I just ‘vibe coded’ a perfect WordPress plugin, and I can’t wait to do it again

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time managing a self-hosted WordPress site, you likely know the familiar, exhausting cycle of the plugin hunt. You have a very specific, relatively simple problem you need to solve. You head to the plugin repository, download three or four different options, discover that two are bloated with ads, one breaks your theme, and the last one hasn’t been updated since 2022.

That was exactly the position I found myself in recently. I needed a simple sitemap plugin that could generate perfectly structured sitemaps along with Google News XML feeds. For some reason, the one I’d used for years just up and stopped working properly.

I spent hours scouring the web, checking developer forums, and testing existing plugins that promised what I needed, but ultimately failed to deliver. Frustrated by the lack of clean options for such a simple task, I decided to pull the plug on the search and try something different. I opened up a new Gemini chat window, described exactly what I needed in plain English, and ‘vibe coded’ a custom WordPress plugin from scratch.

The entire process took only a few minutes, and it works flawlessly, does exactly what I need it to do, and it completely changed my perspective on how I should consider adding (or fixing) customized functionality on our site moving forward.

What it means to ‘vibe code’

If you haven’t caught the term yet, ‘vibe coding’ has quickly become one of the biggest phrases in tech. Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, it describes a fundamental shift in how we interact with software development.

Instead of opening a code editor, manually typing out PHP hooks, debugging syntax errors, and wrestling with WordPress database queries, you step into the role of a product manager or an architect. You state your intent, outline your parameters, and let a powerful Large Language Model (LLM) handle the heavy-duty technical execution. You aren’t writing lines of code; you are guiding a project.

For this sitemap project, I didn’t look at a single piece of raw documentation. I simply described the required structure of a Google News XML feed (from Google’s own documentation), detailed how I wanted the plugin to hook into our publishing workflow, and let the AI compile the file structure.

Gemini even pointed out that a site like ours with a large library of posts should parse out the posts into smaller sitemaps – a step I’d forgotten. Our old plugin did this just fine until it stopped working, so I had Gemini make the adjustments, and once again, it performed the task perfectly.

After completing the task, it also gave me a few options on how to get the plugin in place, and even though I have that sort of knowledge from working in Wordpress for many years at this point, it was a nice touch. I feel confident that I would have been able to get this plugin up and running with ease even if I had no working history with Wordpress at all, and that is pretty impressive.

Scratching your own itch in real time

The seamless execution of this little project made me realize just how massive the gap is between hoping someone else has solved your problem and simply building the solution yourself.

We’ve preached for years about how versatile the web is, but up until recently, executing a custom idea required either a deep repository of personal programming knowledge or a healthy budget to hire a developer. Because of that barrier to entry, most of us just compromise. We accept an imperfect, third-party plugin because “it’s close enough.”

Vibe coding is starting to obliterate that compromise. When you realize that you can securely construct a lightweight, hyper-targeted tool tailored exactly to your specific operational needs in a matter of minutes, the friction of problem-solving completely disappears.

A new standard for everyday workflows

Is ‘vibe coding’ a total replacement for world-class, enterprise-grade software engineering? Of course not. Complex systems architecture, deep security compliance, and massive scalability still require rigorous human oversight.

But for small, targeted, self-contained utilities – like a custom WordPress plugin, a specific Chrome extension, or an automated internal workflow tool – this is the absolute future.

The success of this sitemap plugin has officially broken a dam for me. Moving forward, I’m going to be leaning into this style of development on a far more regular basis to optimize our site performance and scratch our own technical itches. If there is a feature we’ve been waiting on or a workflow that feels just a little too tedious, we aren’t going to wait around for a software update or spend hours hunting through a marketplace anymore. We’re just going to ‘vibe code’ it.