Recently, I spent two hours trying to change website theme colors in WordPress.
I’ve spent my career in startups - from pre-seed to unicorns, and founded a few myself. I’m comfortable with complex tools. But WordPress made me feel like I was learning software for the first time.
Two hours clicking through menus, searching support articles, watching tutorials. I upgraded to a paid plan. Bought a premium theme. Still couldn’t make simple changes without breaking something.
That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t me. It was the entire approach.
Why I needed WordPress in the first place
Our team needed a blog and we wanted it to be SEO adjusted. WordPress made sense — it’s still the standard for search optimization. I’d used Wix, Framer, Squarespace before and thought this would be similar.
I was very wrong.
The UI felt deliberately confusing. Buttons hidden behind panels. Basic features requiring premium upgrades. Want to adjust your template? Pay for the template separately. Want to customize it? Upgrade again.
I tried the workaround I found online: paste custom CSS to override the theme. Asked AI to write the code. It worked at first, and then it completely broke (the CSS file grew massive, changes conflicted with each other, not great).
I started researching WordPress freelancers. Found an entire ecosystem of services built around helping people use this one tool. The learning curve is brutal and slow.
So it made total sense why people pay others to handle it.
But there was one more thing that I tried.
The shift: controlling WordPress without touching it
I remembered something from my Desktop Commander work — if a tool has a command-line interface, you can control it through natural language. No UI needed.
Most people interact with software through graphical interfaces: buttons, menus, forms you click through. But underneath all that visual stuff, there’s another way to control software — the command-line interface (CLI), or terminal. It’s a text-based system where you type commands directly to tell the software what to do. It’s faster and more powerful than clicking through menus, but traditionally required memorizing specific commands and syntax.
WordPress has WP-CLI. A terminal application that gives you full control of WordPress sites through commands.
So here’s what I did:
I asked Desktop Commander to install WP-CLI and connect my WordPress account. I downloaded WordPress locally on my computer. Then I asked it to set everything up so it could make theme changes locally first, test them, then deploy to my live site.
Desktop Commander configured the local environment, connected to my hosting, set up deployment workflows. It required some actions from me — entering credentials, confirming connections — but it walked me through everything. The whole setup took under 20 minutes.
Then I just started describing what I wanted.
“Make a blog with magazine layout. Adjust it for my brand colors. Add an authors section. Navigation and share buttons.”
Desktop Commander took the WordPress theme and made custom adjustments. Launched a local version in my browser for me to test. I iterated through conversation. When it looked right, I said deploy.
It went live.
No WordPress developers involved. No fighting through impossible menus. Just describing the outcome I wanted.
Publishing posts became a conversation
Now when I write blog articles, I never visit WordPress.
I save my article as a .docx file in my local folder. I tell Desktop Commander where the file is on my computer.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
It reads the file, drafts the WordPress post, adds tags and author info, optimizes for SEO, adds images, runs checks, publishes it live (using Terminal and WP-CLI for me).
The post goes live with proper formatting, featured images, meta descriptions. Everything I would’ve spent 30 minutes configuring manually.
I just provide the content. Everything else happens automatically.
This feels amazing. I’ve saved hours of frustration. Now I just tell AI to do the tedious work for me.
What this means for using other software
I started looking at other tools I use daily — the ones that feel unnecessarily complex, time-consuming, frustrating.
There are plenty.
CRM systems where I spend 20 minutes extracting a simple contact list. Analytics platforms where finding traffic spikes requires navigating five different menus. Email tools where sending a branded message to a segment takes forever.
Here’s what I realized: at their core, most of these tools are just databases wrapped in complicated interfaces. The UI became the problem.
With AI assistants like Desktop Commander, you don’t need the UI anymore. AI speaks directly to the service in data language.
So my workflow is becoming:
“Extract leads I added to my CRM after last week’s conference.” “Send a branded email to this contact segment.” “Find any traffic spikes in the last 30 days.”
All from a chat. All in one conversation. Describing outcomes instead of figuring out how to do stuff.
Why this matters beyond me
Most teams have no idea they can work this way yet.
There are entire industries built around heavyweight platforms and tools. I see how this need can vanish rapidly. Removing the layer of complicated UI and letting anyone interact with services directly is both a big disruptor and an opener for people who can now use more software and do more stuff.
The technical expertise that used to be critical like knowing exactly which menu hides which setting, memorizing command sequences, and understanding how systems connect, can now be skipped.
You just describe the outcome you want.
I think this shift will happen fast. Not because of some future technology, but because workflows like this already work today.
I’m routinely connecting many of them in sequence now (not all work, but many do).
I ask to do things like read my Slack → make a summary of issues I brought up last week in Notion → find supporting data from website traffic → find supporting evidence in my folder with customer interviews.
All done in one chat, without visiting the tools and saving tons of hours.
There are lots of possibilities for such flows. And they’re highly customizable to what you do. But I think the more we do this, the more we get to actually doing the core job humans are best at — creating, collaborating, shaping a vision and defining outcomes.
And less of spending hours, days, or even weeks figuring out how to configure your theme, create lead lists, or make custom data reports.
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I’m Ričards, building AI products and leading growth at Desktop Commander. I’ve been through the full startup journey — founding companies, scaling them from early traction to unlocking new revenue at unicorn stage. Now I’m documenting how AI is fundamentally changing what non-technical people can do, build and ship. Because I’m living it daily.
What tools frustrate you the most in your daily work? I’m documenting these workflows as they emerge. Happy to grab a coffee (online or offline) and discuss!