Writings

Adding an AI help bot to a WordPress product is easy now. Point it at your documentation, give it an API key, done. It'll work beautifully for about a month. Then you ship a release. A button gets renamed, a default gets retuned, a feature moves. Nothing breaks, no error appears. The bot just quietly…

Fifteen years ago I climbed Kilimanjaro. One of the strange things about altitude is that you can feel absolutely brilliant. You’re chatting, laughing, wondering why everyone made such a fuss. Then somewhere above about 4,500 metres, your brain quietly reminds you that it has veto powers. The very unsettling part is that you don’t really…

Can we please stop saying we're "harnessing AI"? It's such a weird word. You harness horses. Oxen. Maybe a particularly determined husky. You don't harness a chatbot that occasionally forgets what you asked it three sentences ago. I'm not standing in a field wrestling ChatGPT into a leather bridle before asking it to rewrite an…

England lost to Argentina. This is not ideal. In fact, for approximately 57 minutes, England appeared to be doing something highly unusual, which was winning a football match against strong opposition while looking reasonably comfortable. Then England scored. And everything changed. Most teams, when they score, become more confident. England, however, reacts the way I…

When I built Jamie's Front-End Editor for Content Teams, the idea was simple: let a client fix the words on their live site by clicking the text and typing, without ever opening the block editor or learning WordPress. No dashboard, no interface, just edit the page in front of you. The idea landed. But the…

When I was running WordPress courses, someone once copied my website almost word for word. They copied the headlines, the structure, the sales copy, the lot. They were so lazy they even copied my phone number. So I started getting calls from people trying to book courses through their website, which was both annoying and…

If you’ve ever shared a WordPress Playground link and watched someone wonder where to click next, this is for you. I’ve been experimenting with a new feature on pootleplayground.com called Guided Tours. Here’s a live example: https://pootleplayground.com/p/5ai0uv Open the link and you’ll be guided through WordPress step by step. The idea is simple: instead of…

Or: Why British Government Is Basically a Washing Machine Stuck on Spin Cycle Every few years, a politician stands at a lectern, looks serious, and announces that power is going to be devolved. This week it was Andy Burnham. The speech is usually accompanied by words like local empowerment, community leadership, decision-making closer to the…

WordPress is a brilliant publishing platform, but let’s be honest about the writing experience: the moment you click “Add New Post” you’re staring at admin bars, sidebars, settings panels, block inserters, and a dozen things competing for your attention. None of that helps you write. It helps you configure. Jamie’s Distraction-Free Writer strips all of…

Over the past few months I've been exploring a simple idea. AI has become remarkably good at generating HTML. Not just acceptable HTML, but genuinely beautiful, well-structured landing pages that would have taken me hours to build by hand. I've found myself reaching for ChatGPT to design pages more often than traditional page builders. The…

I've spent the last five years making WordPress videos. For a long time, the formula was fairly simple. Build something useful, make a good tutorial, publish it, and people would watch. I don't think that's true anymore. The problem isn't that people have stopped caring about websites. The problem is that attention has become much…

ChatGPT might be the best WordPress page builder I’ve ever used. Which sounds ridiculous. But I’m not sure it is. Last night, I rebuilt my wife’s yoga studio website using ChatGPT and WordPress. The reason it worked so well is speed of creative iteration. Inside one chat, I can work with something that feels like…

Publishing a plugin to the WordPress.org directory has a reputation for being fiddly — and that reputation is earned. You have to zip your files in exactly the right shape, hand-check a readme.txt against rules you can’t see, install developer tools to run the official “Plugin Check,” fill in a web form, and — once…

Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right. This is awkward for me. I am a huge free speech advocate. If something is legal, broadly…

The problem with AI builders is not the first demo. It is the third rebuild. I have used Lovable, Bolt, Replit and Base44 a lot. They are brilliant at getting you from idea to working prototype quickly. You describe the app, it creates the interface, wires up the logic, adds authentication, connects a database, and…

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…