I started to look at some live previews of the Twenty Twenty-Five theme in WordPress to see how it would work. It seems like I would have to activate the theme and then start to modify it to make the weblog look more like the current weblog. It seems to be a deployment process and then a user has to highly configure it. For the most part the deployment curve for setting up a base WordPress site has gone up in the last couple of years. Configuring these Gutenberg elements and pages is a lot more clicking and thinking than the pick a theme and deploy method of previous years. Probably the only real path forward will be to just deploy the new theme and plan on spending several hours making it work well enough to be usable followed by refinement sprints. That is a pretty big commitment for a single person deployment. 

One of my favorite television shows is the Curse of Oak Island which is a real life money pit example. I’m afraid that people are going to see the sunk costs of building and training AI models and LLMs that have been occurring over the last 5 years as the biggest money pit in history. Seriously, the amount of money that has been spent trying to get to the forefront of these technologies is absolutely ridiculous. I actually believe that the money being spent now is not a moat that will protect against additional entrants. The cost to catch up will be way lower than the cost to show up first. This is one of the times that being first in the pool will be the most expensive experience for an ultimately commoditized reward. 

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado