I got a ticket from a client the other day. Good client, on a monthly retainer. They wanted a copyright notice in their footer that automatically updated the year. Simple enough. But they wanted to be able to edit the company name right there in the Site Editor. My first thought? Ugh.
This is one of those tiny jobs that turns into a headache. The old way would be a shortcode, like [copyright]. But shortcodes are a pain in the block editor: they don’t preview, they feel clunky, and clients hate them. The “right” way is to build a custom WordPress block. But for a single copyright line, that’s overkill.
Spinning up a full React build environment and wrangling npm dependencies just to output one line of text is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It’s not the kind of billable time that feels good. I almost told them to update the year by hand every January. Almost.
Then I remembered the AI hype
I’d been seeing posts about AI-powered WordPress blocks. Sounded like a toy, honestly. But this looked like the perfect low-stakes test. I found a tool called Telex, from Automattic, and decided to give it a shot. I didn’t expect much, so I typed in a prompt, basically talking to it like a junior dev.
Create a WordPress block named "Copyright Year". It should display the copyright symbol (©), followed by the current year, followed by a company name. The company name must be an editable text field in the block's inspector controls. Default it to "My Awesome Company".And here’s the surprise: it worked, on the first try. It generated a live preview right in the browser. I tweaked the prompt a bit to refine the output, and it let me download a standard, installable plugin zip. No build process, no terminal, just a prompt and a zip file. The whole thing took about five minutes.
My little copyright block is pretty boring. If you want to see the flashy stuff, the official WordPress.com blog has a whole showcase of wild examples built with this tech, like Minesweeper and personality quizzes. Fun, but not the kind of client request I get every day.
Where this helps in practice
This isn’t going to put WordPress developers out of a job, not by a long shot. But it’s a genuinely useful tool for a few specific things:
- Rapid prototyping: building a quick, working block to show a client an idea, without burning half a day on setup, is a real win.
- Simple utilities: good for small, single-purpose blocks like my copyright example, a social share button, or a styled callout box.
- Client empowerment: for clients who are technically savvy but aren’t React developers, this could let them build their own simple layout tools.
For anything complex that has to handle metadata, talk to third-party APIs, or hit high-performance targets, you still need a pro. But for the small stuff, this is a real time-saver.
This stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
It’s a new tool in the toolbox, and one I’ll use again. It saves time on the boring work so I can spend it on the hard problems.
