Got an email from Automattic about MCP support in WordPress, which is now available on their servers. With this new interface you can write prompts in Claude etc that do things in your WordPress workspace. Kind of like a scripting language, but English, like this — "In WordPress, please set the category for the current post to Project 32."
I guess it's very much like the wpcom API we're using for WordLand. It's going to be harder to get people to look at wpcom with this kind of functionality out there. It was always going to be hard, but I liked the challenge of telling a story about a great bit of technology that could save the web but wasn't known to almost all developers. WordPress never attracted the kind of devs that care about APIs like that one, ones which would let you build on WordPress as opposed to in WordPress.
Tech is always foggy and full of hype, but rarely is it as intense as it is in 2026. AI is the major thing people are talking and thinking about, trying to figure out if there's a way to be part of the fun with our software and ideas. And there are so many quick ways to get hooked up to the hype, that seem pretty desperate, the kind of ideas that emerge from management offsites in orgs that have little sense of direction — "let's add AI" everyone agrees, without any idea of what that means, and not much comes of it. Firefox, the perennial hype-harvester very predictably did this late last year. No we don't need another browser with AI. You have to think harder and more creatively. My advice was to be better for the web, and eventually if there is a link to AI it will reveal itself. But you have to pay attention for that.
As revolutionary as AI is, some things aren't going to be done with prompts, pretty sure of that. It 's a lot easier to pick categories from a dialog than typing an instruction in ChatGPT. Think about how you drive a car, you don't slowly tell the car to "turn the wheel left and tap the brake, now right, and hit the gas." Maybe this will turn out to be like the difference between using a mouse or a keyboard. Some people thought keyboards were obsolete when the Mac came out in 1984. I'm using a keyboard right now.
I'm going to finish the new WordLand and ask some people I want to connect with to try it out. The goal is to create a new kind of structure for the web, made out of posts that both stand alone and are part of a graph that you can walk around in. Far more spontaneous than web rings of the early web, like my blogroll does so much more than the static blogrolls of the 90s and 00s. But it is going to be hard to get attention for it, in the midst of all that's going on with AI.
On the other hand, I haven't seen the AI tools get into social structures, I feel very much alone with my AI collaborator. I know there are ways to set up collaboration, but that hasn't reached me yet, and at this time I'm not actually receptive to the idea. I haven't yet seen how we can plug away together human to human.
Like everyone else we're feeling my way around this, looking for ways to add value, and at the same time help to revive the web, which definitely needs help.
I'd like the web to make the transition to AI, not to become even more forgotten. I feel like this is the last chance, I want to get the web hooked into AI, but I have to work with other people, going it alone won't work.
Just some random thoughts on a Wednesday morning, having absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's freaking April 1.