Envato has been a huge part of my journey as a developer. CodeRevolution grew there, I met thousands of customers through the marketplace, learned a lot, made plenty of mistakes, and built things I probably wouldn’t have built otherwise. So, I want to thank them for these 11 years.
At the same time, things change. Envato changed a lot, the WordPress market changed a lot and I changed as well. At some point we have to accept that what worked for many years might not work any more.
Important for me is to not have any hard feelings and to waste energy on stuff I cannot change, but to funnel my passion and motivation into what’s coming next.
greed, we need to focus on the future. Personally, I still believe Envato could have been saved…
As for WordPress, it’s still strong. The entire IT ecosystem has changed, not just WordPress. I’m not even sure how to describe the current situation, the demand is there, but it feels like everybody is waiting for something, and nobody really knows what that “something” is.
As for AI personally I love it and no it can’t replace me it will never can, my ideas are mine and witohut my skill AI can’t do much, I work now on a new prodcut and believe me I need to baby sit it every step of the way and check things otherwise it goes into lalaland and this babysiting requires strong coding and ovreall skill without it is not possible! So what is that something I guess we will see but now things are really bad for use WordPress guys at least for me it is
Yes, it really feels like “change & adapt” is the theme of these days.
Also save and invest while the money is there because you never know what comes next. But that’s always true, and arguably regular employees are even more exposed to that.
I think for us, maybe the skill used to be code - doing a WP plugin (or whatever, script, JS etc) was simply not something that many people knew how to do.
Right now I think we still have an edge, but it’s harder to put the finger on what that edge is.
In my opinion, I think that is going to be “developing and managing complex systems” - I think it’s where AIs (at least for now) are basically useless and only a dev with deep knowledge can work well. I think it ties in to what @tibi_diablo said as well.
Most of my clients and I mean the majority don’t even know what HTTP or HTTPS is. And that’s just a dumb example. Some have issues simply adding a URL to an input field. Now imagine these guys vibe-coding an app.
We’re seeing things through a developer’s eyes, but the average person, even someone with some coding skills, will never be able to create an actually complex app. Maybe they’ll vibe-code something, but they won’t even know if everything is working properly because they don’t really understand what they’re doing.
So skill will still matter. No company out there has AI doing absolutely everything for them. They have senior developers using AI. Without skilled people behind it, AI is nothing, and I don’t think that will change no matter how good AI gets.
Just think about a different profession. Let’s say AI gets so good that it can read our minds and everything becomes AI-driven. You need to go to a dentist. I bet you’d still choose a good dentist who uses AI rather than an AI system doing everything on its own.
I’m not worried about AI, I love it. What I’m worried about is the current state of the industry because I genuinely don’t understand why there are no sales anymore, at least for me. A regular person isn’t suddenly going to start creating their own plugins.
There are no sales because for one part AI replaced developers and for other part I think our plugins and themes are still used but now agencies don’t pay for it. Ordinary authors could never do much about illegal use of our work. I think in past Envato was doing something about protection but now they don’t care for that and instead they want the agencies to focus on their AI subscription.
I’m disappointed with level of corruption in IT industry.
I am not sure if Envato did something agains piracy, maybe they were a bit feared, as they were a large company with access to expensive layers. But more than this, I don’t really think they did any action, did not proactively contact or take down any piracy site, as the most of these kind of sites are relatively old now.
The single thing they did legally is to enforce their own trademark, in case somebody copied any Envato controlled site, they would have been sued immediately… other than that, not much probably.
Ai replaced irelevant developers the good ones are still there at least most of them orchestrating AI. I keep hearign that clients are creating their own plugins and sites… peronsally I found this funny when I think the support I offered over the years. I can only imagine a client that has difficulties installing a plugin creating it’s own… I don’t think that is it… we are in a transitional phase and it will pass, the IT indistyr wasw ove4rsaturated and 90+ devs were there simply for the money no passion and that is no bueno! C
ompanies are startign to realize that even if now we write our code with AI while watching a movie we still need to know our s*it, AI is as best as you are as a developer and this will not change no matter how good it will get!
WOuld yo buy a plugin for your bussines that was built by someone that has no experience and literally is gambling there , I don’t think so.
Mark my words thigs will spiral back hard in the near future in our favor for those who survive this… hwo do I know, well I do this since 2000, I’ve see thin happen before in a different maner but kinda the same!
