New blog: ProcessWire and AI

[ryan]

In this post I wanted to talk a little bit about the state of ProcessWire and AI. I'll share what my experience has been so far and where I think ProcessWire should focus going forward. This new world of AI can be both exciting and concerning, but it's the world that we've found ourselves in. As far as ProcessWire and web development goes, I think there's a lot to be excited and enthusiastic about— 

https://processwire.com/blog/posts/processwire-and-ai/

[Jonathan Lahijani]

So ProcessWire now has the beginnings of a first-party "schema" (in the ProcessWire sense) migrations system? YES!!!

[ryan]

@Jonathan Lahijani very little code in the module to make it happen. You tell the AI what changes you want in your site, and it writes the code for the changes to a file, runs the file (which makes the changes), and then you can copy the file to another installation (or have the agent do it) and re-run it there, making the same changes. It's only as good as the AI agent, but Claude at least seems to be really good with PW's api. The AI agent learns how to create the migration from the included .md files.

[Jonathan Lahijani]

From my experience, even asking an LLM (like ChatGPT in their website chat interface) about ProcessWire's architecture is pretty impressive.

I spent a lot of time last year using AI to compare (verbally compare, not direct code) ProcessWire to full-stack web application frameworks like Laravel and the language it used to describe ProcessWire, with API variables like $pages, $fields, etc as "services-like objects" was something I've never seen described anywhere (pw docs or forums), but it's technically correct, and a lot of things clicked with me after that.

These coding agents do really well with ProcessWire without any special harnesses already.  I'm excited for all these upcoming features.

[gebeer]

I really like the way things are going with ProcessWire and AI. Thank you, Ryan.

I've been a big fan and strong advocate for migrations in PW, since I started using RockMigrations years ago. What makes RM a particularly strong candidate is the abstraction into a schema-like format which is much easier to understand/read/write than native PW API code. This is a real strength of RM and I would prefer a schema-based approach anytime over writing (or having AI write) PW API code.

Claude is very good at understanding the PW API, other models are not that strong. But they all can understand schemata. Be it PHP arrays, JSON, YAML. So I would advocate for either developing an "official" PW migration schema or adapting the existing, battle tested one from RockMigrations.

 

[HMCB]

I’m worried about you, @ryan. You talk about Claude like a person. Pretty soon you’ll be in your basement in your underwear, unshaven for weeks and your family is going to be wondering what happened to the family man they knew. And please don’t accidentally call Claude Claudette because your wife will truly think something is going on with this newfound friend of yours.

Hopefully we can rely on one weekly post from you. Just to let us know you’re ok. But even then, how do we know Claude isn’t writing for you. We may have to start doing weekly Zoom updates (yes, with video on!).

[ryan]

@gebeer the module is really about providing tools for agents to PW. After building the cli parts that opens the API to the agents, the next step seemed like it was to build something that uses it and demonstrates it. the migrations seemed like a good way to do that. But I've never been a user of migrations in the past, as that just hasn't ever been something that's cost me any real time. Though I do want to support this feature in the module, and think it will be good for some use cases. I don't think there's much chance this would be a substitute for something like rock migrations. But I don't really know much about rock migrations other than that I've heard good things.

I imagine we're not far away from when you can just have the AI watch what you do and have it repeat the same thing on another install. 

[ryan]

@HMCB it's Claudia, and we're meeting up for coffee next week.

[HMCB]

37 minutes ago, ryan said:

@HMCB it's Claudia, and we're meeting up for coffee next week.

Have you no shame?! 😂

Love you man. I can’t wait to see what Claudia does for PW