It was weird walking into DrupalCon in Chicago this week knowing almost nobody. I’m a WordPress guy. I’ve been to dozens of WordCamps. Showing up at DrupalCon felt a little like wearing a visitor’s jersey at a football game — you just hope people are nice about it.
They were more than nice. The Drupal community was warm, curious, and way more interested in shared problems than tribal differences.
I gave a talk called “Stop building AI features.” I wanted to make a case that may sound counterintuitive, especially coming from someone whose day job is literally helping build AI features.
Every CMS and web tool right now is racing to ship AI content generation, AI image editing, AI assistants. The demos are great. But we will never out-build OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. The features we ship today feel dated in six months. So we should stop running that race and start building something they can’t.
What I didn’t expect was that shortly before my talk was my first Driesnote. Driesnotes are Drupal’s version of State of the Word. We heard updates and news from Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal.
At around the 1:04 mark, Dries noted that for Drupal core, they focus on features and tools for content (like the opposite of the point of my talk), but not on anything for development with AI. I found that they have even gone so far as not to want to accept some of the emerging primitives, such as agent.md files, in Drupal. This stands in stark contrast to the WordPress project’s position, which is to make everything as easy for agents as possible.
Websites and apps are getting made with AI, whether we like it or not. After all, building with AI on top of open source platforms is the best of all worlds. Data ownership and portability are strong. There are efficiencies in extending the 20+ years of platform security, performance, and scalability. There’s a good case to be made that tools like WordPress are the OG vibe coding platforms — letting anyone build, regardless of skills.
The web is changing underneath us. Cloudflare’s CEO said at SXSW last week that bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027. Your site’s primary audience is increasingly not a person with a browser. So build for that audience.
Instead of AI features your users touch directly, build the infrastructure AI agents interact with. At WordPress.com, we’ve been working on all of this. MCP adapters, content guidelines, the idea that your CMS should show up wherever you already are — and be managed from there — Slack, Telegram, SMS, even phone calls. There’s some really fun stuff coming soon!
Without accessible open source tooling, the agentic web becomes a place where large players have sophisticated AI representation and everyone else is just data to be scraped. We’ve seen that movie. It’s the same problem that made WordPress and Drupal necessary in the first place.
One other note from talking with folks this week. I do think those of us living the wild ride of AI assume everyone is with us. Many developers, builders, and creators aren’t as actively deep in AI as we think. We need to do better and bring more people along.
I walked away from Chicago less sure about the timeline and more sure about the direction. The Drupal folks I talked to are thinking about this seriously, too. I hope both communities keep comparing notes.
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