For the last month, I’ve had unlimited access to OpenAI Codex. It’s been such a weird experience! This post is about my experience, learnings, and reflections. What I ended up shipping Quite a lot. I’m sharing this early in the post to put the rest of it in perspective. It took 500 billion tokens in…
Twenty-three years into WordPress, the general problem of site synchronization is still unsolved. We have great tools for the slices, but nothing for the whole. You can’t reliably automate any of these tasks beyond basic sites: This post exhaustively covers what makes these problems so difficult, and what we can do instead. It is a…
With unlimited tokens, the constraint becomes compute power: CPU, memory, disk space. Dan Luu’s and Dennis Snell’s work inspired me to move from managing Codex sessions to assigning it a big task and a pool of compute resources to maximize. It burns tokens! I’ve got through ~120 billion tokens since Thursday. Dan is at ~300…
I wanted to revamp WordPress Playground UI for a while but I couldn’t get any useful results from LLMs. Until today. I’ve shared my struggle on Slack and Chris Huber inspired me to ask it not for 100 iterations on one design, but for 100 different designs. So I did. And I got 100 designs.…
I use LLMs a lot lately. I even got an unlimited access to a popular commercial model recently, which increased my usage even more. It’s all still so new to me. I keep poking at the limits and discovering what it means for software and three things come up for me on most days: Human…
Jamie Marsland published this great video on how to turn your handwriting into a font, and then how to use that font on your WordPress site. Check it out!
I’ve just refreshed Butterick’s Practical Typography. The first time I read it was a couple of years ago and I’ve surely forgotten a bunch since. Here are a few thoughts I had during this read-through. Typography is like theater Butterick cites three principles from The Elements of Typographic Style: The three principles read exactly like…
I looked at SQL queries through the lens of isolation levels ever since my brother showed me that concept about 16 years ago. I’ve noticed many, many senior devs are unaware of this fundamental database feature. Here is a short primer on isolation levels that every backend developer should read. The core problem Suppose we…
Waiting for AI to finish is uncomfortable. I found I feel better and get more done when I stay with that discomfort without acting on it. When, instead of rushing to open my fourth concurrent agent or reply to another Slack ping, I just stay right there, present. Maybe I’ll close my eyes for a moment and focus…
This post is re-published post from https://make.wordpress.org/playground/2025/12/03/wordpress-playground-2025-year-in-review/ A lot happened for Playground this year! Let’s review what changed and why it matters for your work: 99+% of WordPress Plugins Supported in Playground Nearly every plugin from the WordPress plugin directory works in Playground. In testing with the top 1,000 plugins, 99% install and activate successfully.…