Does Discourse have AI development skills?

Dev
1

I spent three days trying to develop a plugin using Claude 4.6, and it was still too difficult.

Content Involved:

  • Database
  • UI
  • Admin backend
  • Routing
  • Logical functions and components, etc.

Overall Impression:
The code capability is strong, but the standardization and accumulated experience are insufficient.

During these three days, I spent most of my time correcting syntax and some conventional guideline errors, even regenerating the entire project.

I don’t understand code at all, and when encountering problems, I can’t even provide effective prompts. Regarding code structure/naming/development style, I can only obediently follow the AI. The AI’s performance was mediocre; it was difficult to resolve errors, and it seems it hasn’t accumulated much experience specifically for developing discourse features with AI.

Recently, I noticed the rise of Evomap. It seems AI has entered a phase of knowledge collision after absorbing a large amount of knowledge and has begun to improve in quality. Perhaps developing discourse plugins with AI will quickly become easier?

So, I wonder if the official team will release some AI development specifications or guidelines? (For example, agent skills, and tutorial documentation should be condensed into guidelines and instructions usable by AI).

2

I believe this is your problem unfortunately. AI can’t do the entire job of a programmer, it just simply isn’t feasible. AI is a very useful resource for completing repetitive tasks in coding but it isn’t to the point where you just tell it “make this” and it makes it perfectly even with refining. This isn’t just a Discourse issue, most AI falls apart the second you ask it to make anything relatively complex in any language.

With that being said, if you’re interested in coding or developing with Discourse I would recommend just taking the plunge and learning JavaScript/Ruby. It’ll serve you better in the long run and you’ll be able to correct the AI when you know it’s just lying to you or generating bad code (which is relatively common if you know what you’re doing).

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3

I wrote many Discourse plugins with Claude Code, and it is a breeze nowadays.

Context is king, and you need to provide a proper context for it to work this means:

  • Opening Claude Code at the Discourse root, even when working at a plugin. This allows Claude to check for patterns easily and locally.
  • Have a proper local development setup, so tests can be ran, migrations, etc.
  • Use plan mode often, write overall idea to a markdown file, clean context on new steps, etc.

We are doing this already, see for example

Skills are being developed and will be added to the repository as they are ready and tested.

Still, Vibe coding in an existing project isn’t completely free. Spending some time studying and getting familiar with your target is still a good idea.

5 Likes