I’ve been building websites since 2008.
That’s high school for me. While other kids were figuring out video games, I was figuring out WordPress 2.5 — back when widgets were new and theming meant editing PHP files in Notepad. I freelanced through school. Built sites for every kind of small business that would pay me. Then I joined a major Canadian hosting company and spent years putting that knowledge to work for thousands of clients across North America — building, fixing, troubleshooting, optimizing. Sites for small businesses, e-commerce stores, publishers. The full range.
After a while, you develop a particular kind of intuition. Someone describes a problem and you already know what’s wrong. A site is slow — you know which three things to check. A client wants to scale — you know which decisions they’ll regret. You stop thinking in “WordPress” and start thinking in patterns: hosting, infrastructure, performance, security, plugins, code, people.
That intuition is the most valuable thing I’ve built in twelve years. And about eighteen months ago, I realized AI was about to change what it’s worth.
The Carthage Magazine moment
I run Carthage Magazine — Tunisia’s first and largest English-language general-interest publication. Publishing is a business of relentless work: SEO audits, content strategy, editorial planning, copywriting, social, partnerships, distribution. The classic problem of independent media: too much to do, never enough hours, the work expands faster than the team.
When I started seriously using AI inside Carthage’s operations, something clicked that I hadn’t felt since the early WordPress days. SEO audits that used to take a full afternoon — done in twenty minutes, better than before. Content strategy sessions that needed three brains — now I could think out loud with one model and get sharper output than most meetings. Copywriting, brainstorming, planning, the editorial calendar, the analytics dives — all of it got faster, and most of it got better.
If you leverage AI correctly, it basically runs your business.
That sentence sounds like LinkedIn fluff until you actually live it. Then it sounds like understatement.
At the same time, I was watching the same shift happen in the corporate world. AI-powered website builders. AI features showing up inside WordPress itself. Customer support being rebuilt around Fin AI and Intercom’s automation layer. Workflows that used to require five people now requiring one person and a model. Every month, more of the work that used to be human became automated, augmented, or outright replaced.
And the people running those companies who understood the shift were pulling away from the people who didn’t.
What most of the WordPress community is getting wrong
The WordPress world is not adapting fast enough.
I say that with love. I’ve spent my career in this ecosystem. I know the people. I know how good they are. But the prevailing posture in WordPress circles toward AI is something between “yeah, I tried ChatGPT once” and “this is just another hype cycle.” It’s not.
Most WordPress creators and operators are treating AI the way they treated mobile in 2010 — as a thing to keep an eye on while they keep doing what they’ve been doing. Mobile didn’t kill desktop. AI won’t kill WordPress. But the people who built mobile-first practices in 2010 ate the lunch of the people who didn’t, and the same pattern is happening right now with AI.
The agencies who are seriously deploying AI internally are quietly pulling ahead. They’re shipping faster. Their margins are better. Their proposals are sharper. Their clients are happier. They don’t talk about it much because it’s a competitive advantage. But it’s real.
If you’re a serious WordPress operator and you’re not three months in on integrating AI into your stack, you’re already behind.
What most of the AI community is getting wrong about WordPress
The other side of the conversation has its own blind spot.
The AI hype crowd thinks AI is going to replace the people building websites. It’s not. Not even close. Not for the kind of work that matters.
AI is extraordinary at the parts of the job: drafting, summarizing, debugging, transcribing, coding, suggesting, comparing. But a website that actually converts — that captures a brand voice, that earns trust in the first three seconds, that knows what to leave out — still needs a human who understands what websites are for. AI gives you a great first draft. Humans give you a great final product.
The human touch isn’t sentimental. It’s strategic. The judgment of what to build, what to remove, where to position the CTA, how to write a headline that doesn’t sound like marketing — that’s the part the LLM can support but cannot lead.
The right framing isn’t “AI vs. humans.” It’s “AI as infrastructure.” The same way hosting is infrastructure, and the database is infrastructure, AI is now infrastructure. You use it. You leverage it to the maximum. But the building still belongs to the builder.
What I think is actually going to happen
Here’s the prediction I’m willing to put my name on:
The entrepreneurs who thrive in the next five years won’t be the ones who master the next WordPress release. They’ll be the ones who understand what websites are actually for — and who use AI as infrastructure to deliver those outcomes faster than anything else could.
The era when knowing the WordPress core inside-out was a moat is ending. Everyone has access to that knowledge now. What scarce, valuable, and rising in value is judgment — the ability to look at a business problem and know which combination of WordPress, plugins, hosting, AI tooling, workflow design, and human craft will actually solve it.
The operators who win will be the ones who can:
- Diagnose a business problem in the first conversation
- Architect a solution that uses AI where AI is strong and humans where humans are strong
- Ship faster than competitors who are doing it the old way
- Charge premium prices because they’re delivering premium outcomes
The “WordPress developer” job is bifurcating. On one side: commoditized work that AI handles for ten dollars a month. On the other side: high-judgment, high-leverage, high-paid operator work. There’s not going to be much in the middle.
I know which side I’m on.
What AskSaber is
AskSaber exists because I’m in a rare position, and I want to talk about it openly.
I understand WordPress at the depth of someone who’s spent twelve years inside it — not as a tutorial-watcher, but as someone who’s shipped, fixed, troubleshot, and supported real client work across thousands of real sites. I also understand AI at the depth of someone who’s actually rebuilding their own businesses around it — not as a content creator who reviews tools, but as an operator who uses them every day to do real work.
That intersection is rare. Most WordPress creators are still wary of AI. Most AI creators have never run a real WordPress site in production. Most agency owners are too busy in client work to think strategically about the shift. And almost no one is bringing the North America, Europe, and MENA perspective into a single conversation — I work across all three contexts every day, and the differences matter.
So this is the seat I’m taking. The WordPress operator who deploys AI seriously, writes about what’s working and what isn’t, and builds real things to prove it.
The brand is called AskSaber for a reason. It’s a conversation, not a broadcast. The questions are what matter. The answers will keep evolving. But the underlying belief won’t:
WordPress is sharper with AI. The operators who learn to wield both are the ones who win.
What’s coming
Over the next twelve months, I’m publishing weekly — articles, deep dives, opinionated takes, and live builds. I’m offering audits and advisory work for agencies and operators who want a senior set of eyes on their stack. I’m building things in public so you can see exactly what AI-leveraged WordPress development actually looks like in 2026 — not in theory, but in shipped, working code.
If any of this resonates — if you’re a WordPress operator, agency owner, or serious technical founder who senses the shift and wants to be ahead of it instead of catching up — subscribe to The dispatch. One email a week. Sharp writing, real lessons, no fluff.
This is the most interesting moment in WordPress since I started in 2008. I’m betting my career that the operators who lean into it are the ones who’ll define the next decade.
I’d rather be wrong out loud than right in private. So let’s go.
— Saber