WordPress development has entered the agentic era. Pete Panel was built for it.
Claude works on a disposable copy of your site, you approve, one command ships. Production never at risk.
Free to start with one local site; bring your own site with Pro.
The site you’re reading was rebuilt off Divi by an AI agent, in an afternoon. See how it was done
See how it works
Senior developers never point an agent at production.
So Pete Panel gives Claude a disposable sandbox with all the access (real WP-CLI, files, database, and logs) and none of the risk. Build custom plugins, refine themes, create new landing pages, run security audits: a week of work delegated in an afternoon, shipped only on your say-so. It’s how we rebuilt this very site off Divi. Free to start on your Mac.
Clone
Copy your site into a disposable Docker playground in minutes. Production is never in the loop.
Delegate
Claude builds custom plugins, refines your theme and website copy, creates your new landing page, and runs security audits, with real WP-CLI, files, and database.
Approve
You sign off on design direction, rights, and anything that can’t be undone.
Ship
First deploy exports in Pete format; after that, push updates one page at a time with /push_page over SSH, backed up and verified.
One installer. Any cloud. A fraction of the hosting bill.
The playground isn’t the whole story. When the work is ready, the same stack ships to production with one installer, on Linode, Hetzner, Google Cloud, AWS, or any Ubuntu server you own. Free SSL, tuned for speed, and because it’s your cloud, you pay cloud prices, not managed-WordPress prices.
Any cloud you own
One installer brings Pete Panel up on Linode, Hetzner, Google Cloud, or AWS. No lock-in, no reseller markup.
Enterprise speed, cloud prices
Redis, OPcache, ModSecurity, and free SSL, auto-tuned to the server. Managed-host performance at a fraction of the cost.
Same environment, dev to production
What the agent built locally ships as-is. Export in Pete format, deploy in one command.
WP Engine’s biggest published plan: $248 a month for 400,000 visits. Pete Panel on a $48 Linode: up to 432 million. See the full math → Deploying to production → Benchmarks →
Why other local WordPress tools feel limited: they exist to sell you hosting
Every popular local WordPress tool is owned by a hosting company, and it shows: sealed-off environments, no real shell, and an export button that points at their servers. A senior developer doesn’t accept that ceiling, and an agent can’t do real work under it. Pete Panel answers to the developer: the same WP-CLI, files, and database you’d touch yourself, in a disposable Docker copy you can throw away. That’s what we call an agentic WordPress environment. See how the tools compare.
Yours to throw away
Other local tools are a sealed product you rent. Pete’s is a disposable Docker copy: clone it, break it, delete it, clone again. Experiments are free when environments are.
A real shell, not a dashboard
No training-wheels API. You and your agent get the same WP-CLI, files, and database a senior developer touches, with nothing walled off.
The full toolbox, in the box
Redis, phpMyAdmin, multi-PHP, Composer, and VS Code Dev Containers, ready out of the box. Not a locked-down feature set you have to upgrade around.
Answers to you, not a sales funnel
Every popular local tool is a hosting company’s front door. Pete has nothing to upsell, so it’s built for how you actually work: free forever, locally.
Seven commands that do a developer’s day of work
Pete Panel ships these battle-tested workflows built in. Each runs the full, gated engineering process a senior developer would insist on: step by step, verified, reversible. Use them as they are, run any prompt against your dev site, or encode workflows of your own. The same recipes rebuilt this very site.
/push_page
One page, dev → production. Content, template, and media shipped over SSH. Backed up before it overwrites, idempotent by slug, nothing else touched.
/retheme
Legacy theme → modern block theme. Genesis or Divi rebuilt as a Full-Site-Editing theme, every menu page verified, packaged as an installable .zip, with the old theme kept as one-command rollback.
/reblock
Any page → self-contained block theme. WordPress, Shopify, or headless, rebuilt with bundled assets and license-correct fonts. Rights-gated: your faithful rebuild, or an original design study.
/plugin_audit
Any plugin → security report. Traces untrusted input to real, exploitable findings, ranked by severity. Read-only: it reviews code, never runs it.
/activate_redis_cache
Redis object cache, on → off. One production site at a time: site-unique key prefix, wp-config backed up, only that site’s keys purged. Its twin /deactivate_redis_cache reverses it cleanly.
/run_benchmark
Published claims → measured results. Detects your server’s tier, runs the k6 cached-visits test, and reports claimed vs measured, PASS or FAIL. It’s how our benchmark numbers became measurements.
We rebuilt this site with Claude. You’re looking at it.
Years on a page builder, then a single agent-run migration inside a disposable playground: native block theme, every page verified, legacy theme kept as one-command rollback. The migration you’re considering is the one we already ran on ourselves. Read the full story →
Ready to give your agent a real environment?
Spin up a free dev playground, hand Claude the keys, and watch a migration happen in an afternoon.
Free forever for one local site. Pro adds importing your site, multiple sites, backups, and production. See pricing