Working with AI tools is neither “hype” nor a luxury, but a necessity if you want to best balance your knowledge and experience while letting your AI collaborator handle its share of the work.
In this session for advanced users, I will show you how I work on a current and real project for Invictus gym using AI tools, planning, local development, and the procedure of how an AI tool checks and deploys code to the server.
We rely on serious tools: the terminal, git, and Docker. We go through a workflow that utilizes three things: DDEV, which allows every project to have its own local environment that faithfully reproduces production (the same PHP version, the same extensions, the same database); parallel work on multiple tasks through git worktree; and an AI agent that doesn’t just “suggest” code, but also helps with planning, estimation, and logging work, runs checks, and activates sub-agents that work for you in parallel.
The key difference compared to “chat” vibe-coding lies precisely in the environment: an agent that sees the entire codebase (context) and works where it is allowed to fail, under version control, with a plan and conditions (“acceptance criteria”) before anything moves forward. That is what sets this process apart as a good practice that you adapt to your team and project.
Target Audience:
Developers who already work with WordPress and want to introduce AI into their work seriously and conceptually, rather than experimentally. Knowledge of git and the command line is assumed; experience with Docker or DDEV is not strictly necessary, but it makes following along easier. Those who do not yet use a local environment will receive a complete working template, but the talk does not stop there.
WORKSHOP:
This talk can also be organized as a workshop where everything mentioned above is demonstrated practically, in a live session.
The workshop follows the same flow, but on the participants’ machines, allowing them to follow along, ask questions, and do the work themselves. Everyone leaves with practical experience, a running local WordPress environment, a version-controlled project, and an agent configured for planning and working on their own code.
We set up the project, develop a theme and plugin alongside the agent, and push code to the server in real-time, with everything that entails. Preparation materials, the demo project itself, and resources will be available on GitHub, where anyone can see how to prepare, clone it, and use it as their own starting foundation (“scaffolding”).
Prerequisites: If you want to follow along actively, a laptop with Docker and git installed, a GitHub account, and an AI tool of your choice (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor). SSH access to your own hosting is desirable for the final part.