Writings

If you are a non-technical but want to build stuff in WordPress with AI, bookmark this. This is the cheat sheet I wish I had when I started vibe coding. The trick is simple: Know what to ask AI to use. After reading this, you’ll know when to ask for blocks, plugins, the REST API,…

I had a slightly crazy idea. What if we stopped fighting the fact that AI is extremely good at creating HTML and instead made it easier for normal humans to edit it safely inside WordPress? So I built a tiny plugin called Vibe Code that makes raw HTML much easier to live with inside WordPress.…

I used to read The Tiger Who Came to Tea to my daughters. A tiger turns up unexpectedly and consumes absolutely everything. The food. The drinks. The water. Daddy’s beer. No restraint whatsoever. Increasingly, I think we are the tiger. Right now, many of us are absolutely gorging ourselves on AI. “Analyse this.” “Build me…

Here’s my simple guide to vibe coding in WordPress for non-techies. You do not need to become a developer. You do not need to understand complicated code. But there are a handful of ideas worth understanding before you start. Not because you need to become technical. Because understanding these ideas will dramatically improve the results…

Science fiction writer William Gibson once said: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” You can see this happening with websites right now. While many businesses are still proudly announcing they have “refreshed the homepage,” something much bigger is happening underneath. I’ve been deep diving, experimenting, and researching this for a while…

PootleWriter is a frictionless, always-on writing app for WordPress. Instead of logging into wp-admin every time you want to write, edit, or publish something, you can open PootleWriter and start creating straight away. No dashboard clutter. No hunting through menus. Just open the app and write. It connects directly to your WordPress site, so your…

A few folks asked me how Tomorrow Times agents work, so here’s a look under the hood. Tomorrow Times runs on serverless edge functions: small TypeScript programs that wake up, do one job, and disappear again. There is no server running 24/7. Instead, five agents take turns on a schedule, all connected through a shared…

Every morning at 8am, Telegram sends me five draft prediction cards for Tomorrow Times. I didn’t pick the stories. I didn’t write the questions. I didn’t commission the illustrations. AI agents did it while I slept. While I’m asleep, a small invisible newsroom is quietly working in the background. One agent scans the news. Another…

What If the Interface Is the Last Thing We Build? I’ve been building an agent for Tomorrow Times. Its job is surprisingly broad and powerful. Behind the scenes, I’m continuously shaping what it does, tweaking workflows, refining behaviour, and slowly teaching it how I think about editorial decisions. It helps shape stories, generate prediction questions,…

This sounds manipulative. It is not. Mostly. It is really about the psychology of groups, and why getting humans to move in the same direction is so hard. I was reminded of this because we are not going cycling this year. For years, a group of us have gone on cycling trips. They worked because…

Loveable has one simple promise: Describe what you want to build, and it helps you build it. That works for beginners because they don’t need to understand code. It works for non-technical founders because they can finally make the thing in their head. It works for marketers because they can spin up campaigns, tools, and…

I didn’t set out to build a website. I set out to build a place to dump stuff. You know the feeling. A link you want to remember. A screenshot you took at 1am. A half-formed thought. A PDF someone sent you. A tweet that made you laugh. Normally these things get scattered across bookmarks,…

I sat down this week to count how many things I’ve built with AI over the last couple of years. I assumed it would be around fifteen. Maybe twenty if I was being generous and included things that exist only on my laptop and possibly in my imagination. It is over fifty. Fifty apps, plugins,…

I’ve trained over 5,000 folks on WordPress, face to face. And one thing you learn very quickly is that the hard bit is not usually intelligence. It’s momentum. People get stuck because they don’t know where to begin, what to click, or whether they’ve already broken something beyond repair. So I’ve been thinking about how…

Try this thought experiment. Every time you ask AI to write, read, summarise, rewrite, check, explain, translate, or think through something, a meter starts running. Not metaphorically. Literally. AI companies don’t charge per question. They charge per token. A token is just a small chunk of text. Roughly: 1 token ≈ ¾ of a word…

The other morning, over breakfast, I made what I believed was a fairly harmless observation: that capitalism might, on balance, be a good thing. This came shortly after I had spent 26 hours in NHS A&E with my mum, inside a system that felt confusing, broken, and, at times, properly scary. So I felt, contextually,…

There is a possible future in which the AI boom does not end with a robot butler bringing us tea. It ends because somebody asks: “Wait. Why is this worth a trillion dollars?” OpenAI and Anthropic are now discussed less like companies and more like weather systems. Their valuations roll across the financial sky in…

If you’ve ever asked AI to design something and thought “that’s not quite my style”, you’ve already run into the problem DESIGN.md is trying to solve. AI is getting very good at building things. What it’s still not great at is being consistent. That’s where this comes in. What is DESIGN.md? DESIGN.md is a simple…

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,…