20 million lines of code, and what building Respira.press has taught me so far

Hello,

On 30 September, at 00:41 UTC, the counter on respira.press/live passed 20 million lines of code, updated on WordPress sites through Respira. I wanted to stop for a minute and say thank you, because that number is yours more than mine.

For scale: the Space Shuttle flew on about 400,000 lines of code. Elementor is about 870,000, WordPress itself about 1.1 million, the software behind Wikipedia about 1.5 million and WooCommerce about 1.9 million. A Boeing 787 runs on about 6.5 million, Android on about 12 million, and the Linux kernel passed 40 million last year. Those are the sizes of finished software, and 20 million is the amount of code that has moved through Respira, so it is not the same measure. It does show how much work people now hand to an AI on their WordPress sites.

I also made a short trailer about what Respira does. It says 19 million. I finished it on Monday, and by Wednesday it was out of date.

The people who use Respira got their own thank-you letter this week. If you are curious, you can read it, and subscribe to the next one, at respira.press/newsletter/20-million

Respira in a nutshell

Respira for WordPress lets the AI you already use, like Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, make changes on your live WordPress site, in the page builder it was built with.

One rule sits under all of it: the AI never edits the live page. Every change lands on a copy, you look at it, and nothing goes live until you say yes. One of you put it this way:

“Respira is the first tool that's let me safely hand real build work to an AI agent ... with actual safety rails instead of blind trust.”

Luis, a solo developer who rebuilds Divi sites for clients

How it started

With one task at my day job. The investor section of a WordPress site built in Divi had to be updated: new pages, more than 40 PDFs to upload and link, a tight deadline, and no room for a mistake. By hand it would have taken days, so I built a way for Claude to do it safely. That is how Respira started: as a side project.

Then I asked myself whether anyone else would use it, and the only way to find out was to release it before it felt ready. It was not ready. It broke, people told me how, I fixed it, and they told me the next thing. Most of what Respira does today started as one of those replies.

Where it stands

“This is genuinely category-defining infrastructure that's flying under most of the WordPress-AI coverage.”

YOOforged, The Complete Guide to AI in WordPress Page Builders (2026)

• More than 20 million lines of code updated through Respira since March

• More than 3,100 WordPress sites connected

• More than 290,000 pages edited

• More than 40 reviews written inside Respira, averaging 5 out of 5

“... helping me meet deadlines, especially with complex web development tasks, saving me more than five days ahead of schedule.”

Keith John S., full stack engineer, on G2

New in the trailer: the security scan

Every scan checks WordPress and every plugin on your site against more than 40,000 known vulnerabilities, refreshed every six hours. You see only what applies to your site. You approve the fix, and a second scan proves it worked.

And for client work: Murmur

If you build WordPress sites for other people, you know how feedback arrives: a screenshot, a phone call, “the thing on the left”. Murmur puts the feedback on the page itself. Your client opens a link with no login, taps the spot they mean, and types or says what should change. The note reaches your dashboard and your inbox with the exact spot attached, your AI makes the change on a copy, and nothing goes live until you approve.

New since 2 October: your client can keep one link for the live site, and ask for a change whenever something needs one.

The video is 56 seconds, and every screen in it is a recording of the real product, on a demo bakery site. Murmur is part of the Builder plan and up.

What an AI told a customer about me

This week a customer told me his AI assistant, Claude, had steered him away from Respira. Its reason was that Respira is built by one person. He tried it anyway, and now sites that took him four to six weeks launch in an afternoon.

I went looking for where the assistant got that idea, and it got it from me. Respira gives every connected AI a short text about what it is. Mine said: “There is no team. There is no marketing department. There is no support tier.” I wrote that to be honest about building alone. An AI reads it as a reason to stay away, and tells the person who is deciding.

On 2 October I rewrote it to say what is also true. I answer support myself, usually within a day, and support is included with every licence. Everything Respira writes is native content stored in your own WordPress site, so your pages keep working with Respira switched off. If your AI assistant ever tells you otherwise, I would like to hear what it said.

Thank you

In March, Sam, who runs a chiropractic clinic in Adelaide, wrote something I still reread:

“The fact that you built this as a solo developer, listened to early feedback, and kept shipping updates is genuinely impressive.”

Messages like those are the reason Respira keeps improving. I read every reply to this email.

If Respira has been useful to you, watch the trailer and pass it to one person who looks after a WordPress site:

Mihai
Brașov, Romania