Up Your Game With AI

Well well…. here we are. It is 2026. That happened fast. 😜

Happy new year to you – and after taking a break last week, I’m fully back at it this morning and ready to kick things off with a new issue of WP Edge!

This year, I have a few different goals on the docket – and not all of them are business. But, one of my business goals is to up my own game when it comes to usage of AI. To take it to the next level beyond just chatting with it. I’ll talk more about that below.

Then, I wanted to share a few tools with you that are useful for debugging your WordPress installation. Useful additions to the ‘ol toolbox. 😎

Let’s dive in…

Take Your Usage of AI Up A Notch in 2026

As you might have noticed, AI has been a big thing lately. 😜 It is growing so quickly that it reminds me of the dot-com boom of the early 90’s. In fact, I think the rate of growth is way faster than that.

So many people are using AI now. My kids are asking it questions. My wife recently got her own paid ChatGPT account. I have clients trying to use it to debug things on their WordPress sites (not always successfully, but I’m there to bail them out. 😉 )

I myself am using AI on a daily basis. The rate at which I am using it keeps on increasing. Sometimes, I use it as a substitute for a standard online search, with the nice ability to ask followup questions. Sometimes I use it as a second set of eyes. Sometimes I use it for coding. Sometimes I use it for writing.

And I can tell you that one of my goals for 2026 is to continue to up my game further when it comes to AI. I want to dive deeper into the use of MCP servers, AI worker bots, etc. There’s so much more that you can do with AI than just chat with it – and I know I have a lot to learn.

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make, though, is that they’re trying to REPLACE themselves with AI. They treat it as an all-knowing tool that will always give right answers and just do what you want. Anybody who has been using it for much time at all quickly realizes this is not how it works.

AI will hallucinate. It will agree with you (even when you’re feeding it wrong stuff). It can give you false answers. It will produce messy code that would make a real programmer laugh. It is pretty sketchy to put blind trust into anything AI tells you.

But, those things come up more when you’re using AI to replace you. To do what you cannot do (or think you cannot do).

A better way to think about AI is as a MULTIPLIER of you.

Whatever it is YOU are doing, AI can speed you up. It can help remove bottlenecks and automate the busy work. It can allow you to better focus on the big picture while it takes care of the nitty-gritty.

But, it can only do this well if it knows your thought process.

And I think one of the big mindset shifts when it comes to using AI is to move away from simply thinking that it is all about just wording the right prompt…

… and instead think about systemizing HOW you think and what your decision processes are.

And when you can systematize how YOU approach things and train AI on those things, then it is able to act as you would act…. but do it much faster. It becomes YOU with superpowers… rather than you sitting there trying to make this separate tool spit things out that you want to see.

Learning to do this is a skill – one I’m still learning and developing.

It does involve “training” your AI using it’s memory functions. Almost all of the AI tools now have settings where you can tell it how you want it to do things – and even upload background information about the things you want to use it for. This way, your AI tool knows what you know.

You can also organize things into projects – and each project has it’s own background info. ChatGPT, for instance, now has Projects where you can group chats about similar subjects together and it will remember the context of those chats. For that project, you can provide instructions specific to that project. You can upload backup files for AI to reference.

So, for instance, let’s say you wanted to use ChatGPT to help you perfect and write your sales copy for your core offer. For this to be useful for you, it needs to know all about your offer, the target market, etc. It needs to see how you write. It needs specific instructions for how you want it to do things. If you set this stuff up, then the copy it produces is going to be WAY closer to what you need.

I even one time took a screenshot of my entire sales page, uploaded it as a PDF, and ChatGPT could read the entire thing.

With the right guidance and context, AI becomes a truly useful tool. Not just the surface level usage that we all know, but true deep use because it can literally do things exactly the way you would do them.

And that’s how I see usage of AI really advancing here. Not with the newbie thing of just asking it questions like a glorified replacement for Google search. But, instead, systematizing yourself, how you decide things, how you do things, and your very thought process. It is like creating company documentation – but for yourself. And instead of human team members you hope will actually read it and do it that way, you’ll have AI tools that can reference it and do things just like you would.

AI usage improves not just by how to word the right prompts… but through actual business systems. And frankly, personal systems as well.

Concierge Weekly Update

Fresh back off the long holiday break…. and kickin’ off 2026. Heres the video update…

WordPress News & Updates

CEO of Cursor Gives Common Sense. The CEO of Cursor (the popular AI coding agent) put out a stern warning to business owners that over-reliance on AI vibe coding will backfire eventually. He says it creates “unstable foundations” and that blind trust will lead to problems that will eventually crumble. He’s absolutely right, of course. Vibe coding doesn’t suddenly make non-coders into programmers…. and the software that is vibe-coded without any other knowledge is often a mess.

AI Agent Skills For WordPress. If you are using AI to vibe code stuff for WordPress, this new set of Agent Skills may be helpful. This is a folder of resources, scripts and AI instructions that, when set up in your favorite AI tool, helps that tool understand WordPress development patterns and avoid common mistakes. Obviously, this whole thing is meant more for coders and nerds. 😇

Online Course Plugins Are Stuck. It is interesting that WordPress LMS systems have been stuck in time – with nothing really new in multiple years now outside of some goofy AI integrations just to look cool. LearnDash is one of the big ones… and it seems frozen. Justin Ferriman (founder of Learndash) posted on LinkedIn about this – and he says it is because the e-learning space as a whole just stopped innovating. And he’s right. In my view, the entire space has changed and most LMS platforms are still stuck in an old paradigm.

FluentBooking 2.0. FluentBooking was updated to version 2.0 on New Years Day. This version introduces recurring events, dark mode for the admin panel, super admins, etc. You can read the full release post here. The recurring event function has been long-awaited and will enable things like weekly coaching sessions, recurring team meetings, etc.

Simple Captcha Failsafe Mode. In a cool idea, the Simple Captcha plugin was updated to have a “failsafe mode”…. meaning if the Cloudflare API goes down and your Turnstiles don’t work anymore, the plugin will adjust and still enable form submissions so things don’t shut down. Useful little function so that Cloudflare hiccups don’t disable core functionality of your website. See the changelog here.

New Falcon Optimizer. The original creator of the MetaBox plugin has released a new optimization plugin called Falcon. The plugin allows you to clean up bloat, disable components, and optimize your site. It looks nice and clean, although I will say that most of this functionality is stuff I’ve seen in other plugins like PerfMatters or Admin & Site Enhancements. Still, it looks handy. And it’s free.

Quill CRM. A new WordPress CRM has been launched called Quill CRM. They call it a “Smart CRM” and features things like pipelines, campaigns, automations, analytics and more. This thing is new so some of the functionality is still “coming soon”, but based on what I’m seeing… this thing could be a promising competitor to FluentCRM. It looks like a nice interface and quite capable already. And I know some in the FluentCRM world have been wanting pipeline functionality for awhile and it never comes. This will be one to watch.

ACF Pro Going To Make AI Easier. Looks like the new Advanced Custom Fields Pro 6.8 Beta 1 release is out – and this one integrates with the new WordPress Abilities API. In short, this will enable AI tools to read and work with custom fields, CPTs, and interact with the data. That is going to be handy.

Useful Little WordPress Debugging Tools

WordPress can be a little persnickety at times. Especially when you’re running a lot of plugins.

And have you ever had somebody recommend that you find plugin issues by disabling everything on your site? It is pretty standard advice. But thing is… if you’re testing things on a live website, disabling all the plugins breaks the whole site. So, the only real option has been to clone the whole thing to staging and test from there.

Well, there’s a simple plugin that probably comes up all the time for you… and you overlook it. And it solves this.

If you go to add a new plugin to your site, the default screen shows a bunch of plugins put out by the WordPress team themselves. (That is, unless some plugin or web host hijacked it to promote paid plugins 😜). And one of them is Health Check & Troubleshooting. I’ve seen this plugin a million times but totally overlooked it.

What this plugin does is add some tools to the Site Health section of WordPress. And one of them is the ability to deactivate all plugins and revert to the default theme – but only for yourself. This means, you can test things on a live website – and everybody else will continue to see the regular, live site.

I used this plugin just the other day to track down why page saves in the WordPress editor were stupidly slow for one of my clients. By putting her site into “troubleshooting mode”, I could load her site “raw” and then turn on plugins one by one until I found the culprit. The entire time, the site continued to work normally for everybody except me.

The plugin does some other little things, too, in the Tools section. You can run File Integrity checks, test outgoing emails, look at your PHP configuration, and some other things.

The plugin isn’t perfect – and it does have some bad reviews. It also hasn’t been updated in a little while. But, it is free and it works. And once you’re done with it, you just turn it off again.

If you want something more robust and want to dive into the geek stuff, you can check out Developer Debug Tools. This plugin doesn’t offer the troubleshooting mode of the other one, but it offers clean access to a LOT of technical data about your site and it’s hosting.

I mean, that plugin can get you into the weeds if you’re not a nerd like me. But, what it does do…. it does well and it is very useful. It can provide deep insights into your WordPress install and do so right in the WordPress interface. Very convenient and a ton easier than running command lines or dancing all over the place. For somebody like me, Developer Debug Tools is a super useful tool.

And, in case you were interested in what was causing that big slowdown on page saves for my client…

It was the caching purge settings. Specifically using the Nginx Helper plugin which is quite common on Nginx sites using FastCGI caching. That little plugin was purging RSS feeds and archives every time a simple page edit was made. Also, it’s method of purge was not set correctly. The result was that page saves were taking sometimes up to a full minute to process. And this is on Concierge Cloud servers which are fast as hell!

But, using the troubleshooting mode for Health Check & Troubleshooting, I was able to narrow it down to the Nginx Helper plugin. I realize that the moment I turn that plugin back on, saves slowed down a ton. So, I tweaked the settings and…. boom, everything works fine again.

And THAT, my friends, is my nerd talk of the week…. and why I have clients who usually just trust me to deal with this stuff for them so they don’t have to worry about it. 😇