How to build wordpress custom themes faster with Claude AI

Hey there – everybody has heard the theory that the rise of AI will lead to job losses as productivity will increase. As white-label Wordpess Development agency we have enough field for experiments.

As every other agency in the world who started testing Claude, chatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Co-pilot, and everything out there to ship the projects faster – we’ve joined the ride as well at Codelibry, and this article hopes to be adding new items as our internal experiments continue

The AI usage story

Since ChatGPT’s release – everybody in the world has started using AI instead of Google and Google is testing AI first mode, which basically means you’ll spend less and less time searching the usual way. For developers and agencies it was time when stackoverflow stopped being a thing as most answers were already outputed with AI, and it could modify our code.

How to make AI smarter by providing context?

Smarter AI = AI that understands the context of your project:

• Arhitecture,
• Variables,
• Dependancies

What’s a better way to share that as sharing the project details and access to the folders? That’s how we’ve all started using Cursor, GitHub Co-Pilot and other tools.

How to work with AI in Figma to WordPress mode?

In our agency, most tasks are Figma to WordPress kind of projects, where design is done first and then converted into a pixel-perfect solution. Sharing the context with AI gives some benefits:

• It understands the codebase
• It propose valid solutions based on your style of code and project
• It really helps to fix small bugs and boosts the productivity but very little, as it can’t really work with Figma, at least it could not before.

How does Figma MCP help convert designs into custom wordpress themes?

Figma released an MCP – (Model Context Protocol), which is an open-standard server that allows AI agents and development tools (like Cursor or VS Code) to read and write Figma design data directly. Sounds great – but does it work?

Setup details:

• Figma MCP
• Figma design file
• Claude code plus
• Custom theme on localhost

I’ve started by trying to create an FAQ section from Figma design into Accordion with ACF Flexible Content

Then I have asked to create another section and saved the code output – looks nice, really.

Figma convertion works bad, could we get better results?

By using some Figma helper plugins one of our devs got a significantly better result.

Should you add more context to skills and claude.md ?

Absolutely – these things have a big impact on the final output. We have started by creating the guide files in the starter theme, so if a developer is using Claude or another AI tool to generate any piece of code, the AI will know the requirements, and the output will be much better.

Final thoughts

All of this still requires testing, and we’re far too the point where 1senior dev could replace the whole team, but rapid technology is just in place for sure. We usually take 5 business days to develop brand new homepage using custom code for custom theme from scratch.

This will include UI KIT and proper theme setup, but with AI we’ve managed to do this in 2 business days for a non-commercial project.

However, it’s just for 1 page, some other more complex things may require manual work as required before, but some parts of the project really got a significant boost