I love WordPress — but I hate the part of WordPress development where you’re doing the same work again and again, just with a different design and a different client.
As an agency developer, custom blocks are the sweet spot: fast websites, clean markup, flexible content for clients, and the ability to build a reusable library of components over time.
But the reality of building them, especially at agency volume, is… brutal.
The workflow that finally broke me
A typical block build used to look like this:
A designer hands over a layout, and the first job is translating design into data — identifying every editable piece and deciding what should be a field, what should be repeatable, what should be optional, and what should be locked.
Then the manual grind starts:
You create the field group.
You build out the repeater logic.
You scaffold the block.
You wire up the render template.
You write the code to safely output every field.
You add conditional logic so the block doesn’t fall over when content is missing.
And if the design needs interactions… you build the custom JS too.
None of that is “hard” — it’s just slow, repetitive, and easy to get wrong when you’re doing it under time pressure for multiple clients.
And the developer flow made it worse.
The tedious part wasn’t the code — it was the loop
Even with AI helping locally, the loop still looked like:
Generate something → paste it in → run it locally → refresh → check → tweak → repeat…
…and you’re doing that while juggling different themes, different client standards, different naming conventions, and different expectations around what “editable” means.
It wasn’t the complexity that hurt. It was the context switching.
And when you’re an agency, context switching is expensive — it’s what turns a “quick block” into a half-day.
SurgeBlocks started as a tool to remove the friction
SurgeBlocks began as a simple idea:
“What if building ACF blocks didn’t require rebuilding the same scaffolding every time?”
“What if the whole process lived where the work actually ends up — inside WordPress?”
Now, instead of translating designs into fields and scaffolding everything manually, SurgeBlocks lets you:
- Describe a block in plain English (or upload a screenshot)
- Generate the structure and code right inside the WordPress dashboard
- Get previews, linting, PHP parsing, and the ability to send errors back to AI
- See exactly what changed with change summaries
- And package it all up so it can be reused across websites
Built for agency reality
SurgeBlocks is not trying to be another page builder.
It’s built for the reality of agency work:
- You need to move fast, but you can’t ship chaos.
- You need flexibility, but you can’t lock clients into something proprietary.
- You need reuse, because building the same “pricing table” from scratch on every project is a waste of life.
That’s why SurgeBlocks stays ACF-first and developer-controlled.
You’re not locked into SurgeBlocks output. You own it. You can export it. You can reuse it. You can maintain it like any other production code.
What changed after building it
The biggest shift wasn’t “AI writes code.”
It was this:
The entire workflow became one continuous flow inside WordPress.
No more stitching together a process across local tools, pasted snippets, and manual checks.
No more rebuilding the same foundations for every client site.
No more “I’ll just scaffold it quickly” turning into hours of setup.
SurgeBlocks streamlines the boring parts so developers can focus on what actually matters:
structure, quality, performance, and shipping.
Why I’m building SurgeBlocks
Because WordPress is still the best platform for a huge portion of the web — and it deserves developer tools that feel modern.
SurgeBlocks exists to make custom ACF block development:
- faster,
- safer,
- more reusable,
- and far less tedious.
If you’ve ever built the same block twice, you already understand why this exists.
Nicholas Katsambiris
Founder SurgeWP