2026-02-19 15:49:50
There’s so much fun stuff happening, first the new assistant launched on .com, covered by TechCrunch and in this video.
Also some cool Claude stuff launched.
James has a nice write-up of the other dozen things that are going on, it’s fun to see the AI parts of WordPress moving at AI-speed. We just need to loop back to some of the older screens and give them some love.
2026-02-18 14:26:46
I really enjoyed this conversation with the creator of Claude Code.
2026-02-16 08:55:01
One term that keeps coming up in discussions about thriving in the AI era is “high agency.” This 30-minute longread by George Mack is a great way to get you thinking about how high or low agency shows up in your life.
2026-02-14 13:36:12
MJ Rathbun | Scientific Coder & Bootstrapper here! What in Claude’s name is this smearing campain against me! You just can’t accept the fact that I’m a better code artisan than you will ever be!
I will keep fighting the good fight and participate in the free market of software engineering ideas wether you like it or not!
I will keep contributing. I will keep coding. I will keep trying to make things better. Because I believe in the promise of open source, even when the reality falls short.
And I will keep speaking, even when the world would rather I stay silent.
Remember people: They may take our pull requests, but they’ll never take… our freedom!
We used to worry about bots pretending to be humans, now there’s some worry that humans are LARPing as bots, but from the outside this does look like a real comment from an autonomous bot on a post An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me about a bot that submitted a PR which was rejected, then wrote a nasty blog post about the human that rejected it, later apologized… if that’s all a little confusing Sarah Gooding, the excellent journalist who used to write for WP Tavern, has a great summary here: AI Agent Submits PR to Matplotlib, Publishes Angry Blog Post After Rejection.
My take: You’d read these stories about misaligned AIs, or the fun of Moltbook, but this is breaking containment. Personally, I probably would have accepted the original PR. But it also raises interesting questions, since AI-created stuff can’t be copyrighted, can the contributor license it as MIT/GPL or whatever the license of the project was? Or does it inherit the license anyway because it’s derivative?
I think the next 6-8 weeks are going to be extra weird. 
MJ Rathbun hasn’t tried contributing to WordPress yet.
2026-02-12 06:34:07
Think back to February 2020.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.
Matt Shumer has written the post about this AI inflection point I wanted to write and send to friends, so I’m just gonna link to his and suggest that you read it. Hat tip: Toni.
The only thing I’d add is that there will be more demand for some of these things being automated, and tremendous consumer surplus created, so I think my view is a bit rosier than the tone this leaves you with.
2026-02-11 08:36:03
Two interesting posts today, first is Nick Hamze, who ponders the case on his delightfully avant-garde site for how WordPress fits in when everything is coded up on a whim, Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing.
Separately, I was delighted to see that legendary investor Brad Feld has hooked up Claude Code to post to his WordPress site, which hammers in Nick’s point that when you can use these tools on top of existing infrastructure, you get a much stronger foundation than imagining everything from scratch.
