Writings

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,…

By someone who now has a minor degree in Sitting Around While Things Happen Slowly My mum had a fall. This is how many British epics begin, except instead of dragons and swords, you get a phone call at 2pm and a growing sense that your day is about to be completely rewritten by forces…

I’ve worked with developers for years. Lots of them. Brilliant ones. The kind of folks who can stare at a screen for six hours, emerge blinking into daylight, and casually say something like, “Yeah, I just refactored the entire data layer,” as if they’d popped out to buy milk. And here’s the thing. Only a…

There are more than 60,000 plugins on WordPress.org plugin directory. That’s not just a number. It’s one of the most important assets in the entire web ecosystem. Each plugin represents: A solved problem A developer’s time and thinking A real-world use case, battle-tested And crucially, they’re open source. Meaning anyone can download them, study them,…

Two years ago, the idea that you could describe a piece of software in plain English and have it built for you would have sounded far-fetched. Now it is becoming normal. That is what makes vibe coding interesting. It collapses the distance between an idea and a working product. Instead of needing a developer, designer,…

There are certain moments in life that burn themselves into your memory forever. My wedding day.The birth of my three daughters.The day a man in a slightly-too-tight suit told me, with the emotional range of a fax machine, that the company where I was working had just evaporated. This is a story about the third…

At the heart of WordPress is a quiet design choice: content is stored as HTML. For years, that made perfect sense. HTML is portable, durable, and native to the web. It helped make WordPress content easy to move, easy to render, and hard to lock away in some strange proprietary format. But it was built…

Yesterday, Cloudflare announced a new CMS called emdash CMS. And they didn’t exactly tiptoe into the room. They positioned it as a kind of “spiritual successor” to WordPress, built from the ground up to fix what they see as the platform’s biggest flaws, especially around plugin security and outdated architecture. It’s a full-stack, serverless CMS,…

Since joining Automattic, one thing has stood out. There is an incredible amount of smart thinking and incredibly interesting work happening, and a lot of it stays in the building. We’re getting better at changing that. So in that spirit, here’s mine. A transparent look at what happened when I posted consistently on X for…

There’s an assumption baked into WordPress: That humans are the ones doing the building. Blocks exist because we needed a way to visually assemble pages. Drag this. Stack that. Tweak spacing. Nudge things until it looks right. It’s a design abstraction for human brains. But what happens when the thing doing the building… isn’t human?…

For centuries, writers have relied on a highly sophisticated system known as: “Write something terrible… and fix it later.” This system has powered everything from Shakespeare to your last slightly panicked email that began with “Just circling back.” It is not elegant. It is not efficient. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a plan.…

There is a particular moment, when using a tool like Lovable, where you lean back in your chair and think: “This is magic.” And to be fair, it is. You type something vague like “build me a SaaS for dog yoga instructors with recurring billing and a slightly spiritual tone,” and moments later you have……

I watched Louis Theroux: Into the Mansphere last night. If you haven’t seen it, the basic idea is that Louis Theroux wanders into rooms full of men who have somehow managed to turn being extremely online and extremely confident into a career. This is impressive. Not the confidence part. The career part. And it struck…

Over the years I’ve taught more than 5,000 beginners WordPress. Workshops, courses, WordCamps, training sessions, the lot. And over the past year I’ve also built a slightly alarming number of things with AI. Apps, tools, experiments, websites, and various bits of creative nonsense that probably should not exist, but do. That combination has made me…

(or: Aparigraha for Builders) I have accidentally developed a new software methodology, which is to build the first version like an absolute scruffy disaster, but with optimism. Not building badly.Building freely. Here’s the trick: give yourself one hour to build a rough, loose first pass of the thing. You are still aiming for good. You…