A slightly crazy experiment is unfolding inside Automattic right now.
For one month, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has asked many folks across product, engineering, and design to step away from normal structures, pair up, build fast, and ship work they’re willing to put their name on.
The project can be almost anything: a wild idea, a long-standing frustration, an internal tool, or something boring-but-critical that never quite gets prioritised.
On paper, that sounds like a shipping experiment.
But I think it’s doing something much more interesting.
It’s changing the culture in real time.
The obvious bit: a burst of building
Unsurprisingly, people are making things. Lots of them.
You’re seeing experiments like:
- Blockless versions of WordPress
- Radically simplified editing experiences
- Live blogs that update in real time
- New ways to think about content types
- Early agent-driven workflows using CLI and Claude Code
…and dozens of other ideas that would normally sit in a backlog, waiting for the right moment.
Some are polished. Some are rough.
But that’s not the most interesting thing I see happening.
The less obvious bit: people are learning fast
The real shift isn’t the output.
It’s what’s happening to the people doing the work.
This month forces a very specific behaviour: build with modern AI tools, and do it quickly.
Not talk about them. Not plan around them. Not add them into a roadmap six months from now.
Use them. Now.
And when you do that, something clicks.
The loop between idea and execution collapses.
What used to take days takes hours. What used to take weeks takes an afternoon.
You can almost see the moment it happens:
“I wonder if this is possible…”
becomes
“Oh. I can just do it.”
That shift is everything.
A jolt to the system
The best way to describe it is this:
It feels like electricity has been injected into the veins of the business.
People are:
- Shipping things they would previously have parked as “too complex”
- Prototyping ideas without asking for permission
- Sharing work earlier, rougher, and more openly
- Talking about what they’re discovering, not just what they’ve finished
There’s more energy.
More momentum.
And more belief.
The legacy won’t be the things we build
It’s tempting to judge a month like this by output.
How many projects shipped? Which ones stuck? What made it into production?
That’s the wrong lens in my opinion.
The real legacy of this experiment won’t be a handful of features.
It will be a mindset shift.
A collective realisation that:
- the tools have changed
- the speed has changed
- and individuals have far more agency than they thought
Once that clicks, it’s very hard to go back.
You can see it in the open
There’s another signal that matters.
People are sharing more.
Posting demos. Writing updates. Talking about what they’ve figured out. Showing half-finished things without waiting for them to be perfect.
There’s a quiet excitement to it.
Not forced. Not performative.
Just:
“Look what I just managed to do.”
That’s hard to create artificially.
Why this works
Step back, and the shape of the experiment becomes clear.
Give people:
- time
- permission
- smaller teams
- and tools that dramatically compress build time
…and you don’t just get output.
You get a change in behaviour.
And behaviour change, at this scale, is far more valuable than any single feature.
What happens next
I don’t know which of these projects will survive the month.
Some will become products. Some will become features. Some will vanish.
But I suspect the bigger thing will stick.
A lot of people are discovering, by actually building, that they can move faster than they thought.
That feels like the point.
Leave a Reply