WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, has already been put to real-world use

Summary

WordPress’s experimental AI development tool, Telex, has already been put to real-world use, only months after its September debut. At the company’s annual “State of the Word” event on Tuesday in San Francisco, WordPress Project Cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg shared several examples where Telex had been used within a working WordPress shop to do things like create price comparisons, price calculators, and pull in real-time business hours plus a map link to a retail store, among examples. Telex, which Mullenweg previously described as a “v0 or Lovable, but specifically for WordPress,” is essentially the publishing platform’s attempt to build its own vibe-coding tool for the AI era. The software allows developers to generate Gutenberg blocks — the modular bits of text, images, columns, and more — that make up a WordPress website. While the software is still labeled as an experiment, Mullenweg was able to demonstrate several real-world examples that had been built by community creator Nick Hamze. In the first example, Mullenweg showed off a pricing comparison tool built with Telex, noting that these sorts of rich, interactive web elements were something that a developer used to have to custom-build, but could now be created in a few seconds. Image Credits:WordPress State of the Word (opens in a new window) In another demo, a developer used Telex to add real-time store hours, a phone number, and a link to get directions to the header block of their WordPress site. Image Credits:WordPress State of the Word (opens in a new window) Telex was also shown being used to create a carousel of partner logos on a business’s site, a custom pricing tool, a Google Calendar integration, and a grid for posts on a WordPress homepage where each post’s card on the site had the same height. Image Credits:WordPress State of the Word (opens in a new window) “Again, things that you used to have to, like, hire developers, do custom software like this would have cost thousands, ten...