Bricks MCP vs Novamira (The Best AI Abilities?)

Bricks 2.4 releases all kinds of new features and one of those standout features is going to be the new Bricks AI abilities for MCP clients like Cloud Code and CodeX. Now, I've been using Nova Mira Pro on all my Bricks websites, but this got me thinking, do I still need to use Nova Mira? Let's take a look at both of them and figure this out. Let's start by checking out the new Bricks AI abilities and skills. And at the time of recording this, we have Bricks 2.4 a beta 3. In the latest a beta release, they did improve the AI abilities, making them faster and more efficient, and adding in more abilities. And it is still in beta, so keep that in mind. This is for testing, not for production websites. After looking at the beta releases, you can see that they continuously improve the AI abilities, so I do expect this to be a lot better once the stable version is released. Once you have 2.4 installed, we are going to see a new option here saying AI. And this is where we are going to connect our MCP server and connect everything to our AI agents like Cloud Code and CodeX. We could also see our abilities and we can install our Bricks skills. I'm going to go through all of these, show you how to set it up and connect it all, but first, I want to help make sense of all of this because this is not an MCP. Let me explain. In case if you are new to MCPs inside of WordPress. This new release is a set of abilities and skills that connect to an MCP. And back here you can see the steps required. The first step is to set up and connect an MCP server. Let me break this down really quickly just to help make sense of all of this and how MCPs work inside of WordPress. You see, WordPress has this thing called WordPress Abilities API and this is inside of the core of WordPress. The Abilities API connects to an MCP server and allows an AI agent to speak to your website and understand your website through abilities. But, in order to open this up, we need an MCP server. And this is where the WordPress MCP adapter comes in. This turns the abilities registry into an MCP server. And back here in the setup, it's going to show you to install the WordPress MCP adapter. And if we look at it on GitHub, this is the official plugin by WordPress that turns your website into an MCP server. Once we have that MCP server activated, then we could connect the Brix AI abilities. This also works for other MCPs and other set of abilities like what we have inside of Fluent Cart and many other tools now. Lots of tools are releasing MCPs or abilities that connect to MCPs. Here's the back end of my website. And I am using Nova Mira Pro. You can see I have a bunch of Brix abilities already built in here because this is the pro version. But, then I also have abilities for Fluent Cart and Fluent CRM. Now, the way this works inside of Fluent is that in Fluent, we have the Fluent Hub. And the Fluent Hub actually is an MCP server. But, let's hold off on this and go back here to help make sense of how Nova Mira works and to see if we even need something like this anymore if we're using the Brix abilities. The way Nova Mira works is it uses a WordPress MCP adapter. And what this means is it is using this WordPress adapter by WordPress but adding its own features and abilities on top of this. So, when we install Nova Mira, we are installing the WordPress MCP adapter just with more added on top of it. Going back over to my website and looking at the Fluent Cart and Fluent CRM abilities we have here, well, Fluent actually works the same way with the Fluent Hub. The Fluent Hub, if we were to install that, it bundles up the MCP adapter by WordPress and adds its own abilities and features on top of it. So, this is how the whole MCP inside of WordPress works. We have the abilities API, and then we have the WordPress MCP adapter, and then we have other tools like Nova Mira, even Fluent, and many others as well, just using the WordPress MCP adapter and then adding their own features on top of it. Now, what all of this means is we have options. The option is we could use the WordPress MCP adapter and just use it as a standalone, keeping only our Bricks abilities set up through the MCP. That's all we have is what we are getting with Bricks. Now, with Bricks, we are getting a lot of abilities. As of this time, with the beta 3, we have 170 abilities. I believe it was 142 abilities. I ran some tests last week while it was inside of beta 2. We'll come back to these test results, but those are a lot of abilities. And if we go back here to my site right here with Nova Mira Pro, well, we have 49 abilities. But, with Nova Mira and Nova Mira Pro, we get a lot more that comes with it. For example, on the Nova Mira Pro, we are going to get more abilities like I use SEO Press, so it is going to pull up some SEO Press abilities that are by Nova Mira Pro. Now, taking a look at Nova Mira Pro, we can see that it adds abilities for many different page builders. So, since I'm using Bricks, it's automatically going to apply the Bricks abilities, but it would do the same with any of the others like Elements or Divi and any of the rest. It's going to do the same with a set of themes, with a set of blocks, with WooCommerce, some forms, and then some other plugins. And what this does is it uses the abilities to speak to my AI agent. Right now, I'm using Claude Code and Codex. It'll speak to it and it'll allow the AI agent to understand the website a lot better. Basically, it won't be stumbling around blind. It is given clear directions on what it could do and how to do it. Now, back over to the test cuz I ran a few of them. Now, this is just a test with Claude Code and I ran several and got a lot of different results. Nothing was exactly the same every time, especially when I was testing things like token usage. But, what I found was pretty interesting. And one of them was how the overlapping abilities actually use less characters inside of the native Bricks' abilities, which is actually a really good thing. Cuz basically, this means less context. And the more straightforward, clear context the AI agent is given, that means it is giving it less to think about and less room for error, basically. So, this is actually pretty good. But, there is something to consider as well, and that is a token usage. But, honestly, after running the test and after seeing the latest updates and just the fact that it's in beta and that Bricks is working on improving and making it faster and more efficient, we're going to be seeing Bricks making things run more efficiently, which means the token usages are they're going to change. So, I don't want to go on that right now. But, what I do want to go on are going to be the abilities. Because if we go back here, we have 170 abilities, and these are created from Bricks, who knows their product better than anybody else. And the abilities that are given are very straightforward, very direct. Hands down, you're not going to beat something that is built natively from bricks, especially something that is as thorough and just as complete, especially being that this is only in beta and we're already into this at 170 abilities. Let's go ahead and connect all of this and see how to set it all up. We could go and install the WordPress MCP adapter. That's totally fine, but there will be limitations. We won't have all the abilities, the extra abilities that Nova Mira will bring in. So, what I'm going to do first is just activate the free version of Nova Mira. Let's go ahead and activate this and connect it really quickly. Just going to go over to our configuration, turn on AI abilities, save the settings. I am going to select on application password, select it on Claude code, and then I'm going to copy and paste in this prompt. I already have my Claude code session set up. The folder is connected to my local website. I am going to turn this on a low effort. I found that keeping the effort on low or even like dropping it from Opus to Sonnet just makes a connection faster and easier, prevents Claude from doing that overthinking thing where it just wants to do too much work for something simple. And that took just 1 minute, super easy to do. Let's go ahead and close this down and then restart it in order for Claude to be able to read the server. And now that I'm restarting it, I'm going to just tell Claude, "Hey, let's restart it, check the connection to the MCP server." And that took 15 seconds. Okay, everything is connected and we're good. Let's go back over to our site now and let's refresh it. Go over to our abilities hub, and now we can see already the Nova Mira abilities are here. Now, if I were to activate the pro version, we're going to see the bricks abilities come up. But before we activate the pro version, let's go back over to our bricks AI abilities and set those up. First thing we got to do is enable. And now for the MCP server connection, we already have an MCP server. It is working. So, we could continue moving forward. Let's go over here and give it a credential name. I'm going to call this bricks AI. Let's generate the password. And you definitely don't want to share that password. It's going to be deleted right after you see this or right before you see this video. Okay, and you can see we already have our Nova mirror here. It is picking that up. Let's go ahead and connect it and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to go to the prompt and we're going to copy it. Let's go back over to our AI agent. I'm going to keep it on low and let's send that over, let it do its thing. While it is doing that, let's take a look to contest a connection. We're going to have the test and okay, the MCP server config. Everything else is there, but we need to get this MCP configured. So, this should take care of that and this took about a minute and a half to load and not that many tokens, 1.7 thousand tokens. And we can see here that it is showing 160 bricks abilities that are live at this endpoint. Now, we need to do the same thing. We have to close down our session and restart everything. So, I'm going to close my app, force close it and restart it. And to restart it, I'm just going to ask Claude to restart the session, test MCP connection and to list all of the active abilities. And there we go. That took less than two minutes. And we can see here, it is showing active 165 bricks abilities. I like to run tests like this because it tells me what can my AI agent read. So, let's go back now and take a look inside of our site. I'm going to refresh and after refreshing it still shows the MCP server is not configured. But, this might be because it's still in beta because it says here to start a new AI chat and ask it to list the available bricks abilities, which it was able to do. So, we're going to continue forward. I believe that it could read it, but now we need to install the skills and this is pretty dope and awesome of bricks that it included this making it super easy. Let's go ahead and copy this prompt, take it over to our Claude code, paste that in, and just send it. While it is loading those skills and getting it all ready, I am going to grab this prompt right here, which is a verify it all works. So, let's grab that. And that took about a minute and a half. Let me go ahead and restart the session, force close it, and let's give it that test prompt. In fact, I am going to move this over to Sonnet low just to go even a bit faster with less tokens. And you can see that took like 8 seconds to to start going off. Okay, so we can see the skill list is currently loaded inside of the client. We are good. So, everything now is connected. We have all of our abilities and what we could do with our abilities is we could turn them on or off. We could use the ones that we want to use. Now, you will see some that are labeled destructive. What this means is we are given the ability to our AI agent to do things on our website that require us to be very careful. One of those things is going to be execute PHP. Now, this is what allows Claude to go in and start writing PHP. It is something that we need in order for it to work on our website and actually do things on our website. So, if you do see the destructive, it doesn't mean like, "Hey, don't use this." It just means be very careful while you are using it because these are the things that if we tell Claude, "Hey, remove all the breakpoints and let's just keep everything at desktop." It'll use this ability and delete all of your breakpoints. It could delete all the styles from it, which, you know, will be a massive headache for you to fix later on. Delete post, you know, we got to be careful with those kind of things. So, take time to actually go through this and look at what we are giving Claude and our AI agents the abilities to do on our website. Now, let's jump back over to Nova Mira to our abilities of. And this is where things get interesting with Nova Mira and kind of bringing everything to full circle. Bricks versus the Nova Mira abilities. I'm going to say abilities instead of MCP. Which one to use? Well, inside of Nova Mira free, we are getting that default WordPress MCP adapter plus more. And this is in the free version. And we are also getting an overview of all of the abilities, even from other sources that are being added to our website. So, we're able to see everything in one place. We're able to load more skills. We're able to give more context. There's still a lot more we could do in the free version. And then, if we were going to use the pro version, it is going to give us more abilities, including 49 Bricks Builder's abilities. Now, when it comes to the Nova Mira Bricks abilities versus the default or native Bricks abilities, I mean, I think it is safe to assume that Bricks, the team behind Bricks, that knows our product better than anyone else, is going to come with better results for us because they This is their product. I mean, we already see 170 very straightforward abilities versus what we see inside of Nova Mira. But still, because of everything else Nova Mira brings to me, this sounds like the best option using both and just going in and turning off the bricks abilities here. Let's disable them. And now with the bricks abilities in Nova Mira by Nova Mira disabled, we are able to get the best of both worlds. We are able to use the default native bricks abilities by the bricks team. It is not going to conflict with them inside of Nova Mira and in fact, it all works with Nova Mira. Nova Mira is going to bring us the MCP adapter and it's going to give us some extra features alongside of it. And I did run tests inside of Nova Mira. Once you disable some of the abilities like I have all of them disabled right here, your Claude or Codex isn't going to read them. They're going to skip right by them and we're still going to be able to use all of these abilities. And this is how I see myself using this bricks abilities and MCP workflow inside of WordPress on my bricks websites once this gets out of beta. Well, I do hope you found this very helpful and if you have any questions, definitely drop them in the comments and also let us know what are you using? Are you already using the new bricks abilities and how is that going for you? I definitely want to hear from you and I know everybody else does as well. So, let us know in those comments. Thank you for watching and if you did enjoy this and want to learn more, then definitely do that good YouTube stuff. You know the deal. Like and subscribe. And I'll be back with more. Thank you for watching.