I’m a software engineer, entrepreneur, and founder of CodersBucket & WebEquipe, with over 18 years of experience in software development. I build and ship WordPress products alongside large-scale SaaS platforms, and I now focus on how AI-assisted development helps experienced developers move faster, from spotting a real customer problem to building, launching, and growing a paid product around it.
Topic Title
From Client Problem to WordPress Product: Building Faster with AI
Topic Description
This session shares the real journey of turning a client’s urgent PDF search requirement into a WordPress plugin and eventually a commercial product using AI-assisted development. When the traditional development process was taking too long and the client had limited time, I used AI coding tools to accelerate development and get a working solution delivered much faster. But building the plugin was only the beginning. My first WordPress.org submission was rejected, mainly over security issues. That became a valuable lesson in what the plugin review team actually looks for and why AI-generated code still requires experienced human review. After addressing the issues and resubmitting, the plugin was approved and released for free. As people started using the plugin, we discovered demand for a bigger feature: OCR support for scanned PDFs. We integrated Google Vision API for OCR processing and built our own API and usage-tracking system around it to support a Pro version. The Pro version received its first 10 sales within the first month. I’ll share the practical lessons from this journey: where AI genuinely saved development time, where human review and security judgment were still essential, what the WordPress.org rejection taught me about production-ready plugin development, and how real user feedback helped us identify a feature—and a niche—worth investing in. Beyond this case study, I’ll show how developers can use AI not only to write code, but also to research niche opportunities, validate ideas, build MVPs faster, test and debug, and reduce the time and cost of taking a WordPress product from a real problem to a paying customer.