is actually a really powerful use case for WooCommerce because we have this problem for ages that like we have this powerful open source free tool that is just like hard for somebody who knows how to sell shoes.

[00:18:24] To navigate, you know, like, or knows how to make pizza to navigate. Like they don't wanna have to, it is a, there's a, the onboarding curve, right? But just being able to ask a dumb question and get an answer from it, um, is sort of what this enables in a, in a more informed way, uh, than just hoping that chat GPT makes up the right thing for you.

[00:18:42] Right?

[00:18:42] Zack Katz: Yeah. And that's the thing, instead of relying on, on AI to know these things. When you ask it, when you ask AI a question that it doesn't actually have the answer to, like, live data from my website, um, it needs to figure it out somehow and it will just make it up if it can't figure it out. So giving it access to your actual data through an MCP allows it to actually run queries on the live data.

[00:19:05] Um, we have some questions coming in from the chat, which is great. Keep 'em coming. Um, first I wanted to bring up, uh, a comment rather than a question from James C. Kemp, uh, who is the head of WooCommerce core. Sorry, James, if I got your title wrong, uh, I see MCP as being most useful in chat contexts where it's natural language and context aware of you.

[00:19:27] Nik McLaughlin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:28] Zack Katz: Um, and I found that the case as well. Yeah. Context aware parentheses of you. Uh,

[00:19:34] Ian Misner: I, I will say the parentheses here is actually the really, really important bit, and I think that's very similar to what I was thinking when Nik, you were explaining it. Um. Uh, in addition to MCP, you have like the concept of skills and you can write your own instructions and, um, you know, Zach, to what you were saying, where it'll make things up.

[00:19:50] You can teach it not to, but you can also tell it where to find things and what skills to use, and it'll remember it going forward for you. And it's when it starts combining things that you care about. That the whole machine starts to feel like it's doing magic. Uh, first of all, like I'm bad at Google Analytics, but I'm pointing it at the Google Analytics MCP and the WooCommerce MCP, and I'm learning things that I should have known like two years ago.

[00:20:14] You know what I mean? Like it's sorta, it's the combination of the things you care about that and not having to actually know how to solve it, not having to write the code. It has that for you? I don't, there's something there for

[00:20:27] Nik McLaughlin: sure. Yeah. On the, I mean on the technical level, like that's the magic of the open standard protocol, right?

[00:20:33] Is like there, you no longer have to have bespoke in our integrations or interactions with particular services. The chat client is the one, like the LLM is the one deciding like what tools to call and can string those together among whatever's available to it. Um, so you can be writing a blog post. And if you have an MCP server that can tell you about the weather and geolocate someplace and get a read, Google Maps reviews or something like that, um, it can piece together like a travel blog for you in a way that those services were never designed to do.

[00:21:10] Like whoever exposed the weather MCP wasn't like, oh, I sure hope people are gonna write blog posts with this. Um, but you can piece those things together or that through MCP, like those things can be strung together, um, in a way that makes for like novel use cases and or like emergent use cases even.

[00:21:28] Ian Misner: There's, uh, specifically, again, like I said earlier, I started playing with this properly over the holidays and I was very nervous to connect Google Drive. Just like it's read only access and I really didn't wanna do it. But the second I did, like everything got 10 times better because it knows everything that I know now.

[00:21:47] And now when I'm asking a que I was doing a better job than I am. I don't know man. It's sorta. So it's, as you connect all these pieces, you string it all together. Um, there, i, it, it's greater than the sum of its parts. So the WooCommerce, MCP, on its own is only part of it, I would

[00:22:01] Zack Katz: say.

[00:22:02] Ian Misner: Right. So,

[00:22:02] Zack Katz: um, I, I, this is related a bit to a question that Matt asks.

[00:22:06] Matt asks, uh, would this allow the AI to interact with multiple plugins at once? For example, combining data from WooCommerce core sales and give WP sales into one report, if they both ex both expose data via the abilities API? Yes. Um, absolutely. That's the, that's part of the, what Ian was just talking about.

[00:22:25] Um, I've been building out dashboards, uh, on my own computer, like locally, and I'm gonna be, I'm, I'm currently trying to figure out a way to have it hosted so the whole team can use it. Um, that requires a help Scout. MCP, uh, I have an operations dashboard that I, I built out using cloud code, of course, a QuickBooks MCP.

[00:22:48] Uh, and an E-D-D-M-C-P. Um, like, uh, I forget, I've been doing a lot of mc Oh, drip. Uh, like we use drip.com for our, uh, email marketing. We're actually gonna move from drip to a fluent CRM and I wrote the drip MCP in order to make that possible because fluent CRM has an MCP. So I'm gonna slurp in from Drip, have it pushed to flu CRM and have everything synced up.

[00:23:15] That's possible because of the cps. I could have already also written a. Program, but I don't know. MCP seem more flexible than that.

[00:23:23] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's, that was my point earlier too about, um, you know, like, it, not necessarily being for developers, but there are definitely things that we can, that everybody can use to leverage it.

[00:23:35] Um, you don't wanna have to always be the developer for all of your own integrations, and you, you don't have to. Now.

[00:23:41] Zack Katz: So how does this make people money, Nik? Like, where's the money?

[00:23:46] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, I mean, uh, yeah. So like, I, I think the like. Agent commerce use cases are really interesting. I don't, that's probably not really what you're asking, um, because like,

[00:23:57] Zack Katz: do we, do you know about the stripe, uh, OpenAI, uh, like collaboration?

[00:24:02] I think it probably is worth talking about as an example of what's possible, but also maybe where we aren't going to get access to that kind of integration.

[00:24:10] Nik McLaughlin: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you want to like spell it out more. I guess like the, the high level there is like the idea being that, that folks using OpenAI, using chat, GPT can complete transactions, can like find products, shop, have their whole shopping experience be managed by their LLM agent, right?

[00:24:29] So they, they don't have to click through a site, they don't have to look for the right site to shop on. They just say what they want. It finds things, it handles the transaction for you. Ask any questions about. Product variations or customizations or whatever that the server tells it to ask. Um, but all of that can happen within the chat interface.

[00:24:48] Um, I think for like a store owner who was maybe like upset that they had to build a website in the first place, uh, which is maybe something we forget being in the woo space, uh, that, that merchants a lot of times see that as a cost and a liability and being able to sell more, like directly to where. Uh, customers are at, is a boon.

[00:25:07] Um, I, I think my first reaction to something like that was like, oh, no, there, what about my website traffic? But I'm like, but I think a merchant doesn't, I don't know. There are lots of reasons that I think there a will still be websites and b should still be websites. Uh, but I, but like, I, I think there's a lot of, uh, of benefit there from being able to, you know, process those transactions in a more direct way.

[00:25:30] Ian Misner: Yeah. I do have two thoughts on that though. So number one. I do view like, you know, again, if you can go to chat GPT and ask it to sell you something and it'll do it, that's amazing. And I love it. But also there is like, I don't know how different that really is than like a product feed into Google or you know, syncing with eBay or the Walmart marketplace and all that.

[00:25:49] But I think it's just one more channel among many and you still need a home base. Uh, I do think though, I would love to explore a little bit on like. Where do we all make money on this sort of deal? It's the, uh, I, I just wanna throw out the, the idea that maybe WordPress is uniquely well-suited to be a home base for a lot of this new, new stuff coming out.

[00:26:08] You know, it's sort of the open source nature of it. The MCP being an open protocol. Uh, the biggest benefit of it is as you connect all these various parts, how it feels like magic and there's. I think there's some sort of like, I, I mean I haven't done much with it with our products yet. I don't know anyone has really dove deep into exposing a lot to customers.

[00:26:27] But isn't there a point where if like every third party developer is exposing skills and abilities that like, I don't like what? I don't know. I don't have a formed question at the end of this. Do you see where I'm going? You know, like

[00:26:41] Nik McLaughlin: I, I mean, I, I think the, the, uh, the uptake at the end of that is that, like, it, it explodes WooCommerce adoption, it explodes WordPress, uh, usage, right?

[00:26:51] Like the, having this whole ecosystem that can already do all these really bespoke specific, magical things. Then just like giving it a better, a better, sorry. Everybody's spent 20 years working on this thing, but like giving a, a more, a natural language wrapper around, I'll describe it instead of valuing it, um, uh, just opens that up to a lot of people and yeah, enables, like these emergent use cases that lets more people see the value of the thing that's already there.

[00:27:19] Um, I, to me that's like the big thing as a product owner is like, this allows more people to get value that I was already. Building that's just like, you know, hidden behind these bespoke UIs and forms and settings and things like that. It just makes it, it makes the onboarding process that much easier.

[00:27:37] The time to value, um, is that much faster.

[00:27:40] Zack Katz: I think that's a great point about settings. Um, one of the great, for those of you who aren't using CloudFlare, just use CloudFlare. It's so good. Um, part of what they do really well is the setting search that they have. It makes it easy. And this wasn't the case a couple years ago.

[00:27:57] It was hard to find settings, but like they've added a really good setting search that allows, uh, exposing all their functionality via universal search. Um, same with post hog. Post hog is a great search, uh, that goes across all the different types of settings and, uh, reports that they have. One of the things that's hard for our customers at Gravity Kit, there are a lot of things you can configure and it's hard to know where to do it and how to do it.

[00:28:20] So I think that a settings MCP that exposes all the different settings and describes what they're for and like, uh, that is something that is worthwhile. Like so in, from a UI perspective, uh, having a settings functionality exposed might be a good, good idea. Yeah.

[00:28:41] So what is the future of. MCP, like, uh, let's say two to three years from now, uh, James Kemp apparently, uh, still exists as head of woo woo Commerce. Oh, no, James, uh, James said, don't you dare say anything bad. I, I have to razz him. He's a, he is too nice a guy to, to not get razzed occasionally, so. Two, two to three years of James, uh, being like pushing the envelope on what MCP can do.

[00:29:12] Uh, what does that look like for, for WooCommerce? What does that look like for people selling online? Uh, in a, in, in the woo, in the WordPress world? Uh, what, what do y'all think? Like, put on your prediction hats.

[00:29:24] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I, I look at mostly at like the pieces that we know of, right? Which are like the agent at commerce, um, just like totally changing how, or, or at least providing, like Ian said, like a new channel for how people can, can purchase from your store that you didn't have to build an integration for, right?

[00:29:44] Woo exposes, MCP and they can now buy products from your store? Um, I, I don't know, like in a three year time span, uh, I think that's, that's becoming more realistic because more people are using, uh, MCP clients. Like, I don't, I don't think they'll be clicking the MCP client app button on their, it'll, you know, it'll appear in places that they're already, they already are either the browser or the chat app or whatever.

[00:30:09] Um, but I, I think more and more people will be having those kinds of, using those kinds of experiences. Um, to me that's the, that's the three year thing is more like the adoption of how common that becomes. It's more like. Um, you know, the mobile revolution of like the 2010s of like, oh, well people really shop from their phones.

[00:30:28] I don't know. That seems like something you'd wanna do at a desktop. And then like, you know, that behavior changes in a couple years and then now that's where a lot comes from, right? Um, so I, that's, I, I don't know if there's more, like, new pieces coming, I sure let's, you know, get real crystal ball about it and, and dream up something together.

[00:30:47] But I, I think the biggest thing is looking at the pieces that are set, um, because they're getting a lot of buy-in right now. Um, and then just saying, okay, when that becomes the normal way that things operate, you know, from a product perspective, like how, how can I, what opportunities are there for my product to grow in that space?

[00:31:05] Um, and or to deliver on this new interaction model in a, in a way that's really like, optimized for it. Um, that actually like, helps merchants, helps customers find what they need. Um, all the same problems that we're solving, uh, just through a new, uh, interface.

[00:31:22] Ian Misner: Yeah. I do have a bit of a, this actually was a conversation we had on a recent episode about, you know, blocks adoption and all that.

[00:31:29] Right? Sort of like the, you know, the effort to reward ratio. Um, what are your thoughts on like. How easy is it to, to start, you know, incorporating abilities into your various products and, you know, knowing the adoption isn't quite, you know, three years, I'm sure it is everywhere. You know, it's just for a few people right now.

[00:31:49] Nik McLaughlin: Right.

[00:31:49] Ian Misner: What's the risk versus reward and how do you feel about that? Like for

[00:31:52] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, I mean, I, like, I think the, the baseline risk is very low. Um, I was able to prototype, uh, memberships API or uh, abilities, A-P-I-M-C-P integration in. A couple hours, um, myself

[00:32:09] Zack Katz: and if you, if you have a rest, API already even, uh, like in it's one prompt away from in clog code.

[00:32:15] It really is.

[00:32:16] Nik McLaughlin: Really, yeah. You can do it in less, yeah, I say a couple hours because I was like being picky and being nerdy about like how it all worked. If you don't want to get into that and you just want to be able to chat to your plugin, like it, it's very close. Like, so the, the risk there is super low, I'd say, or the, the in specific from a base level is super low.

[00:32:35] Ian Misner: And this is a very basic question, but I haven't explored the Woo MCP so much more than just installing it and using it. Um, but if I'm just, you know, is it. Aware of, you know, product meta and orders, you know, is it, do you need to do anything for it to start helping?

[00:32:51] Nik McLaughlin: No. Yes. Hooking up the MCP is the thing that you do, and then it has what it needs.

[00:32:56] Uh, I, there are like some limitations on that and I also haven't like, tried to push it. This is where we, like a adoption will push these things forward a lot more. Um, 'cause right now it's like developers who have their specific use case that they want to build toward in mind. Um, but people who are just trying to use a site.

[00:33:12] Having access to this, um, will, uh, flesh that out a lot more. Um, but, but yeah. Yeah. It, it basically set it up and it, and it has your, has your stuff, has your site loaded in. Right.

[00:33:24] Zack Katz: So, in terms of where I see MCP in a couple of years. Um, either it's going to be everywhere or it's going to go away. Like, uh, 'cause one of the things that it, that we've already talked about, one of the limitations of it is that it's very developer.

[00:33:38] You've focused, you have to install it currently. You have to like, uh, configure it with your environment variables possibly like it, depending on how complicated it is. Um, you can, there is a way that you can single click and have it open in cloud code automatically, or not In cloud code in Claude desktop automatically configured.

[00:33:57] Uh, if you add a button to your website that has that structure, I don't think it's consumer, uh, like facing.

[00:34:05] Ian Misner: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:05] Zack Katz: Uh, and I don't think it's going to be consumer facing unless we make it consumer facing by doing things like, and Nik tell me if I'm way off base, but like Sure. I don't know the WooCommerce world as well as both of you.

[00:34:17] Um, di dynamic creation of products. Like, could you do it so that somebody says, I want a hat that has Bugs Bunny riding a surfboard. Uh, and, and have it like, uh, initialed with my, you know, first and last name and, uh, and have it be a black hat with, you know, gold stitching. Like, and have the MCP dynamically create that if you have a hat store, or is that something that, uh, I

[00:34:42] Ian Misner: genuinely think you can do that.

[00:34:43] And honestly, like the Printful API probably supports sending, like, I think you could literally not even go make the product. You could fulfill it. Mm-hmm.

[00:34:53] Zack Katz: Yeah. So then the customer would say that it would go to your MCP, uh, or like it would go to your website. The MCP would figure out. Like, okay, I need to create a product.

[00:35:02] Then you have the API connect to Printful, create like figure it out, come back, like create the product dynamically for this single person. I don't know, like that kind of example. Uh, might be more possible in the future. But I also, AI is already getting so good with web searches and like tool connections and stuff like that.

[00:35:22] I don't think, my honest answer is, I don't think MCP is gonna be a big deal in a few years from now. Because there are gonna be so many different ways to connect and, uh, because it's not so, it's, it's gonna be around for developers. I think the consumer facing stuff is gonna be more, uh, fetch and less like the MCP.

[00:35:42] Like, I don't think that MCP is necessary for getting the data. I think it's really good for the crud part.

[00:35:51] Nik McLaughlin: Well, yeah, I mean, I, the, the credit part is what, like, is the layer before the MCP though, right? And that's the part that you have to build, whether it's you're doing

[00:35:59] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:35:59] Nik McLaughlin: Bespoke tool calls or an open protocol.

[00:36:01] So the, my, my bet on MCP is the fact that they're building the standard. Um, and,

[00:36:07] Zack Katz: and you've gotta, you've gotta have crud no matter what you do. If you have an applica, like if you have a W WordPress product, it's likely that you have, create, read, update, delete, so,

[00:36:15] Nik McLaughlin: right. Yeah. We're still getting data out of the application, like, you know, like MCP doesn't rewrite your, or delete your WOO database or something.

[00:36:22] Right, right. Like, it's not a replacement for that. It's adding the layer onto that. So I, I like MCP adoption is like a weird thing to talk about for that reason, that it's like, it's, it's not. I don't know. It's, it's not building something new, it's exposing it in a new way. Right, right. So I that's, and that's where I, I see so much investment there that I, I think it'll stick around.

[00:36:43] But you know, we can be, we can at this point in history, we can both still say that and be right.

[00:36:48] Ian Misner: And, and I will like point it just in, again, my experience over the last couple weeks really diving into this. I do think like pretty confidently that using, you know, Claude skills, you could probably give it the API calls and be more deliberate about it.

[00:37:01] Probably save money on tokens, right? Like, you could probably be really precise and, you know, MCP loads a lot into context. The more servers you add, the more is sitting there and the more in each call. But I, I mean, the cost is so low compared to just going to do that yourself. It's like the, the time, the cost of the time versus the context is so dramatically different.

[00:37:21] Yeah. So I'm like. I agree with Zach that I think that there's a point at which, you know, it's not necessary to, you know, have all these sort of like declarative translation layers at all. I think that probably is an eventual thing, but that does, at least for me right now, still feel a bit science fictiony.

[00:37:39] Whereas right now. We got magic. Let's use what's here as you're gonna feel about it.

[00:37:44] Zack Katz: Right? And you, you point out a really good point about CPS is that cps, the, all the tools, like if you expose everything in your application, all the tool definitions get loaded into context, which means that your conversation can't last as long without it compacting or going away, which is really annoying.

[00:38:03] And, uh, one of the pro, it's one of the problems that has to be solved in WordPress as well. Um, my friend Daniel Eiser, uh, has ex uh, configured a fluent fluent boards integration and also some other fluent CRM stuff on his website. And he said when he loaded all the, the, um, the mcps. He didn't have any space to do anything.

[00:38:26] Like the tool definitions themselves were larger than the context window, which made the MCP useless. Um,

[00:38:33] Ian Misner: right.

[00:38:33] Zack Katz: So I do think that there needs to be a kind of proxy for the MCP, like one en entry point and then have an AI figure out which MCP calls to use and stuff like that. I think that we're gonna get there in WordPress, um, but it's,

[00:38:46] Nik McLaughlin: yeah,

[00:38:46] Zack Katz: it's not, yeah.

[00:38:47] B for a little while.

[00:38:48] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. There's, and yes. Yeah, that's, that's like gets into like the limitations side and I think right now, like the biggest MCP critics I see are the ones running into those limitations, which I, to get to the, like, where does this go in five years thing I like I, that doesn't seem like a threat to CPS existence.

[00:39:07] For me, that's like a reassurance that we're trying to solve the right problems. And having to make it better and figure out how to do that. Right. Right. So I, yeah, we're already seeing things like agents that will be your tool search agent on that live on your MCP server. So like it that connects to this and then it can expose those tools dynamically as needed.

[00:39:28] Um, rather than having it all just sit in context the whole time. Right. Which, yeah, like there's, you know, technical solutions around that stuff. Um, for sure.

[00:39:37] Zack Katz: Yeah, and I've been looking into this a lot because of the project that I was talking about with having a dashboard for my whole team. And there are, uh, tools, Docker makes one that has, uh, like a, a Docker container that's job is to receive the query and then figure out which CPS to use and return it.

[00:39:54] So like, uh, there are tools out there. And then I was gonna host that on a, on a server, and then have everybody connected that as the. The primary MCP and have all the configurations for our entire team to connect, to help Scout, to connect to our website, all that stuff. It, they don't have to configure it, they only have to configure that one MCP for that endpoint.

[00:40:14] So there's a lot to learn from, like setting up the MCP itself. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

[00:40:22] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, I, I try to draw back to like the product level image of like what this unlocks.

[00:40:28] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:40:28] Nik McLaughlin: Um, because yeah, the, the weeds, the, the technical is. Has been most of the story so far, and I, and I think the, the promise of MCP isn't so much in being the best tool to build an integration to your app.

[00:40:44] It's like being the standard that all chat apps can integrate with all tools. Um, that's, that's like what it's trying to deliver. Um, and that's. More of an ecosystem promise than a, than a specific, like technical one. Um, obviously it's a, it's a piece of technology. Like it, you know, I'm not waving hands that much over, like, don't worry about the code.

[00:41:08] Like, it, it is, uh, it's technology, but like, it's, it's more about, um, you know, providing that standard baseline that everything can interact on. It's the reason that, like to use the HTTP example, it's the reason that we don't have to, uh, you know, build a website that for. We don't, well, there's a little CSS problems here, but we don't have to build a website for Chrome and a website for Safari and a website for, you know, each company's client.

[00:41:35] Right. And we don't have to apply for our site to be published on their client and all that. We have, you know, protocols and systems that, that expose all of that globally openly. Right. Um, MCP is, is building that at the, you know, application level. So again, like it's. Yes, there are important things about how that works technically, like that, like there are technical realities to HTTP that need to work every single day, um, and at scale.

[00:42:03] But, uh, but, but I think the, the vision here is, is more at the ecosystem.

[00:42:10] Ian Misner: Yeah. And I just wanna throw out there, like, even if MCP does have any problem of like, um. You know, context, windows, whatever. The context windows are only gonna get bigger. Uh, apparently there is some amount of diminishing returns there.

[00:42:21] Mm-hmm. But it gets cheaper if not bigger, at least. Right. So that problem will solve itself. And I think that the magic part, the, you know, you expose all of these things, like all of our companies have like this heap of untouched data that we create through day-to-day work all the time. And like it allows you to just use all of that.

[00:42:41] It becomes a resource rather than like. You know, just a backlog of, you know, you're paying pennies on the dollar to keep everything so it's there, uh, all of that becomes relevant and useful. Um, and I do wanna throw in just one quick example as, uh, like as Zach you were talking about, you know, that using the Help Scout MCP, that is something I found incredibly valuable as far as a lot of my experimentation was actually around support stuff.

[00:43:05] It's an area I'm very familiar and comfortable with. Um, but. The fact that it can help test things automatically and all that. Uh, we have an API Manager product. Um, and we could very easily add, uh, an abilities for just, you know, getting your current customer's licenses and eliminate the need for things like license checks, when people email from different support addresses and all that.

[00:43:28] Uh, I gotta start doing more, I guess, is really what I'm saying.

[00:43:31] And

[00:43:31] Zack Katz: you'll have to actually release the license manager as well.

[00:43:35] Ian Misner: Yeah, there, we, we got it out there. It's quietly chugging along. It's,

[00:43:40] Zack Katz: um. For those of you who use easy digital downloads, uh. Like I, I don't know. I've, I've been pestering, uh, them to release their, uh, kestrel to release their,

[00:43:53] Ian Misner: yeah.

[00:43:54] So I will throw out there the effort of migration is the big obstacle with that. Of course. And, you know, we even have a product using easy digital downloads. If

[00:44:02] Zack Katz: only you had a MCP that allowed, they

[00:44:06] Ian Misner: could handle that.

[00:44:07] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:44:07] Ian Misner: Actually that could be a fun little side project, uh, that. Actually, I'm worried that that could work, actually.

[00:44:15] That

[00:44:15] Zack Katz: I think it would work. So

[00:44:16] Ian Misner: that's the

[00:44:17] Zack Katz: problem. So cps, I, the reason we released the gravity Forms MCP or the MCP for Gravity Forms is because we knew that eventually somebody was going to do it and we might as well do it. And it unlocks some really cool functionality. Even though technically if somebody pointed, uh, like we have a product called Gravity Import that imports CSVs into gravity forms and it does a great job.

[00:44:38] There are a lot of edge cases. It's not an easy problem, it turns out, but, uh, when, now that we have the MCP for gravity forms, people can point their CSV to the, uh, like their LLM to the CSV, say, use this MCP and import the products and figure it out. And I think that that would work really well. So I do think CPS have the ability to really tear down some barriers of entry that will make some of our products less.

[00:45:06] Uh, relevant and we'll probably sunset some of our products, but I, I think that's coming anyway. So like, the products that are going to get killed from MCP integrations are probably going on the chopping block anyway, and we, we really ought to focus on the ones that have more of a moat.

[00:45:24] Ian Misner: No, I'll say bluntly.

[00:45:25] I'm fine with that. A lot of our, like, really small, simple stuff, like we got 50 plugins and like 20 of them do one thing, you know what I mean? Like, they're, they're, and people need them and they're useful, but honestly, I don't think you need. 67 plugins on every WooCommerce store. And I think that's okay, basically, right?

[00:45:41] I think that's not a problem. Uh, now, obviously, you know, please buy the expensive ones to replace that. I'd really appreciate it. But in the meantime, but in the meantime though, like I'm not concerned that, you know, things get easier and the platform gets, you know, better. Like, great, you know, let's do that basically.

[00:45:59] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:46:00] Ian Misner: I, I am just thinking more and more though, and I hadn't even even thought about this, so thank you Zach. Um, you know, you give it the schema that it's coming from and the schema you're sending it to, it'll do all the work, and I'm like, 99% sure you don't have to worry about that. That makes me, that throws into question that again, back the three weeks ago, being more of a skeptic around this stuff.

[00:46:19] One of the things that I said to Nik actually prior to asking him to come on here was, you know, why would we want to introduce the uncertainty of an LLM for things like data management or a migration? Uh, is that even a valid question? Might be my real question. You know, kind,

[00:46:37] Nik McLaughlin: kind of No, right? Like there, like you are, like that's, that's the, let's see, that's the surface that you're exposing your app's interactivity or your app's functionality to, right?

[00:46:50] Is this. Chaotic prediction machine, right? Like determinist or Yeah, whatever. Anyways, uh, but like you're writing the API, you're, you're writing the, the tool schema and you're controlling what it has access to do and how that gets done. Um, so I mean, it's, it, I guess like the analogy as far as like where the chaos lives, um, is like, is is at the user level still, right?

[00:47:19] Like it's still like somebody could fill out your form wrong, somebody could uh, you know, click the wrong settings button. That's the same way, that's the same thing that can happen now. They just maybe can chat to a bot that does that. Um. Does

[00:47:33] Zack Katz: that. So one of the things that, that I've, I've been doing is having writing docs locally and then using an MCP to, to push them to the Help Scout Docs website.

[00:47:42] We're actually moving our docs from Help Scout to our WordPress site because we think that WordPress is the right place for all this content to live in the AI future. So like that this is all connected, right? Um, somehow the MCP deleted all the categories. Um. In my docs. So, uh, thankfully they were able to recreate them.

[00:48:03] Uh, the, the Help Scout support team was able to restore a backup essentially. I had also backed up everything using, uh, like markdown files. I had scraped the entire site already, uh, using an MCP as like markdown, but it did randomly delete some stuff that it shouldn't have. So, uh, that is a warning. Um, do not enable delete on your MCP unless you absolutely know that that's the case.

[00:48:30] And if you, I would recommend putting in, requiring an environment variable for the delete, uh, functionality. Like have some safeguards on the delete. Right. Delete. The delete is what I would say.

[00:48:43] Nik McLaughlin: I think for now. Yes. Like I, I think like find a different way to clean it up. Write a script if you have to, that you have to run manually or something like, um, for now, for sure.

[00:48:53] Uh, as we get there further, you know, always requiring, uh, permission to do something destructive like that. But we all live in the gray spaces enough to know that like what a destructive action is, is, you know, not always clear in every case. Um, but I, but I think stuff, I think, you know, safeguards like that are, are gonna be pretty key.

[00:49:14] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:49:14] Ian Misner: Yeah. I do want to throw at those. So one of, one of the reasons I really started playing with cloud over the holidays was that everyone was hyping up skills on Twitter. And the fact that it solves a lot of the context issues, um, you know, if it does something you don't like once you can tell it to just not do that again.

[00:49:28] And using the skill system, it does remember, like, I don't know if it's foolproof yet, but honestly. It's,

[00:49:36] Nik McLaughlin: I've seen some problems with specifically, like certain models, like telling them not to do something. It kind of skips over the knot part and says, oh, great, now I know that I, that this is a thing that I could do.

[00:49:46] Um, so, you know, like, yeah,

[00:49:49] Ian Misner: you give

[00:49:49] Nik McLaughlin: it instruction.

[00:49:50] Ian Misner: If you're

[00:49:50] Nik McLaughlin: gonna take

[00:49:51] Ian Misner: a destructive action, always save a copy somewhere else, right? First or whatever, I don't know, whatever. Um,

[00:49:57] Zack Katz: Marcus Burnett says, watch my Woo MCP, set all my products to outta stock or run a sale on its own for 50% off all products. See that is, um, an opportunity as well.

[00:50:08] It's a, it's a threat, but it's also a possible, uh, opportunity where, you know,

[00:50:13] Ian Misner: what, if you want it to, is actually a better question though, right? Like, you know what if you know it's monitoring your traffic fluctuations and there's a good reason to do a sale on a product and you give it the power to test and experiment with that.

[00:50:26] Again, I'm not doing this yet, but I'm not. I think you might wanna let it put stuff on sale.

[00:50:32] Zack Katz: Yeah. But that's also, that's more like code running in the background rather than an MCP interaction. Like, uh, there are products that'll have, that have personalization, like personalized WP for example. Uh, you can say if a person comes back five times in a week and they have, you know, the letter Q in their name, uh, put it on sale.

[00:50:52] Ian Misner: Yeah, it's just you can have a web hook that triggers

[00:50:55] Zack Katz: that

[00:50:55] Ian Misner: true cloud action that uses all the various CP stuff you've connected. Anyways, I, I don't wanna get into just random thoughts and ideas, but, you know,

[00:51:02] Nik McLaughlin: yeah. This is, this is part of like the, the fun and challenge of having a conversation about AI right now, right?

[00:51:08] Like, can we just name that? But like, it's, it's hard to put boundaries on these things because we don't know what they can or can't do. And then that bleeds into like, well, then there's this other related thing that like, yeah, that's ai, but it's not MCP, but it's also, it sort of is on the back end, but not on the front end.

[00:51:27] Right? Like we don't have 10 years of experience. Interacting in this environment yet. So, yeah,

[00:51:32] Ian Misner: and there's something around the AI uncertainty problem that obviously none of us can agree on or have like a solid understanding of. And that's maybe the point, maybe that is the answer. Uh, I do wanna throw out one point on that though, is you handed off to some guy, you know, you have just as much uncertainty is actually something Oh, definitely.

[00:51:50] Zack Katz: More uncertainty. Yeah.

[00:51:53] Ian Misner: So I mean, it's not, it's not as perfect as code, but also. The uncertainty comes with all the magic, I guess. Right?

[00:52:03] Zack Katz: So I wanna, uh, ask one more question from Marcus. He asked about translation. Uh, he was saying, because we're using LMS under the hood, does this open up a way to use natural language by any language?

[00:52:14] Do you do things on your site? Are we making translation, uh, less necessary? Like, can I jump into a WordPress site and start asking it things in German even though the site is in English? Will the system understand and do it?

[00:52:28] Nik McLaughlin: Uh, I mean I, the, so this gets back to like James's little parentheses, right? Of like the, the magic is the, the chat context, being context aware of you.

[00:52:38] Um, and so you are chatting to Claude or you know, name your agentic browser or whatever MCP client this ends up being, um, in the language that you use. Uh, as long as it has access to MCP servers, it can do those things. Um, so, uh, you know, when, when it decides that you've told it to do that, it will hopefully ask you.

[00:53:02] Um, but it will go and do that. Uh,

[00:53:05] Zack Katz: and it will translate the response I'm, uh, I imagine as well.

[00:53:09] Nik McLaughlin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:53:10] Ian Misner: Yeah. Actually, if you prompt Claude with a, just a file without text, it gets mad at you. 'cause it doesn't know what language to answer you in. It actually will like, uh, in the thinking. Complaints for blank prompts.

[00:53:23] Um, but I will, I actually, Zach, you shared a blog post like a year ago, maybe longer, about translating, using ai and we mm-hmm. We copied that at a bunch of our products. We even back then, and, uh, it honestly, it's incredible. It works. The only failure that I've seen in our stuff is sometimes there's like cultural meaning of translations that it's not quite picking up.

[00:53:46] The word technically means that, but no one would ever use it. Mm-hmm. Um, so we've definitely had a few people correct us on those. But I mean, we've translated everything into like 30 languages using LLMs then. Uh, you know, four complaints that I know of basically in a year. So, yes, it does translate very well.

[00:54:07] In fact, if your job is translation, I would be concerned.

[00:54:10] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:54:11] Ian Misner: Might be top of the list to be worried maybe.

[00:54:15] Zack Katz: Well, I think that's a wrap for, for our conversation today. We've covered a lot and we've covered nothing somehow, like, uh, the topic is so huge that it's impossible to really cover in one episode, but hopefully we get to have you back, Nik.

[00:54:27] Uh, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, where can people follow your work and learn more about what you're building?

[00:54:33] Nik McLaughlin: Oh, yeah, sure. Uh, so SkyVerge over here, SkyVerge.com, uh, is the one to check out. Mainly I'm on, uh, mostly X for, uh, woo and WordPress stuff, uh, but also Nik mclaughlin.com, which I, my name should be visible somewhere so you know how to spell that.

[00:54:51] Um, it's outta date, but I try to at least have like links to my socials and stuff where you can actually find me through there.

[00:54:58] Zack Katz: You could have an MCP write automatic updates about what

[00:55:00] Nik McLaughlin: you're doing. I mean, why not? Yeah. What am I doing? I'm sleeping on it.

[00:55:04] Ian Misner: And if you guys are all enjoying, oh, wait, wait.

[00:55:06] You're supposed to do the learning thing or the one thing or

[00:55:09] Zack Katz: Oh, oh, advice. Okay. You're, you're absolutely right. Ian, uh, thank you for restoring our structure to the show. Um, we wrap up every show with, uh, best advice Nik. Uh, if somebody's thinking about building for cps, what's your one piece of advice, uh, that you wish somebody had told you before you had started?

[00:55:27] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah, yeah. I, I'll, I'll pick one I guess. Okay. So yeah, my, I have two, but my, my one is that the new like full stack mentality is both product and engineering, not front end and backend. Um, so if you're on one of those or have historically come up in one of those camps, like, now is the time to branch out is to like reach across.

[00:55:49] And see what you can build. See how you can better understand what you're building. Um, yeah, the reach across that divide right now.

[00:55:58] Zack Katz: How about you, Ian?

[00:55:59] Ian Misner: Uh, for me, honestly, it's my main advice is that even if you're a tiny bit skeptical today, if you're wa, if you listen this far and you're still skeptical, that's, that's weird actually.

[00:56:08] But also, um, if you're a tiny bit skeptical, just start putting the things you're doing into Claude, even if you're only gonna just go do it yourself anyways, just to watch what it can do, because honestly, it's better at parts of my job than I am. And it's like, uh, you gotta try it. You just. Risk overdoing it.

[00:56:26] That's my advice.

[00:56:27] Zack Katz: Yeah. And I will, uh, tack on top of that and suggest that people, uh, use Claude to install CPS on Claude. Uh, I use Claude code. Uh, if you're running Claude Code, you could say, here's an MCP. In integrate it and it'll say, are you sure? And I would like, yeah, I'm sure I give cloud code, uh, dangerous permissions by default, which, you know, whatever.

[00:56:50] It's kind of, you

[00:56:50] Nik McLaughlin: get deleted categories every once in a while.

[00:56:53] Zack Katz: Exactly. Um, but in the end it is so much less frustrating. Um, so I just have it add CPS and you can just chat with Claude to get it done for you and just say. Do it for me, and it will. So if you're at all concerned about how technical it is, uh, just chat with an AI and it'll help you out.

[00:57:13] Ian Misner: And the skills builder skill in Claude is one of the most cool things in the world. All right. Uh, and yeah, so, uh, if you're enjoying these shows, folks, again, hit subscribe. Literally now. Thank you. I really helps more WordPress builders find the show. And, uh, you know, big thanks again to Freemius for supporting the show as well.

[00:57:32] Zack Katz: Yeah. And, uh, I'm, Marcus asked what my favorite swear word is. It's on a bingo card for today's conversation. Uh, my favorite swear word is fricken. Uh, and for this, uh, for this episode, uh, you, you can rewind a few episodes to find out what my actual favorite, uh, next week, uh, join us because Matt Cromwell and I will be joined by Carlisle Alexander and Paul Carter, COO of of built fast for a can't miss discussion where we talk about.

[00:58:02] No excuses, meeting modern user expectations in WordPress. That's gonna be a good conversation as well. So, uh, we're gonna dig into performance onboarding. Oh my gosh, guess what helps with onboarding? AI helps with onboarding and how WordPress products can rise to modern user standards. So make sure to tune in next week.

[00:58:20] Thanks all for joining us. Thanks again, Nik.

[00:58:22] Nik McLaughlin: Yeah,

[00:58:23] Zack Katz: yeah, thanks. See you all next time on WP Product Talk.