md files are the new intellectual property

"I built a site in 2 hours with AI" posts are missing the point entirely. Nobody's arguing AI can't generate a website. It can. The question is what happens on day 31. Your developer is busy. Your marketing manager wants to update the homepage hero. Your content team has three blog posts ready to go. Who's touching the site? If the answer is "we have to wait for a developer" that's not a website problem. That's a business problem that isn't solved by AI. This is exactly why WordPress still powers 43% of the internet, not because it's trendy, but because it works for real teams over the long haul. A few things AI-generated sites quietly can't do: Look like you. Vibe-coded sites and no-code tools recycle the same layouts. Your competitors are launching the same "site" with different colors. Custom WordPress builds don't have that problem. Hand off cleanly. Any developer on the planet can open a WordPress project and know exactly what they're looking at. Try that with someone else's AI-generated codebase. Let non-devs take the wheel. WordPress was built around the idea that content people — not engineers — run websites. That's still true. Scale without starting over. E-commerce, memberships, multilingual, complex integrations — there's a plugin or a pattern for it. You're not rebuilding from scratch every time requirements change. Keep you in control. Your data, your hosting, your codebase. No platform deciding to change pricing or deprecate a feature you depend on. Speed to launch is a metric. It's just not the most important one. The sites that win long-term are the ones people can actually maintain, update, and grow — without the whole thing becoming someone's full-time job.

WordPress block editor vs page builders: the fight is over and nobody won. Blocks are fine for blogs and simple layouts. They fall apart the moment a client wants anything custom. Page builders are still faster for real client work. The people who swear by blocks either build very simple sites or have forgotten what actual client requests feel like.