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I have used Claude to write some code for my websites, but never used it to write a full plugin. Did it get it right first time? Was it a simple plugin? Do you think you could use it, for example, to write a spam filter or anti-hacking plugin that wouldn’t allow other people using Claude to break in to my site or send all those spam emails and comments?
Yes it got it right the first time (after I gave specific instructions), with multiple features, although it may have helped that I told it which outdated plugin I wanted to replace the functionality of. I also successfully used the free version of ChatGPT a few months ago, after updating WordPress to a much later version, to replace a simple plugin to move off-topic comments to more appropriate posts, and to write custom CSS.
As a general rule, this is the sort of thing that the chatbots are very good at now. However, I’m not sure that I would recommend it for the specific use case of writing an anti-spam plugin, since that’s a pretty delicate thing, involving using lots of data to process each post. For that, I would suggest you use a standard anti-spam service like Akismet or something, which claims to have already protected my site from 3,071,754 spam comments so far (I use the free version). Then if too much spam is still getting through, you can put an additional step on the back end. Or if your server is being overloaded, you could put in an extra step at the front end to auto-dump the laziest bots (I use a plugin called “Cookies for Comments”.)
More precisely, AI is extremely useful for IDENTIFYING spam (I’m sure the standard services are all using it), and I’m sure Claude could easily tell you whether a given individual comment is spam (just as you can tell yourself). I’m skeptical though that it could write you a good plugin for this since the hard part here isn’t the programming, it’s the data analysis.
As for anti-hacking, that’s conceptually impossible for anyone to do, AI or human, since nobody knows the precise lists of bugs and exploits that have yet to be discovered. The only real defense here is to follow best practices and frequently update everything. You could however ask an LLM to look at your site and your plugins and tell you if there is anything you currently need to fix.