Automattic just released a repo that lets you build a full WordPress block theme from a text prompt. I gave it a spin this morning and came away genuinely impressed with a few caveats worth knowing about before you dive in.
What Actually Shipped
The repo is called wordpress-agent-skills, and it dropped on February 13th. It’s built for Claude Cowork – Anthropic’s collaborative AI product – though the underlying skills are platform-agnostic, so they’ll work with other AI tools like ChatGPT and Codex too.
There are three main pieces to it:
- A Studio MCP server – this connects to WordPress Studio on your local machine using Model Context Protocol, which is the standard that lets AI tools interact with external services. It handles creating sites, writing files, running WP-CLI commands, and generating shareable preview links.
- A Cowork plugin (
wp-site-creator) – this is the bit you install into Claude Cowork. It gives you a/create-sitecommand that kicks off the whole workflow. - Three skills – Site Specification (gathering context about what you want), Site Design (fonts, colours, layout options), and WordPress Theme Creation (generating the actual block theme files following best practices).
Worth noting: this is labelled as a developer preview. Beta software. Not production-ready. Automattic are being upfront about that.
Setting It Up
There are some prerequisites. You need WordPress Studio installed with CLI enabled, and you need to configure the MCP connection so Claude Cowork can talk to your local WordPress environment. If you come from a development background, this is straightforward. Clone the repo, set up the MCP server, install the Cowork plugin, and you’re off.
For anyone who isn’t comfortable with terminals and config files, this is going to feel like a wall. I wrote about this exact problem in my piece on AI agents and the digital divide – the tools are powerful, but they’re still locked behind a level of technical setup that shuts a lot of people out. That hasn’t changed here.
How It Works in Practice
You run /create-site in Claude Cowork and describe what you want. Something like:
I want a minimalist personal site. Clean typography, plenty of white space, sans-serif fonts. Designed with accessibility in mind. It’s for a business in the medical and healthcare space.
Claude then asks a few clarifying questions, works through its skills, and comes back with multiple design directions to choose from. You pick one (or tweak it), and then it goes ahead and builds out the full block theme – theme.json, templates, template parts, patterns, the lot.
For my first test I described a minimalist blog site for my own personal use.
/create-a-wp-site:create-site Create a WordPress block theme that is minimal clean with stylish typography. This would ideally suit a personal Blog for myself Elliott Richmond and I am a WordPress plug-in and theme developer and I’m also a content creator
It came back with three design options.
After a bit of back and forth on one of them, it generated all the block theme files I needed. The whole thing was handled through the MCP connection to WordPress Studio, so the theme was deployed straight to my local site.
If you’ve ever built a block theme from scratch – and I have, enough times that I put together an FSE block theme cheat sheet to save myself the repetition – you’ll appreciate how much time this skips. The generated code followed solid block theme conventions, and the design output was surprisingly decent for a first pass.
The wp-site-creator skill sets are very extensive, you can check them all out in the repo.
The Good
The design quality was better than I expected. Not pixel-perfect, but a genuinely usable starting point. The fact that it presents multiple options and lets you steer the direction before committing makes the workflow feel collaborative rather than just “AI generates, you accept.”
Speed is the obvious win. From prompt to deployed theme in minutes rather than hours. And because it’s building on proper block theme architecture – not some proprietary system – you can take the output and work with it like any other theme.
The Not So Good
Token usage. If you’re running a capable model like Opus, you’ll burn through your allowance fast. I built two sites today using the same workflow and that used up my daily credit on the Pro plan. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s something to be aware of if you’re planning to iterate heavily.
And as I mentioned, the setup isn’t trivial. MCP configuration, WordPress Studio CLI, Cowork plugin installation – each step is manageable for a developer, but stacked together it’s a lot of moving parts for someone who just wants to make a website.
Why This Matters
This is Automattic making a clear move toward agentic AI in the WordPress ecosystem. Not a chatbot that answers questions about WordPress. Not an AI that writes blog posts. An agent that actually builds functional themes by interacting with your local development environment.
If you saw my earlier video where I created a CLAUDE.md file to do something similar with Claude Code, this takes that idea much further. The engineering here is integrated with WordPress Studio, with WordPress.com’s infrastructure, and with a purpose-built skill set for theme creation. It’s a proper toolchain, not a workaround.
The direction is exciting. Whether it’s accessible enough to matter beyond the developer community – that’s the question that still needs answering.
Try It Yourself
If you’re a developer and you’re curious, the repo is on GitHub. Set aside an hour for setup and have a play. I’d genuinely like to hear what you think.
And if you want to see the full workflow in action, I’ll likely put together a YouTube video walkthrough soon so be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss it. https://www.youtube.com/@elliottrichmondwp
The tools keep getting better. The access problem hasn’t gone away. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
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