Posts

Insights, thoughts, and tips on product, design, and development. Pick a topic and start exploring.

All AdviceAIAnnual ReviewBlocksDesignDevelopmentGearGutenbergIdeasNewsletterPatternsProductProductivityThemesTravelWordPress

  • Just Another CMS

    You’ve heard about EmDash, Cloudflare’s “spiritual successor to WordPress.” It’s an interesting demo with some good ideas. But a successor to WordPress? Not quite.

    Why WordPress

    WordPress didn’t reach 42.5% of the web by being insecure. It got there because an open ecosystem creates more value than a closed one.

    The highlight feature of EmDash is its sandboxed plugin model, where plugins run in isolated environments. But that sandboxing only works on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. You can host EmDash elsewhere, but the security model doesn’t come with you.

    WordPress runs anywhere: a shared host, a managed provider, your own server. Whether you’re running your blog, a business, WhiteHouse.gov, or streaming Artemis II’s lunar flyby on NASA.gov to millions of people, WordPress is the CMS with proven scalability.

    Sure, it’s a dinosaur. But that’s not an insult.

    WordPress has 23 years of plugins, themes, documentation, and proven patterns. If you need a CMS, why would you run one that launched days ago, or even years ago?

    What we can learn from EmDash

    WordPress has agent skills, but the EmDash skills are more opinionated and workflow-focused. I particularly like the push for migrating WordPress plugins and themes. We can learn from these to progress Data Liberation further, adding more import paths from other sites and applications into WordPress.

    EmDash also ships a content modeling UI with custom fields and content types built into the admin. WordPress can do all of this with the Fields API, and AI is good at setting it up in code. But there’s no core UI for managing content types visually.

    We’ve explored a similar concept, but EmDash’s take is simpler, and that’s a gap worth closing.

    More broadly, WordPress needs a more opinionated developer experience. WP-CLI, Studio, Studio CLI, WP AI Client, and MCP Adapter are solid foundations, but there’s not yet a clear starting point that ties the technicalities of WordPress together.

    That ambiguity is fine for experienced developers who already know their way around, but it can be a high wall for our agents.

    EmDash made all those choices upfront because it could. WordPress has to get there by converging on the concepts that have built up over time. A proper front door.

    The actual competition

    Companies will keep launching CMS competitors aimed at WordPress’s market share. But the more interesting trend isn’t another new CMS.

    For the first time since W3Techs started tracking historical yearly trends, sites built without any CMS is trending up.

    I don’t expect a wave of people switching from WordPress to EmDash. But I am curious about the people who think they don’t need a CMS at all because they can vibe-code a static site in an afternoon.

    Even so, WordPress has been democratizing publishing for 23 years and will keep doing so for many more.

    New projects like EmDash are a reminder that complexity has a cost. When you start from scratch, simplicity comes easy. WordPress has to earn it with every release. 

    People are building with agents, and WordPress has to be incredibly easy for those agents to work with. That’s what EmDash gets the most right, and what WordPress could take pointers from.

  • A Red Pen

    Craft is caring enough to get the details right.

    Matthew Butterick argues this for typography in Practical Typography. Reader attention is finite. Every typographic choice you make either earns it or loses it.

    Readers judge your typography before they read a word. That’s how they decide whether it’s worth their time.

    Butterick made the case for typography. Orwell made it for prose in Politics and the English Language: no stale metaphors, short words over long ones, cut anything you can cut, active voice, no jargon, and break any rule rather than write something ugly.

    They’re different disciplines, but with the same instinct: sweat the details and respect the reader. These rules aren’t hard to follow themselves, but doing them consistently, on everything you publish, is.

    So I built an agent skill that runs in Claude Code and Cowork.

    Agent skills are folders of instructions and resources that agents can discover to do things well (like editing).

    "Screenshot of the Claude.ai chat interface showing a greeting that reads 'Good evening, Rich' with the Anthropic logo, and a message input field containing '/red-pen I have a post I'm drafting. Mind checking it?' with the Opus 4.6 model selected."can you give me alt text for this9:29 PM"Claude.ai chat interface greeting 'Good evening, Rich' with the Anthropic spark logo. The message composer shows a draft prompt reading '/red-pen I have a post I'm drafting. Mind checking it?' with '/red-pen' and 'a post' highlighted in blue as a skill command and file attachment. The Opus 4.6 model is selected, with an orange send button and a plus icon for attachments.

    It’s a red pen.

    It checks my drafts against the craft rules I set and shows me where I need to tighten up.

    I care about this because craft compounds. Sloppy writing erodes trust one post at a time. The red pen has made my writing better. Maybe it’ll help yours too.

    Check out my Red Pen skill →

  • Studio CLI: Local WordPress in Seconds

    The WordPress Studio team just shipped the Studio CLI as a standalone npm package.

    If you’ve used the Studio desktop app, you know the pitch: fast local WordPress development powered by WordPress Playground. Now all of that works from your terminal. No desktop app, no Docker, no Apache configs.

    Install it with npm install -g wp-studio and run studio site create to get a local WordPress site up in actual seconds.

    You, or more likely your agents, can even configure sites with custom domains, HTTPS, and specific WordPress or PHP versions:

    studio site set --domain mysite.wp.local --https --wp 6.8

    You can also authenticate with WordPress.com to create a temporary preview site and (soon) push/pull sync:

    studio auth login
    studio preview create

    The Studio app is nice. I run it every day I’m building with WordPress. But putting it in the terminal means our agents can use it too. Just tell your agent about the package, or give it my post here, and you’ll be up and running in no time.

    It’s free to install and use. Early access is live now on Mac, Windows, and Linux (a first for Studio).

    Get WordPress Studio CLI →

  • Office Hours

    I’ve been thinking about how to get more direct product feedback for WordPress. X is a fine medium, and tools like Interviews.now are cool, but I also like a good face-to-face conversation.

    Set up a 1:1 with me →

    Two slots a week, up to 30 minutes each. One early morning, one later in the afternoon, so there’s a better chance of catching folks across time zones.

    Grab one if you want to talk about where WordPress is headed, what you’re building, or how you’re using AI with WordPress. I’d also love feedback on WordPress core, WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, or anything else we’re working on at Automattic.

    Many of the best product insights I’ve gotten came from casual conversations. Someone mentions a small thing that’s been bugging them for months and it turns out fifty other people feel the same way.

    Those moments are worth protecting time for.

  • Meet the WordPress AI Providers

    The new WP AI Client in WordPress 7.0 is provider-agnostic. This means you get to choose what AI providers you want to use, while plugins just add functionality via abilities.

    Meet the WordPress AI Providers rich.blog

  • How to Use the WordPress AI Client

    The upcoming release of WordPress 7.0 ships with the new WP AI Client. You will be able to can call any AI model (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, others) through a single API, in PHP directly and from JavaScript using the Abilities API.

    How to Use the WordPress AI Client rich.blog

    3 replies

  • API is the UI

    The fastest-growing users of our products are agents. And agents don’t need interfaces.

    Agents do not need buttons, visual hierarchy, hover states, or spinners. They need APIs, structured data, and predictable endpoints (and to know about them).

    What matters underneath is the primitive: block schemas, data models, structured content. The formats they produce (markdown, HTML, JSON) are addressable, diffable, and writable by both humans and machines. Most interface chrome is just a convenience layer on top.

    You can already see this shift in code editing.

    A year ago, writing software meant living inside a code editor, manually creating and editing files. Today, tools like Codex, Claude Code, and Telex have moved much of that primary workflow into a chat interface.

    The code editor still exists, but its role has changed: you’re often reviewing, fine-tuning, and steering while the editor becomes secondary.

    The same shift is happening in website building: an agent does not need a block inserter or drag-and-drop chrome. It needs a clear schema for what a page can be and a stable way to write to it (cue the block model for WordPress).

    The visual editor becomes the place where a human reviews what the agent built and fine-tunes from there. Which means we’re now designing for two audiences.

    The primary audience is increasingly the agent: give it clean APIs, predictable structures, and fast execution paths.

    The secondary audience is the human: they need controls to edit, review, refine, and redirect, but most of all they need confidence. Did the agent do something that supports their goal? Did it meet their standards? How do we communicate what the agent did and why? How do we help humans and agents stay aligned? And when they’re not aligned, how do we make it easy to redirect?

    We’ve always treated the human interface as the product, the shape of buttons, the depth of shadows, the flow from connecting accounts to purchasing to completing the job. The API was often an afterthought for integrations or technical requirements.

    Human interfaces are not going away, but they are becoming less central. I’ve spent my career building interfaces, but now the most important work I do is what happens beneath them.

    API is the new UI.

    1 reply

  • How I Got Ralph to Ship Overnight

    I woke up to five pull requests this morning. Passing tests, clean commits, generated PR descriptions.

    I didn’t write a single line of code (but I did review).

    This is what product management looks like now. I describe the problem. We shape it into a PRD. Then the agent translates that into structured issues, sequences the work, and starts building.

    My job is less “writing specs” and more thinking clearly, making good calls, and steering the system while it moves.

    I’ve been building my own take on the Ralph Wiggum Loop: a system of Claude Code skills that plans, structures, and executes features mostly autonomously.

    rich.blog

  • Giving my blog a voice

    I’ve found myself choosing audio more often, like in last week’s experiment, interviews.now. It’s nice, especially when I’m walking, driving, or just stepping away from a screen.

    I wanted to explore adding audio to my blog in a way that stays simple and doesn’t add any friction to how I publish—at all.

    So yea, you can listen to my posts, read in my voice.

    rich.blog

  • I built an agent that interviews WordPress users

    I built an ai voice agent that interviews people about WordPress. Three minutes, their honest take, with structured insights delivered on the other side.

    The way I see it, conversations are variables—context, intent, memory, tone. Set them right and agents handle structured research while you focus on judgment calls.

    Humans are irreplaceable for empathy, judgment, shared experience. But for conversations that are structured and repeatable? Agents are in.

    rich.blog

    2 replies

  • WordPress Explorations: Application Menu

    This is part of my WordPress Explorations series, where I’m exploring new, far-out ideas about WordPress.

    rich.blog

    1 reply

  • WordPress Explorations: Pages & Layers

    This is part of my WordPress Explorations series where I’m exploring new, far out, ideas about WordPress.

    rich.blog

    1 reply

  • WordPress Explorations

    I’ve been thinking about WordPress differently lately. Taking a step back from the accumulated complexity and simply imagining how it could exist.

    WordPress has grown, in both capability and in the many different shapes it can take. That evolution enables millions of people to publish online, but it also adds layers of complexity that have built up over time.

    So in this new series of posts, I’m exploring what else could be. What if we could rebuild this ship with the knowledge of everything we’ve learned along the way? What would we do differently today?

    I want to question every assumption. Challenge requirements carved in stone. Strip concepts down to their core and ask: what’s actually needed? Because that’s often where innovation happens—when you stop accepting constraints as given.

    None of these ideas are proposals.

    This is exploration for exploration’s sake. Some might work, most won’t. That’s the point.

  • WordPress Almost Didn’t Happen

    What if Matt had joined Google instead of starting WordPress?

    The internet might have felt a little less like ours.

    In his recent post, Matt mentioned “How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my mom wanted me to (because they offered free food).”

    Funny line. But also wild to think about. It’s incredible how much of the web traces back to one person deciding to build something open.

    I think about that sometimes. The tiny choices that ripple out for decades. Who’s choosing open now? And what will that mean twenty years from here?

  • The Claude Code Subagents I Use Daily

    I built agents.foo to share the Claude Code subagents I actually reach for every day.

    After weeks of building subagents in Claude Code, I’ve settled into a handful that earned their place in my workflow. Not the flashy demos you see everywhere, but mostly boring—but super useful—agents that make me a little faster.

    My favorite is the Linear product manager. Perfect for those moments when you discover a bug but don’t want to lose momentum on what you’re already working on. It creates thoughtfully executed issues right off.

    The agent knows Linear’s data model inside and out. It explores my codebase to find relevant components, references exact file paths, and includes technical context that actually helps. When I prompt “make an issue that the login button is broken on mobile,” right in Claude Code, it creates a structured issue with proper steps to reproduce, expected behavior, and links to the affected components directly.

    It’s like having a technical triage person sitting next to you. One that writes great issues.

    What’s surprising to me is that we’ve already distilled agentic programming down to simple markdown files. No really complex frameworks or orchestration layers. Just clear instructions about what you want the agent to know and how you want it to help.

    This feels like how AI should work. Instead of wrestling with general-purpose models every time, we create specialized helpers that understand our specific tools, projects, and patterns.

    The agents on agents.foo represent what coding with AI actually looks like. Not revolutionary breakthroughs, but reliable helpers that handle the repetitive parts of building software.

    I’m sharing them because we’re each still figuring out how AI fits into real workflows. These work for me. Maybe they’ll spark ideas for your own daily drivers. Have you created any subagents lately that you’ve found interesting?