WordPress

For most of its life, WordPress has been thought of as a content management system. A place to write posts. Upload images. Publish pages. A place where humans create things. But something fundamental is shifting. We are entering a world where software doesn’t just display content. It uses it. It interacts with it. It builds…

Or: Why Humans Are Absolutely Certain Everything Is About to End (Again) Human beings have many wonderful qualities. We invented sandwiches. We domesticated dogs. We created the ability to watch a man eat 14 cheeseburgers on YouTube while we ourselves eat a salad and feel morally superior. But perhaps our greatest achievement is this: We…

For 20 years, WordPress has been moving further away from code. AI may be the moment the interface disappears completely. Most people using WordPress today have never seen the full arc of how we got here. If you line it up, the evolution of editing looks something like this: HTML → TinyMCE → Shortcodes →…

You may have heard people talking about “MCP” or “WebMCP” in the same breath as AI, WordPress, or tools like Claude. It can sound technical. It is not. Here is the simple version. First, what problem is it solving? AI tools are very good at writing text. But they are usually trapped inside a chat…

I saw a post recently claiming AI will make platforms like WordPress obsolete. It was probably designed to spark outrage. It worked. But after working hands-on with AI-powered tools every single day, I think that take misses something fundamental about how the web actually works. Building Is the Easy Part AI has made building a…

For fifteen years I’ve wanted to build a prediction market meets satirical newspaper. A place where readers could vote on what happens next in the news, wrapped in the irreverent tone of a Private Eye or The Onion. Last weekend, using AI, I built the whole thing. Not a prototype. A working app with AI-generated…

I am currently building a tutorial on how to create a Linktree style page using WordPress. This is practical, useful, and will almost certainly help people. Halfway through recording it, a thought arrived uninvited and refused to leave. Why does this need to exist at all? Linktree is clever in the same way that putting…

On the way back from Boston yesterday, unable to sleep because the small child behind me kept kicking my chair with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated mule, I watched the brilliant Benedict Evans give one of his presentations about where AI is heading. It was supposed to help me relax. Instead it felt like someone…

Every year, usually after breaking something I didn’t mean to, I like to remind myself (and anyone within tweeting distance) that HTML is semantically awful — by design. HTML is like that old friend who can’t tell a story without five tangents, two unrelated photos, and a Wikipedia link from 2007. And yet somehow, you…

Maybe creativity isn’t about talent, it’s about learning to see and listen. This week, someone said to me, “I’m just not a creative person.” I don’t think that’s true. I get it though. We’ve been taught to think creativity is a gift, something only a few lucky people are born with. But maybe it’s not…

TL;DR I built six fully working apps: PootleWriter, PootlePhotos, PootlePlayground, PootleSites, PootleBooks, and PootleNoodle – each in less than a day. A few years ago, they would have required a full dev team, months of work, and up to £120,000. Thanks to AI-assisted “vibe coding,” browser APIs, and WordPress Playground, what once felt like enterprise…