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Content note: This post includes a brief mention of a suicide attempt. There’s a version of me that most people know. The builder. Twenty years of shipping software, doing consulting, working on open source projects. Calm, capable, in control. That version is real. But it’s not the whole story. And the distance between what I’ve been showing and what’s actually there has shaped more of my life than I’ve ever talked about.
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Every week there’s a new demo of someone building a full app in twenty minutes with AI. A SaaS scaffold. A working prototype. A thing that would have taken a team a sprint, conjured from a prompt and a conversation. It’s impressive. It’s real. And it’s almost entirely beside the point. I’ve been building software for over twenty years. I’ve been building with AI agents for a while now. And the thing that strikes me most isn’t how much code AI can produce. It’s how little that production matters compared to the decisions it can’t make for you. The building…
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I had a blog post ready to publish this week. A post about the thing I’ve been building. The product behind all the thinking and writing I’ve been doing lately. It was done. Reviewed. Scheduled. I pulled it. When I published my post about the silence in the WordPress ecosystem last week, I braced for pushback. I’d spent months going back and forth on whether to write it at all. The thoughts had been there for years. The courage to put them out there had not. What happened instead caught me off guard. People didn’t push back. They leaned in. DMs from…
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Over the past year and a half, the WordPress ecosystem has been consumed by the dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. The legal battles, the public confrontations, the hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields. I’ve written about these events as they unfolded. A lot of people have. A lot of opinions have been shared, from all sides. Most of that conversation has focused on the people involved. On who said what, who was right, who went too far. And while those conversations have their place, they’ve been a distraction from something more fundamental. A structural problem that was there long…
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I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Months. Probably even longer. The reason I haven’t is, ironically, the exact thing I want to write about. There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.
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There’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now. It’s not a technical question, even though it affects almost every technical decision I make. At what point does convenience stop being a benefit and start being a liability? I’ve been building software for well over twenty years now. Most of that time, I’ve spent in and around the WordPress ecosystem. I was one of the first developers hired onto the WooCommerce team, back when we were still figuring out if eCommerce on WordPress was even a good idea. I’ve seen the ecosystem grow from a…
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I use multiple AI coding tools. Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode. They each give access to different models, and I switch between them depending on what I need. I want them all to follow the same project instructions. That shouldn’t be complicated. It is. AGENTS.md was supposed to fix this. One Markdown file, no special syntax, every tool reads it. And for the main instructions file, it mostly works. But modern AI coding tools have moved beyond a single file. They support rules, commands, reusable workflows. And every single tool invented its own directory structure for those. None of them interchangeable.…
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There’s a narrative that keeps coming up in discussions about AI: that it’s all built on theft. That the models powering Claude, Cursor and others were trained on open source code without permission. That developers never consented to having their work scraped and fed into these systems. I get it. And yes, there’s something uncomfortable about the fact that nobody asked. But here’s the thing: we’ve been here before. When search engines started indexing the web, they didn’t ask permission from every website owner. When Google scanned millions of books, publishers and authors sued. When hip-hop artists began sampling existing…
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There’s an interesting contradiction in how we talk about AI. There’s panic on one side. AI is coming for our jobs. Developers will be obsolete. The robots are taking over. On the other side: people casually trying to get AI to generate a thousand startup ideas, register the domains, build landing pages, and deploy them. All in one command. As if building something valuable is just a matter of stringing together the right prompts. We’re clearly not at “AI takes over” yet. What we are at is a weird in-between where the loudest voices are either predicting doom or treating…
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The role of software developers is changing. Not gradually, not theoretically. But right now. And it’s happening faster than most of us expected. For years, our value was in writing code. Understanding syntax, knowing the quirks of languages and frameworks, translating requirements into working software. That’s shifting. The value is moving from writing syntax to guiding systems: understanding what to build, evaluating whether AI got it right and knowing when it didn’t. We’re becoming architects and reviewers. The code still needs human judgment. Just less human keystrokes. This reminds me of the Industrial Revolution. People dismissed early machines as inferior…