There’s a certain rhythm to learning something new in the tech. It usually involves an idea, a burst of initial enthusiasm, and then a quick, humbling descent into a rabbit hole of browser tabs, outdated forum posts, and YouTube tutorials filmed in 480p with questionable background music. Last week, I braced myself for that very journey.
My goal was simple, yet uncharted for me: host a WordPress site on Google Cloud Run, connected to a proper Cloud SQL database and make it work. My technical prowess is best described as ‘enthusiastic but prone to spectacular detours’, so this was a trek into the unknown.
Instead of beginning the usual digital rabbit hole, I kept my Google AI Studio tab open and started a conversation with Gemini 2.5 Pro.
My request was simple: “I want to deploy WordPress on Cloud Run, so I can manage it properly. I have never done this. Walk me through it, step by step.”
What followed was… remarkable. It was less like consulting a search engine and more like having an impossibly patient, senior engineer sitting next to me.
- When I didn’t know how to create a container, it explained the concept and provided the exact Dockerfile I needed.
- When I was confused about connecting to the Cloud SQL server, it generated the code snippets and the Cloud Shell commands, explaining why each flag and variable was necessary.
- I half-expected it to sigh audibly (can an AI sigh?) at my fifth consecutive basic question about networking permissions, but it just calmly provided the next correct step.
I will admit, old habits die hard. I did open one YouTube video out of sheer muscle memory and it wasn’t particularly helpful. I closed the tab and went back to my AI companion.
In the end, it was a resounding success. The site was up. The database was connected. I had wrestled the beast and, with significant help, won.
My first instinct, born from years of reading and writing online, was to document the process. “How to Deploy WordPress on Cloud Run from Source!” would be the title. I’d include all the code, the screenshots, the hard-won nuggets of wisdom.
And then I stopped.
Why would I write that? The only resource I truly needed to succeed was the Gemini 2.5 Pro. My “how-to” guide would be obsolete tomorrow.
Unless you are discovering something fundamentally new, charting territory no one has ever seen, is the long-form “how-to” guide becoming a beautiful relic? It feels redundant to publish a set of instructions when the ultimate instruction manual is a tool that can generate a personalized guide for you, in real-time.
Maybe it’s less about providing the map, and more about showing the picture of the destination. I’ll just share what I, a tech amateur, was able to accomplish.
With the help of my AI partner, I was able to:
- Launch a WordPress website in Google Cloud Run from scratch. A task that seemed like a mountain a week ago became a series of manageable hills.
- “Vibe code” a WordPress theme. Gemini was an excellent co-pilot for this, provided end-to-end code from scratch with my prompt.
- Actually learn. I wasn’t just copying and pasting. I learned how to create containers, provision a SQL server, and navigate Cloud Shell with a practice that comes from doing, failing, and being gently corrected.
Tools of the trade:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro
- Google AI Studio