Writings
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Wave One Went to Lovable. Wave Two Might Be a Different Story.
That FT chart was doing the rounds last week. New websites up 35%. New iOS apps up nearly 50%. GitHub code output surging. I work at Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com. So when I saw it, I dug into the source data. The FT chart shows the explosion. It doesn’t show who’s behind it. The…
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How to Master a Skill Without Learning It
I recently bought an analogue synthesizer, specifically a Korg Monologue, which is a sentence that makes me sound much cooler and more musically competent than I actually am. I bought it because I have a band called Shenanigans, and I have decided, entirely on my own and without informing the other members, that we are…
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WordPress Isn’t Just a CMS Anymore. It’s Becoming the Capability Layer of the Open Web
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…
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Stop Publishing Markdown for AI. Do This Instead.
I love Markdown. I love it so much that I even built a frictionless writer for WordPress called PootleWriter that uses Markdown (and that this article was written with). The entire point was to remove friction between thought and publication. No buttons. No clutter. Just you and the words. Which is why I feel qualified…
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APOCALOPTIMIST
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…
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The WordPress Interface Is Disappearing: What Comes After Gutenberg?
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 →…
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WebMCP for Non-Techies (A Simple Explanation)
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…
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AI Isn’t Replacing WordPress. It’s Making It More Important.
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…
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I Am Failing My Children (And I Work in Tech, So I Can See It Coming)
I have three daughters, Meg, Lily and Hetty. They are smart. Funny. Kind. Morally serious in the way only young people can be when they still believe adults are supposed to have answers. Unfortunately, one of the adults in charge is me. And I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I work in software.…
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The play that goes wrong has gone horribly wrong
I was in London yesterday for a morning show at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, and on a bit of a whim my wife and I decided to grab tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong later that evening. I first saw it when it opened years ago, so I was curious to see how it…
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Will AI Agents Make WordPress Stronger or Invisible?
There’s a compelling idea emerging: make WordPress fully agent-friendly. Instead of competing with OpenAI or Anthropic on AI models, WordPress becomes the platform AI agents operate on. Technically, that’s smart. If agents are going to build sites, manage content, and handle workflows, WordPress should absolutely be compatible with them. But this is more than a…
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Things That Are Easy, Except When They’re Not
One of the weirder truths of life is that difficulty is wildly uneven. At school, I had a friend who completely fell apart before an inter-class rugby match. Not a final. Not a big deal. Just a muddy field and a whistle. He was pale, shaking, and genuinely distressed. This baffled me. I played county…
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Why Remotion Is Such a Big Deal (Explained for Non-Techies)
Yesterday I dug into Remotion and built my first bit of motion graphics. My three-prompt effort is… rough 😅👇 But it instantly showed me the massive potential of combining Remotion’s approach with AI. I wrote a short, non-techy explainer on why this feels like a big deal 👇 Most video tools work like this: You…
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I’ve dreamed of building this for 15 years. AI let me do it in a weekend.
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…
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How Tomorrow Times Was Built: A 15-Year Idea, One Weekend Side Project
Fifteen years ago, I had an idea. When you watch the news or read a story, the unspoken question is almost always the same: what happens next? What if there was a place where you could make quick predictions on the news and see how good you really are at forecasting the future? Back then,…
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Once A Year, I Get To Be Scrooge
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…
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Yesterday, Something Unique Happened in WordPress
Yesterday I watched a WordPress plugin bounce between creators like it was competing in some kind of WordPress relay race. Idea, prototype, remix, accessibility audit, polished final version. All in a day. It felt like a preview of a future where collaboration is effortless and AI tools turbocharge the whole process. It began when I…
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Why I’m Now Convinced AI Won’t Kill WordPress
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…
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My Annual Reminder That HTML Is Semantically Awful — By Design
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…
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My Shower Has Better Ideas Than I Do
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…