Cutting through the noise: the sharpest ideas, honest moments, and quotable insights, the real signal from our conversations across OpenChannels FM.

On the lighter side

“How did you guess my password?”
— Adam Weeks in response to Mart Virkus joking about “pizza123” as a bad password.

“You got good habits and bad habits, but really, how bad can a habit be unless it’s like, you know, going around throwing rocks in people’s windows or something? And that’s not really a habit, that would just be Bad thing.”
— Bob Dunn is joking about what qualifies as a “bad habit” while discussing the topic of habits.

Tips, insights and commentary

“What we’re doing [with Jetpack] is ensuring that all the modules or features, right, Social, Protect, anti spam, they all follow similar design language. And we’re going to be using a lot more of the WordPress component system to build out our interfaces. Each interface is going to become a lot more visual… making all our dashboard pages or our feature pages feel like more visual and telling what that feature is doing, giving you the data behind it.” — Devin WalkerEpisode 735

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“Somebody else’s perfect day is probably not your perfect day. And I have days that I’m great and I have days that I still am just like a total mess. But you wake up the next day and you can try again to implement those habits.” —Cami McNamaraEpisode 721

The Human Touch in an AI-driven WooCommerce Future

“A release every 5 weeks, there’s a few hundred PRs that make it into each release. So we’re starting to lean into AI to go through and say, okay, pull all the PRs from GitHub for this release. Read all of the comments, all the description, what actually shipped, organize them into categories. What are all the PRs around blocks? What are all the PRs around performance, which has been a huge priority right now? What are all the PRs around beta features? Organize them for us and help me find the most important ones that I can highlight. And so we’ve been exploring a lot of tooling around that, you know, getting Claude Code to use the GitHub API to pull all these things and do this analysis on it and stuff like that. So it’s been a journey, you know, trying to get that to, to work really well. And at the end of the day, like it really still requires a human to go in there and, and give the, the actual context and to fully understand, cuz AI is not perfect. Sometimes it doesn’t realize that a feature got added in one PR, but then removed in another one and didn’t make it, you know, it doesn’t always get all the ins and outs, but Yeah, we’re trying to use it to really be able to like give us like a bigger picture for a piece of code that’s like almost too big for one human brain to comprehend, you know?”
— Brian CoordsEpisode 733

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