• AI Coding and Context

    It’s clear that the way to get code “as if you’d coded it yourself” is to include your coding in the context that your LLM is using. Cursor, which I’ve been experimenting with of late, gives you several layers of potential customized context, and I finally found a few minutes to explore how this works.…

  • What WordPress Should Be

    As I was writing this, Joost de Valk posted a blog piece that points out three key areas of weakness that confront WordPress and rightly points out that we had better face these concerns head on and clear eyed. We need as a community to have the discussions that lead WordPress by developing a vision…

  • Salute Your Cursor AI Overlords

    I’m not sure yet, but I’m pretty close to sure that AI can’t do anything genuinely complicated when it comes to writing code. Or, more accurately, it’s happy to do immensely complicated code creation, but most of the complex stuff doesn’t work and is more trouble than it’s worth to fix. But a recent return…

  • Client variation management

    A key capability PeakZebra needs to develop moving forward is something that, strangely, doesn’t quite exist in WordPress. The capability: completely manage revision control across entire sites (that is, anything at all that changes on a site) and be able to scale to do it across a large number of sites (several thousand, say). At…

  • Slots to Slotfill, Callbacks to Call

    So, one key challenge to tackle is managing changes to individual PeakZebra deployments without creating variants that can’t be merged back together. My initial thought was the WordPress slotfill capability, probably because I was aware of it but didn’t know all that much about it. I did a little poking around, enough to realize that…

  • The Launch List

    I continue to chew through a lot of time making sure that PeakZebra, as a service, works. That it does what it’s supposed to do. But I’ve come to realize that one of my major challenges as a founder is training myself not to keep moving the “finished and ready for launch” goalposts. In particular,…

  • The WordPress Version Control Divide

    I was checking out a podcast video by Brian Coords when I hit upon an exchange that both outlined the difference between a developer/workflow-based approach and a more traditional WordPress approach to managing changes on websites. What I love about this conversation is that both interlocutors are obviously not only smart, but smart about WordPress.…

  • Another Side of WordPress SaaS

    One thing about the strategy where you hedge your WordPress bets by offering your wares as a SaaS built on WordPress is that it opens up the question of what’s in your SaaS. Once you’ve created a setup where your SaaS customers are interacting with your WordPress server, a potential next step is to incorporate…

  • Common Codebase Versus Custom Deployments

    These days I’m spending a lot of my time making sure the PeakZebra product works. But it’s clear to me that quite possibly the biggest challenge I have before me is dealing with the dead certainty that there will be lots of customizations made to client instance of PeakZebra. In a way, that’s PeakZebra’s secret…

  • The Limits of Open Source Software

    Nothing has foregrounded the fundamental bargain of open source like the past couple months of WordPress drama. I’m not here to talk about that in particular, but it has really gotten people thinking about what’s legal, what’s ethical, what you can charge for, what you can give away, and how a business will or won’t…