Why We Build Systems aka Zach and Carl’s Emporium of Madness

Zach Stepek: Guess who’s back? Back again.

Carl Alexander: Back again.

Zach Stepek: Carl’s back.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, and Zach.

Zach Stepek: It’s my friend. And Zach. So, it’s been an interesting month, man.

Carl Alexander: You could tell me about it.

Zach Stepek: Well, just to hit the highlights of what’s happened in the last month: I submitted and had accepted my first gallery exhibit of my concert photography, which is crazy.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, that’s cool.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, there’s prints on a wall downstairs of my photography. I’ve never done that before. It’s very, very interesting. And so that’s this weekend. I’ve been in prep mode for all of that, just trying to get everything together, get everything framed, matted, hung, getting the vinyl for the exhibition’s title put together, and all the other fun stuff that comes along with doing a show at a gallery.

Carl Alexander: How did you stumble on that? Did you get invited? Did somebody see your photography and say, oh, you should apply?

Zach Stepek: So we have an event that happens twice a year here in Rockford, Illinois, called Art Scene. There are 44 venues, and one of them happens to be the place where I’ve set up my podcast studio. When I first started talking to the people who run this place, it was because they have an arts foundation and because they participate in Art Scene. That was the goal. I wasn’t setting out to open a podcast studio or do any of the things I’ve done in the last six months. I was really looking for a place to show my work, because after over a decade, I felt like it was time to do that. So I was really excited when the time came and they said, yes, you can definitely have a wall for your exhibit. I’ve got 16 photos in a pretty interesting layout. The exhibit’s titled Beyond the Barricade, because that’s where I stand, between the barricade and the stage, when I’m taking photos. It’s a really interesting step, not something that I thought would happen quite as quickly as it has. And when I first saw it…

Carl Alexander: Season of discovery.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.

Carl Alexander: Of reinvention.

Zach Stepek: That’s really been the last month in more than one way, right? I’ve been brought in as a technical co-founder on a clothing and apparel brand that’s starting, called We Are Roses. I’m also working on my multiple software-as-a-service applications that I’ve been building. I’ve got this crazy opportunity to take a sales role with a great organization. And yeah, I’m just working toward reinventing how I work in the next decade, basically.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I can’t even think in months, let alone decades right now.

Zach Stepek: The time blindness makes it so I don’t really think in time anyway. So, yeah.

Carl Alexander: I just got out of therapy, but even before that, I think things change so fast right now, everywhere, that it’s hard to know where things are going to be. So I focus a lot on the present. It’s hard to think too far ahead. I just figure we’ll see when we get there, that’s kind of my motto for things. You want to line up where you’re going somewhat, but outside of that, I find it pretty difficult to know, plan, and feel in control of all that stuff. It’s still good, but hearing someone talk about the next 10 years, I’m like, Jesus, I don’t even know where I’ll be in two years. That’s kind of where I land when I hear stuff like that, because I wish I had that kind of forward thinking going on right now.

Zach Stepek: Well, I make it sound like it’s a lot more planned than it is, but really it’s a few wide-ranging goals. One, develop enough varied streams of income that I’m never stuck if one fails again, right?

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I get that. I like diversification too. I used to have a lot.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think it’s important.

Carl Alexander: I used to have a lot of that in my consulting business. Not so much anymore, but that made it a lot better, because you don’t depend on one person or one client or whatnot, and all that.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. The other part is moving from being more technical in everything I do to expanding more into the creative side of myself. I came into this industry as a programmer. I was a ColdFusion programmer. I built database-backed websites in the early 2000s, and built content management systems from scratch around them. My background was highly technical from the beginning. When I used to teach for Adobe, I was teaching Java developers how to build Flex applications with ActionScript 3.

Carl Alexander: Crazy town.

Zach Stepek: It was crazy. It was a very different world than what we live in now. We were very ahead of where things are now back then, because we had a single platform that we were developing for: Flash Player was Flash Player everywhere it ran. And this was during the browser compatibility wars, and all the fun of cross-browser testing, and we have a little of that now, but not nearly as much.

Carl Alexander: I wouldn’t even know. That’s like a long time ago for me, browser testing.

Zach Stepek: Yeah. There are some things, some flags and other features in CSS or HTML that are only supported by one or two browsers here or there, but it’s still a thing, because I can’t log into Riverside with Firefox.

Carl Alexander: So there’s clearly still stuff going on.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, WebRTC is definitely one of those areas where it’s still a frontier thing, where video, audio, and chat applications that focus on that real-time communication layer might develop toward the feature set of specific browsers, and that’s what you’re seeing there. But it’s nothing like what it was then. Back in those days, did we even have a tool like Can I Use? I don’t think we did at all. You just had to know what was supported and what wasn’t. It’s crazy to me that we’re so far beyond that now. But my point when I brought that up is Flash Player was a single platform that we were all developing for, back when that didn’t exist anywhere else, really. You could be a Java developer and build Java applets that ran in the browser, sure, but that required Java to be installed, and it just wasn’t installed by most people. Then you could do things with Flash Player, and most of that was building crazy long intros that everybody skipped at the beginning of websites, all the Flash creativity. When we moved into line-of-business applications built with the Flex framework and ActionScript 3, most people don’t know that at that point, ActionScript 3 was being positioned and pitched as the next version of ECMAScript, which is the standard JavaScript is based on. The virtual machine that was in Flash Player was poised to be the same runtime that JavaScript used in every browser. Then Microsoft stepped in and reversed course on all of that, and the ECMAScript committee moved forward with ECMAScript 4, which basically led to TypeScript and some of the things that have happened since. It’s really interesting now that we’re finally getting to a point where the functionality of what you can do in JavaScript is close to what it was before. Because of where I came up in the industry, I had to combine creativity with technical knowledge basically from the beginning. Flash was a very creative environment. Flex was not as creative but required creative solutions. So I was always engaging both sides of my brain in some way once I got into that world. And then I started an agency and started working less on the tech and more on the business side of things. My former business partner would joke that he had taken my keyboard away, which was never actually true, it just was funny to say. But now I feel like I’m swinging further in the other direction, beyond tech and business and back to the creative side, really exploring what I can do from a creative perspective, and then how I can use technology to support my creative endeavors. My current projects include a photography portfolio system that I built for myself, and productizing that so that the work I built for me, very similar to what 37signals did with Basecamp back when it started, can be used by other people. I’m building tools I need for myself and then making plans to release them to the greater world. It’s a big change from how I’ve done things for the last 20 years, where I’ve done direct client work, actually 25 years this year that I’ve worked directly for clients. It’s freeing to be building my own things. And I get the appeal of where you’ve been with Ymir, building something that is yours.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot wrapped up in Ymir, but there are some days with Ymir where I see all these people tinkering and doing fun stuff with AI, and I’m just like, I can’t do that. I have to focus on the business and not build a million things, because I’m an engineer, I want to build stuff, not sell stuff. So there’s a part of me that hopes that one day I can have that freedom. For me, it was always a vehicle for freedom and independence, and all these things that were in my neurodivergence talk. Part of my crazy month is I don’t really have consulting work right now, so I might need a job. It’s my first time, well, first, the job market sucks. But also, there’s a deep irony that I probably work more than 40 hours a week, but I work when I want to. So it’s the fixed schedule, the fact that I have to compress it into 5 days instead of working 7 days like I do, that gets to me. And Ymir had creative opportunities. I just did the redesign, and that was fun, to put some creativity into things. I think for me, that’s always been empowering, because my dad’s a painter. Well, not full-time, but it was always his hobby to paint. My bedroom is actually, I used to joke when I started dating my partner that it was like the catfish room, because it looks like an artist’s bedroom, like a European artist. There were probably at least 30 paintings just laying everywhere, and an easel with a painting on it. And the irony is, I don’t paint. I don’t draw. He did photography too, the basement was like his black room. But I can’t do any of that, because I have a condition where I shake. So doing dexterous things isn’t something that comes easily for me. Or coordinated things, even playing instruments. Gasp, to anyone who didn’t know, I am a two-finger typer. I don’t actually know how to type. That’s why I’ve been less bothered with the AI stuff. I’m like, I never could type that fast, so I don’t really miss that. I don’t type the code anymore, because I’d never really typed it that fast to begin with. But I think that’s the beauty of being able to diversify and not wind up all your identity into one thing, it lets you have other things, your photography, other artistic pursuits, an apparel company, just insanity, right?

You know, I don’t have, you put serial entrepreneur, I don’t know if I’m a serial entrepreneur. I just have to do it, because I don’t see where I fit in the world if I don’t try to make it work, which is why I try really hard and put myself in rough situations. Like, in the last month, I was interviewed by Jason Cohen of WP Engine, and he ripped into me. But part of the reason is, if this is what you feel you need to do, and this is where you belong, you just take the risks.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, for anybody who hasn’t listened to that episode, it is at times brutal.

Carl Alexander: Oh yeah. And he cut an hour out. So there’s a lot of brutal stuff that’s not even on it.

Zach Stepek: Well, and the thing is, what I love about Jason is that he’s honest in his opinions. He knows when he’s telling you something that’s been proven by empirical evidence that he’s seen himself. He knows when he’s telling you something based on things people have told him. And he knows when he’s just kind of guessing. He’s willing to tell you when he’s in any of those modes. And we all have assumptions we make based on the knowledge we have, and none of us is ever going to be 100% right 100% of the time. So it’s really kind of cool to listen to him give that advice in real time, understanding more and more as you go through the episode about the product and the market fit and everything. He keeps going back to, we’ve already proven there’s a market for this, because we have customers that have high-end hosting at WP Engine. That’s his empirical evidence, he’s seen it, he’s seen other companies in the same space do similar things. So I think it’s really interesting to see that process. I can imagine it was brutal to be sitting there through that, getting that kind of honest and direct feedback.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, it was a mastermind session, so Jason’s super smart, there was just never going to be an easy, feel-good thing. He was just going to call you out if you were wrong, all that stuff. So it’s uncomfortable at times, but the larger point is, I’ve talked to people, I’ve seen people say, oh, I could never do this kind of stuff. But again, to bring it back to what we were saying, life is risks. You have to. If this is what you really want, you have to be willing to put yourself in situations that aren’t comfortable, because if it’s not working, it’s not working. And if that’s what you really want, what sacrifices are you willing to make for it? For me, there was no issue going on Jason’s thing, because I want this to work out somehow. I have nothing against people having a regular job, I think it’s useful for a lot of people to have that kind of structure, but I’m a very self-directed, self-managed person, I never had issues with that. So what was more important for me was having the flexibility to work where I want, when I want, not that I can’t do the work. That was always the goal for me: how do I get to a point where I’m doing something valuable for people, and I get to maintain the value? But we’ll see how it works out. AI is disrupting everything, so I don’t even know if Ymir is safe.

Zach Stepek: Absolutely everything. Yes.

Carl Alexander: And consulting’s not good. So, you played your hand, I’m playing my hand, and part of the hand was going and getting ripped apart by Jason Cohen. I came out with stuff to do, and a lot of it’s gone live now. But that was one of the many things that happened to me in the last month. When you’re trying to figure out yourself and what to do, you were talking about your creative side and all that, right? Part of the Ymir story is the same thing, a vehicle, a way to diversify your income, feel some safety, have something to work on that you enjoy. That was always part of the challenge for me, I could never be a serial entrepreneur, because I don’t think there are that many things I’d enjoy working on all the time, and I don’t have that type of ADHD. I see it online, there’s a lot of people always starting new products. I’m a dedicated person, it’s been 20 years, I go to the gym, I have stable habits. I feel like having the one product to focus on is more interesting to me than having a million businesses and feeling overwhelmed. But I respect a lot of people who do that, because I feel like it would probably help me out more. I feel like the people who have been more successful are the ones who’ve just tried a million things, you know?

Zach Stepek: Well, there’s benefits to both approaches, right? A serial entrepreneur, like myself, I’ve told a joke for years, and it’s terrible, but it actually is true. The difference between a serial entrepreneur and a serial killer is that a serial entrepreneur kills themself. And it’s very true, it’s a lot of work to juggle all those things and build something new constantly. If you look at the ADHD types, there are really three categories ADHD sits in: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, or combined presentation. I definitely sit in combined presentation. I have pieces of me that are hyperactive and impulsive, and pieces that are inattentive. That tends to be the most common, the combined presentation. Most people don’t have predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, it’s the least common, but all three exist in different ways.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, and they can show up in different areas too, right?

Zach Stepek: Exactly. So there are parts of me where I’m extremely high energy, and I’m moving, and I can at times act before I think. If I’m comfortable in the situation I’m in, I get more impulsive. But most of it is that predominantly inattentive, where I have trouble focusing, or staying organized, or finishing tasks. So I have to have systems for everything, right?

Carl Alexander: Love a good system. Love me some calendars, some to-dos, all of it, alarms. All of it.

Zach Stepek: Yeah. So my partner and I have a system in place where things that are happening have to be on the calendar. They just have to, they don’t exist if they’re not on the calendar. We have shared calendars for everything, and if we have something going on, we put it on the calendar so we can both see it’s happening and there are no surprises. Now, I’m normally really good about putting things on the calendar, but I’m also impulsive at times and do things that aren’t on the calendar, which becomes a point of contention at times.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I bet.

Zach Stepek: So it’s all about finding the systems that work. And really, that’s what we do as programmers too, right? We build systems that solve problems, that’s really the job, to create something that accomplishes a goal without needing a human to do all the work. I’ve been programming myself and the world around me since I was young, tiny. I first was exhibiting symptoms of ADHD at three, four years old. I’ve spent my entire life learning how to program myself. So programming other things and building systems around other things was just a natural progression from that. I think that’s why there are so many of us who are ADHD and technical, because it’s something we can understand the limits of and control.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I just like building stuff. I have the most typical programmer journey, Legos, I started programming really young too, at 8, and within a year I was doing my first robotics project. I think the way this ADHD stuff impacts me, I don’t have much of the impulsive stuff. The most impulsive thing for me is buying a video game or something for ten dollars. My partner has ADHD, and her daughter does too. I think the trouble focusing does happen, but I think it’s more of a lack of stimulation. I’ve done talks about it. One of the things around ADHD, when I talk with my therapist and other people, is that the medication is a stimulant, which the first time I heard that blew my mind, because you’re already hyperactive, why do you need to be stimulated more? But once you understand that it’s a lack of stimulation that makes you seek stimulation elsewhere, right. So I’ve always told people during my talks that you should try to design or think through what gives you enough stimulation to feel concentrated. My classic example is an airport, I love working in an airport, which sounds insane to most people, but for me, the visual noise helps me focus. Auditory noise causes me a lot of issues, but visual noise is great, people moving around, living their life, and then I can look, get some stimulation, and look back down. I don’t have to go chase it on a YouTube video or social media. So understanding these kinds of concepts is really useful, to help you manage, the same way calendars and alarms are useful, because if you know what kind of stimulation helps you focus, you can try to work in places that offer that. But that varies from person to person. I think the autistic side holds it back too, but that’s part of why thinking through these careers and these creative outlets is so important for me, because there’s just a huge dynamic range in people. And sometimes the workplace isn’t the right place for a person because of that.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, that’s, I’ve tried very hard to work in corporate environments, and the more corporate it gets, the less interested I become. So I’ve asked in roles for accommodations to help with that, right? And to help with the inattentive pieces, like making sure I have written follow-ups on things I’m being asked to do, so I have it written down, not just verbally told to me. Yeah, that’s a huge one.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, I feel that’s a good one, and one I’m happy that AI can solve, because now you can just do the note-taking thing in most meetings. I feel like that’s a huge boon to people like that. I’m also, to be fair, meetings are the worst for me. I’ll zone out during a meeting, part of the reason I was terrible at school, classes were the worst thing for me, because if I’m not the one, it sounds stupid, but that’s what it is, if I’m not talking, it’s harder to concentrate and keep my attention focused, and then you lose parts of it and you’re expected to remember it. So the note-taking thing, I’d abuse that stuff if I was in that setting, I’d just ask AI to go through it: what was this, what was said, scan the transcript, who said what at what time, what was decided. All that stuff is great. So yeah, I can relate to that one a lot, with accommodations and whatnot. We’ll see. I feel like that’s one of the few positive things with AI, that you can build a lot of stuff that’s missing to help you accommodate.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I used to carry an audio recorder into meetings, and it freaked people out at first, because this was back before any of this stuff existed.

Carl Alexander: I could believe that.

Zach Stepek: But I explained that the reason I wanted an audio recorder was so I could refer back to what had been said later, not as evidence, but as a reminder, a record for myself. Some people said no, and that’s fine, but I find it much easier to record a meeting and then go back and look at the notes. That’s been an interesting thing to have change with Zoom and the advent of AI tools, people are getting used to meetings being recorded. Thirty years ago, people didn’t bring an audio recorder into meetings.

As far as other things that have been going on, the industry’s been moving forward through all of this. Cloudflare just released EmDash 1.0, which is interesting to see happening, that’s a huge milestone for that team, which is great. We’re also getting a new default theme for WordPress, which looks pretty cool so far. I don’t know if you’ve…

Carl Alexander: No, I’m more interested in WordPress from the infra side at this point. What I want to do with WordPress, at this point, has diminished a lot, because I write a lot less, I don’t sell stuff online, I don’t have an e-commerce store, I’m not really in the content business anymore. So I’m just more interested in it from the infra side. But honestly, a lot of these things, I think this is kind of a side problem with AI. I’m a builder, so I want to build stuff, and I’m using Laravel, I’m looking at other languages instead, that’s what interests me more than what’s going on in WordPress. I think it’s good that they’re working on a new default theme, I think all this is really good, but I’m just not really a WordPress user anymore. Until recently I was still doing consulting work that was WordPress-adjacent, it involved WordPress code, so it’s not that I don’t touch WordPress, but just as a person using it, that’s where I’m less involved.

Honestly, I just have AI build me the theme that I want. That’s the interesting thing I think with all of this, if I redesign my personal site, I’d just get a custom theme built from scratch, I wouldn’t use one and extend it like the child themes of before. My current theme’s a child theme, of a very simple, minimalistic theme that I really liked, that was the way I did it when I redesigned this five, six years ago. But now I’m like, no, let’s just do some wireframes, some design, and even if AI builds it all in Next.js as a sample app, you just tell it, here’s the Next.js, turn it into WordPress templates, PHP templates, and off you go. Come back in however long that takes, my experience is, let’s say, 15 minutes, you come back in 15 minutes and the thing’s done. That’s how I would use WordPress. I feel for me, as a developer, that’s where I fall now with this stuff. But that’s just for my personal site. I didn’t do the Ymir marketing site in WordPress, it’s just part of the Laravel app, I don’t need to use a separate thing to do a marketing site, I can just make it part of the framework. I was considering that for the Ymir blog too, but I might keep using WordPress or Statamic or something.

Either way, what I was trying to say is I’m less of a user, I just follow the news, I saw it, but I didn’t look at it. I’m paying more attention to what’s going on in WordPress core, is there AI integration, MCPs, right now it’s more security fixes, because security is kind of a hellscape. I try to explain that to the non-tech folks, but it’s a real wild west right now for security vulnerabilities. But that’s kind of where I fall on that. I think that’s part of the whole change with AI, we have to see where all the pieces fall. My view is I still think WordPress is a great tool to build on top of, especially with AI, because I think tools like WordPress and Laravel, things that have a large corpus of information, are pretty good for that stuff. But my tie-in to WordPress was always more high-level, I taught object-oriented programming, I did advanced stuff, even Ymir is kind of an offshoot of me trying crazy high-end stuff with WordPress. So that was always my interest. I’m still very interested in that, but my last consulting gig was a hybrid, like Radical, a hybrid Laravel-WordPress thing, maintaining and migrating a whole licensing platform that was built on top of WordPress into this kind of hybrid structure. That’s where my skill set is really useful. But again, for the everyday stuff, WordPress, for me personally, I don’t have that kind of need, so there’s less to be excited about, but I still think it’s a good thing to build on top of, especially WooCommerce, e-commerce is just, it’s a lot, you need a lot of components, a lot of people have solved a lot of these things, and there aren’t a lot of open options outside it. So it’s just, the CMS part is tricky, because too much content, too many things.

Zach Stepek: Well, and it’s funny, because yes, the content management system does matter for the end user. So when I’m the end user, I don’t care what it is, it can be whatever. I can build a thin content management layer under something that’s a static site, I can build around EmDash or WordPress or Contentful, or any of the popular solutions out there. I’m happy to roll my own content management against a Laravel application, it just depends on the role. Now, when you’re building for other people, though, that’s when the power of something like WordPress really shows itself, where people already know it or understand it, and you’re empowering them to maintain the thing you’ve built for them using a platform they’re used to. And that, to me, is the real power of a CMS.

So, I want to mention one more thing before we wrap up here. I went down a rabbit hole recently, are you familiar with the Ralph Wiggum loop?

Carl Alexander: Oh yeah, but that’s old.

Zach Stepek: It is old now. It is old now.

Carl Alexander: It’s old, like, what, March?

Zach Stepek: February? Yeah, that was, January was when it really started. But there’s actually a Laracasts series on the Ralph Wiggum technique in Laravel, which I think is pretty amazing. It’s a very interesting series, once all the core pieces are in place, like building an orchestration system by wiring linear and workflow files and agent loops. It’s a very interesting series that I really enjoyed, released in May of this year. And then the other thing I’ve found rather interesting is the Blaze package for compiling Blade templates in Laravel.

Carl Alexander: Oh yeah, that came out a little while ago.

Zach Stepek: Yeah.

Carl Alexander: And nobody, is that even being maintained? Sorry, I forgot about that. I looked into it for Ymir, whether I should support it or whatever, and I’ve never heard about it again.

Zach Stepek: The interesting thing for me was the built-in profiling, so you can see flame charts and all the per-component timing, and figure out where the bottlenecks in your Laravel application are. Really interesting to me, to have a very focused Blade compiler now that makes everything faster, to pre-render components and turn things into static HTML, cache component renders, really pretty cool to see that level of optimization happening now. I’m just really excited about where Laravel is going, where PHP is going right now. Just really cool to see. And there’s a lot of new stuff coming that’s going to make this even better. We got Livewire 4 this year, right, that was this year.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, it’s all super interesting to me, but again, Blaze is a good example of that, I wonder what’s going to be in PHP, what’s not going to be in PHP in the future. I love Livewire, I think for me, that’s way more interesting than Inertia plus some frontend framework. But I think it’s super cool to build stuff right now, the problem isn’t the building, that’s why I was saying, I wish part of me was more excited to just play, but the entrepreneur in me is like, no, you’ve got to focus on your stuff, your marketing, this. But there’s a lot of cool stuff coming out. I know he’s a complicated individual, but just seeing what DHH is doing with Omarchy, and a lot of stuff being rewritten in Rust or other languages, it’s really interesting now to see what you can do with languages, you really get to choose the right tool for the job now.

That’s what I mean, I don’t know where all this falls, because I think right now there’s just a lot of reordering of things happening, rethinking of assumptions. It’s the same thing with WordPress, I don’t think WordPress itself is going anywhere, but it’s worth rethinking what’s in WordPress, what’s not, what you do with it, how you interact with it. I feel the same way about Laravel, Taylor had this joke that Laravel was an implementation detail of PHP. Could you have WordPress rewritten in Rust, or Laravel rewritten in Rust? Rust is kind of the flavor of the month for languages, but what could you do with that stuff? These crazy ideas, it’s not just the EmDash thing, what if Cloudflare redid a CMS, a lighter WordPress, in Astro? Is JavaScript the right thing? I think that’s interesting to me too, but it leaves me with a lot of questions, that’s why I wish I had more time to play around, basically. That’s how I feel about it all, I wish I had more time to play around, but I love looking at people and seeing what they’re doing.

I try to keep an open mind, because one thing I was talking with somebody about recently was, what is a dashboard going to be in two years? What are you going to want when you log into your application? Are you even going to log into stuff? Is it just going to be a bunch of agents logging in for you? What does the agent need? Is it just going to all be CLIs? There’s just a lot of stuff around that, that’s really interesting, and I think a lot about where this is all going. What are the assumptions that don’t work anymore? The dashboard’s a good example, think of how often we’ve said we need to redo the WordPress dashboard. It might not even matter, because maybe in two years that’s just not how it works, it’s not that you don’t use WordPress, but the dashboard’s this thing you’re like, oh my God, I haven’t stepped into this in so long. Even Gutenberg, I think that’s hard, because who knows how this ends up, but think of how much energy, how many man-hours were spent, and you couldn’t know when they started, this isn’t a knock on them, but think about it in two years, are you going to go log into WordPress, is the trend going to be more people logging into WordPress to go into Gutenberg and play with their blocks and put the thing together, or are you just going to have a mockup that Claude Design set up, and say, can you make this with the block editor AI, and the AI’s going to do it, and you’re never going to interact with it? So much time and energy was expended on this, not knowing that’s where it’s going.

That’s what I mean when I think about this a lot, even with my product, what are you going to need, how is this going to be interacted with? Because I find dashboards, product dashboards, are the perfect example of something that will change, there’s no question it has to change, because even if you log in to check it, what you’re going to want from the dashboard, the job of the dashboard, is going to change. I don’t think it’ll be more about creation. It’ll be more like logs, or a preview, or needing to see something, or double-check the work the agent did, some auditing thing, less about actually doing things in the dashboard, because you won’t be doing it. I’m glad I thought about it, because it ties in so well, the WordPress admin was this thing we had so many discussions about, so many trac tickets created to redesign it. In the end, it might not even matter whether it changes or not, because that’s just not going to be the main way you interact with a WordPress site in two years. And that’s okay. But it just shows the uncertainty, and the rethinking of assumptions you want to have when thinking about all of this.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think it’s just going to be really, really interesting to see the next 12 months. The next 12 months are going to determine, in my opinion, the future of engineering as a career.

Carl Alexander: I’m really not doomer about engineering as a career.

Zach Stepek: I’m not doomer about it either. I think the reality, though, is that we’re not going to be writing 100% of the code of things anytime in the near future again.

Carl Alexander: No, I think that’s gone. And that’s why it was never a problem for me, because I’m a two-finger typer anyways, so it was just like, I remember when Toby was making fun of me because I was copy-pasting stuff last year for agents and stuff, and I was just like, yeah, I don’t type fast, I’m just going to copy-paste and select it with my mouse and all that. There’s no question it’s going to change, but how it’s going to change is hard to predict. Like, I dock on WordPress, but they did the right thing at the right time. Meanwhile, I spent a ton of time on the Ymir CLI, because I’m a terminal-native person, and designing a dashboard pre-AI was very difficult, CSS and all that, even with Tailwind, was just a pain. So I spent more time with the CLI stuff, and lo and behold, it ended up being more important now. I didn’t know that, I’m not going to claim any sort of genius move there, but nowadays it’s like, oh yeah, CLI is way better. That’s why you have all these products coming out with CLIs now, because that’s how the agents feel good interacting with stuff. In a way, if I was Automattic, I’d be doubling down on WP-CLI, I’d be doubling down on it.

Zach Stepek: You and I had this conversation very recently, the difference between MCP-based support for things and just putting things in a CLI and making it discoverable.

Carl Alexander: I mean, MCP is still useful, in the sense that the larger question is, what’s an MCP versus an API, a regular API too. But what I mean is, I don’t hear this conversation going on a lot with WordPress, but that’s the thing I’d be thinking about, maybe we need to empower WP-CLI even more, think of a V3 or something at this point.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, I mean, there’s a team, but yeah, it is primarily, yeah, I think so.

Carl Alexander: Right. But again, these are the questions I like to ask myself, because I feel you don’t know where the puck’s going, but you can tell where it’s not. So I can tell it’s not going into more elaborate dashboards with more stuff, more empowering for the user. It’s definitely going the opposite direction, where it’s something like a Grok bot that can log into your WordPress site and do stuff for you, via MCP or whatnot, and you’re not there, you’re just giving it a screenshot, can you fix this, with the arrow, you take a screenshot, put an arrow, this is wrong, and it just goes and fixes it.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think we’re definitely getting to a point where the tool that matters most is the tool that makes the interaction for the end user the simplest it possibly can be, and empowering people to use AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to make changes to their website easily is going to mean that people aren’t going to log into these dashboards as much as they have in the past. And you’re absolutely correct there. I know we’re going to be sitting for a while with this dual-interface paradigm, where we still have to build an interface for the people who want to go do it all manually. But the interface we build for the people who don’t has to be as powerful, if not more powerful, than the one for the people who do.

Carl Alexander: Very true.

Zach Stepek: Very cool stuff. We went all over the place in this one.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, we did. Classic.

Zach Stepek: I mean, it is classic us, right? And that is why we build systems, because we need the tools to keep us on one track, which we definitely showed today is not what we had today. But it’s good stuff, and I’m excited to continue talking about and thinking about the future with you, and seeing where our predictions land in the end. So, anything you want to say to the listeners before we wrap up here?

Carl Alexander: No, I’m good. Looking forward to chatting next month.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, me too.

Carl Alexander: We’ll see where I’m at, lots of life changes right now, so who knows. I feel like August was crazy, September was crazy, hopefully October is not as crazy, but bring some stability for me.

Zach Stepek: Absolutely. I hope for that for you as well.

Carl Alexander: Yeah, same. Thank you. And good luck with the exhibit, very excited for you.

Zach Stepek: Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited to see where it goes. I’ve got to do some more promotion for it this afternoon, but just excited to have people come through and see the work.

Carl Alexander: And yeah, I love that. That’s how I felt when my dad did exhibits too, he did sales once in a while, but it was just fun to have his work hung up somewhere, shown, people seeing it and chatting with people. It’s great.

Zach Stepek: Yeah, well, I’ll let you know how it goes, and we’ll report back next episode. We’ll definitely have to talk about and do a postmortem on the gallery show in the next episode. As always, if you have ideas, suggestions, thoughts, if you want to talk to us and get involved in the insanity that is one of these episodes, hashtag BugBob on all social platforms. We look forward to speaking to you next month.