I still remember the file.
functions.php, open at 2am, a child theme built on top of Kubrick.
One tab for the codex. One tab for a forum thread from 2009. One tab for the coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.
I want to say something bold and get it out of the way first.
The last hand-coded WordPress theme has probably already shipped.
Most of us just haven’t noticed yet.
The Kubrick years
Before block themes. Before FSE. Before anyone said “headless” without irony.
We had a default theme. Kubrick, then Twenty Ten, then a new one every year.
You didn’t build from scratch. You built on top.
Child theme. Custom page templates. A functions.php file that grew until it held half the site’s logic and nobody wanted to touch it.
It worked because someone else had already solved the hard parts. You just had to know where to hook in.
The starter kit years
Then came Underscores.
A blank canvas instead of a borrowed one. No opinions, no bloat, just the bones.
And for the developers who wanted more structure, more discipline, something closer to how real applications get built, there was Sage from Roots. Blade templating, a build process, the Laravel person’s idea of what a WordPress theme should feel like.
This was the era where “theme developer” started meaning something closer to “software engineer.”
We stopped copying and started architecting.
The rebuilding years
Full Site Editing didn’t arrive because AI was coming.
It arrived because WordPress needed to restructure itself first. theme.json. Patterns. Block themes replacing PHP templates with markup a visual editor could actually understand.
This is the part people forget when they talk about AI changing WordPress.
The foundation was already being poured.
Now
Here’s where we are.
An agent takes a design and turns it into HTML. Another agent takes that HTML and turns it into a theme, classic, hybrid, or fully block based, depending on what the project needs.
You are not writing the theme anymore.
You are deciding what kind of theme it should be.
That’s a different skill. Writing PHP was syntax. Choosing architecture is judgment.
One of those was always going to be automated eventually.
The other one was never going to be.
What doesn’t get automated
I’ll say the quiet part.
Taste doesn’t get automated. Accessibility doesn’t get automated by accident. Performance budgets don’t enforce themselves.
Someone still has to own those. That someone is you.
The tools changed four times in fifteen years. The job underneath them changed once.
From typing to deciding.
We’re just the first generation building it while it happens, instead of reading about it after.
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