The last thing WordPress ever asked of me was an update. A plugin wanted to upgrade, the upgrade clashed with another plugin, and the page builder decided this was a fine moment to lose a block. There I was on a Saturday morning, debugging an admin screen I never wanted to build.
So I stopped. Not with the site, with WordPress.
This is the first part in a short series about what happens when you use AI not as an advisor but as an operator. I am starting with the concrete story, because the abstract only makes sense once you have watched it work.
Four things that piled up
It was not one thing. It was four, and they ran into each other.
The updates. Something to upgrade every week, and every upgrade a small bet on whether anything would break. Maintenance was eating time I would rather spend writing.
The builder. I was fighting the tool. Dragging blocks, hunting for a setting buried in some side panel, shipping output heavier than the content justified.
The distance between idea and live. Log in, click, format a draft, preview, go back again. By the time a thought was published, the energy had drained out of it.
And the quiet worry in the background. Hosting, vulnerabilities, the question of what happens when someone finds a hole in a plugin I installed three years ago and had long forgotten.
None of those four was big enough to justify the move on its own. Together they became unbearable.
What replaced it
My sites now run on Astro, static, on Cloudflare. No database, no admin panel, no plugins. The content is just text in files. And I manage all of it by talking to Claude.
That sounds more abstract than it is, so here is the concrete version. Four things that WordPress and a stack of separate tools used to do for me now run through one place.
Writing and publishing. I write the piece, Claude puts it in the right file in the right folder, checks that it holds together, and ships it. No CMS in between. The text I write is the text that appears.
Images. The cover on this article was generated locally, on my own machine, with no stock site and no plugin. One instruction, a few minutes of waiting, done.
Distribution. The newsletter and the socials run through connectors. From the same place where I write, I can stage an edition or schedule a post without five tabs open.
The plumbing underneath. Schema, sitemaps, multiple languages, the build, the deploy. A handful of plugins used to do that, often halfway. Now it lives in the code and Claude checks it on every change.
What I lost, and what I didn’t
Let me be honest: I gave something up. The click-and-see-it-instantly of a visual builder is gone. For someone who does not want to touch code, this is not a free move.
But I gave up less than I expected. The barrier I feared, the technical part, turned out to be exactly the part Claude takes off my plate. I describe what I want, it turns that into code, and if it breaks I see it in the preview before it goes live.
What I got back is harder to measure but more important: the distance between an idea and a published piece is now close to zero. No more maintenance nibbling at my weekend. No more quiet worry about a hole in a forgotten plugin.
My rule
There is a catch, and I do not want to paper over it. If you let AI execute, you give it access. To your files, your publishing channel, soon your mail or your calendar. Convenience and access are the same thing seen from two sides.
So I keep one rule. Claude may execute where I see the result. Publish a piece: yes, because I read the preview. Change a file: yes, because I see the change. But sending something quietly, a mail or a message that leaves without me having looked at it, that it does not do for me. The line is not drawn at what the machine can do. It is drawn at what I still check with my own eyes.
WordPress asked for my attention on maintenance. This setup asks for my attention on review. That is a better trade than it sounds, because the first was work I did not want, and the second is the work that actually matters.
In the next part I get into what this means in principle, now that remote connections are on by default and the assistant no longer sits in a chat window but moves into your tools.
This is part 1 of a series on AI as an operator. See also the underlying piece on AI psychosis and the last mile.