Ellen Bauer @ellenbauer

🧸in my coffee

A year after withdrawing its first official block theme, WooCommerce says the time it spent improving core blocks and the editor made Purple worth bringing back. 🔗 therepository.email/woocommerce-re…

What if you could generate a site with Lovable, Base44, v0, Claude, ChatGPT, etc, and import into WordPress as a real block theme? Oh wait you can github.com/Automattic/sta…

The problem with making awesome website interactions is you waste so much time just basking in its glory 😂

Stoked to finally hit publish on this one. About a year in the making since our last update on Purple. 📣 Call for testing: Purple, a WooCommerce block theme developer.woocommerce.com/2026/09/15/pur…

I’m also really excited to have this one out in the world —

Brian Coords 💻 @briancoords

5 days ago

Stoked to finally hit publish on this one. About a year in the making since our last update on Purple. 📣 Call for testing: Purple, a WooCommerce block theme developer.woocommerce.com/2026/09/15/pur…

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60+ creative growth ideas Everyone's running the same growth playbook: high-production launch videos, paid influencers, AEO, social, maybe some (poorly attended) events. Your competitors are in the same channels competing for the same eyeballs. But attention goes to what people don't see coming. The unexpected gets shared for free, remembered for months, and usually costs less than one week of ad spend. @TomOrbach has dedicated his life to collecting creative growth ideas that worked. Every time he sees a startup do something clever, it goes on the list. Here are his 64 best, sorted by what you're trying to do: 1. I want to generate buzz (without paid ads/influencers) 2. I want my launch to make noise 3. I want other people to spread the word for me 4. I want more leads and conversions 5. I want to outsmart my competitors 6. I want customers to pay more (and be happy about it) 7. I want customers to stay forever All 64 ideas: lennysnewsletter.com/p/60-creative-…

"First do it, then do it right, then do it better." Just start. The journey to success often begins with a single step, but that first step can be the hardest to take. It's easy to get caught up in the fear of failure or the desire for perfection, but I hope this quote I first shared in 2013 can be a reminder of the importance of simply getting started as we go into 2024. Just Start Somewhere "Start slow if you have to. Start small if you have to. Start privately if you have to. Just start." - James Clear Taking that first step doesn't require perfection or immediate mastery. The key is to overcome inertia and take action, as this action will lead to progress, learning, and (if you’re lucky and consistent) ultimately success. When you start, you allow yourself the opportunity to grow, adapt, and move forward. The Power of Starting Beginning a new project or habit often feels daunting. According to psychologists, we tend to overestimate the pain of starting and underestimate our ability to persist. However, studies show that "small starts" predict eventual success better than initial enthusiasm or early progress. This phenomenon is known as the fresh start effect - taking the first step energizes us and bolsters motivation. So focus on starting without putting pressure on perfection. Progress and course corrections will follow. First, Do It: Embrace the MVP Mindset Doing it = get the simplest MVP out. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) represents the simplest version of a product or idea that allows you to test, gather feedback, and iterate. By embracing this mindset (just get something done - it's OK if rough, a prototype, a draft), you focus on progress over perfection, understanding that getting something out into the world is far more valuable than waiting for the perfect moment. Expand Your Comfort Zone Venturing outside one's comfort zone can elicit fears of failure. Leaning into discomfort not only builds confidence and skills, but research shows it makes us more receptive to learning. Recognize that fear is often the mind's way of urging us to grow. Don't let it stop you from progressing. Then, Do It Right: Refine and Correct Doing it right = fix correctness issues. Once you've taken that first step and put your MVP out into the world, it's time to refine and correct. This stage is about learning from feedback, identifying areas of improvement, and making adjustments accordingly. It's a chance to iterate on your idea, ensuring that it meets the needs of your audience or customers while aligning with your vision. Cultivate Curiosity and Resilience Meeting new challenges with curiosity and resilience makes venturing outside our comfort zone more sustainable and enjoyable. Cultivate curiosity about growth opportunities and your capacity to rise to them. Set mini-challenges to incrementally expand your horizons. When facing inevitable setbacks, avoid self-criticism and tap into resilience - the ability to recover, learn and continue progressing. Self-compassion, adaptability and maintaining perspective are key here. With consistent effort, you build confidence in your ability to start, stumble, learn and work toward mastery. Finally, Do It Better: Strive for Continuous Improvement "Doing it better = iterate towards an ideal end-state (e.g., make it fast)." The journey doesn't end with merely doing it right. The final step is to continuously improve, striving for excellence and growth. By iterating towards an ideal end-state, you demonstrate a commitment to progress, ensuring that your product, idea, or project remains relevant, innovative, and successful. Set New Goalposts As you improve, have a clear idea of when you are “done” or update your goalposts. Elite athletes turn small gains into competitive edges via the aggregation of marginal gains. Identify areas of potential improvement and set measurable stretch goals, from increasing efficiency to enhancing user delight. Overcoming the Greatest Barrier to Progress "The greatest barrier to progress is not lack of resources or talent, but fear of failure." Recognizing that fear of failure is the most significant obstacle in the pursuit of success allows you to confront it head-on. By acknowledging this fear, you can focus on taking that first step, knowing that once the ball starts rolling, it becomes much easier to keep it in motion. Remember that starting is more than half the battle. Don't wait until you feel ready, because the perfect moment may never come. The Bottom Line Rather than striving for perfect execution, embrace the power of starting - put forth an MVP, soft launch an initiative, or set a milestone. Progress begets motivation. By simply starting, you open the door to growth and innovation. The rest will follow. Embrace the power of starting and then iterating until you're happy.

SpaceXAI engineer Lauren Tan: "99% of people are using GrokBot with less than 1% of its real power They run a single agent without loops or graphs" "I'm running a fully autonomous team of 20+ GrokBot agents One Chief of Staff, one PM, and 20+ workers That's the new engineering stack" GrokBot → Chief of Staff → PM → Workers → Autonomous Fleet In a 1-hour session, a SpaceXAI engineer shows how to build a powerful AI agent team from scratch This workshop is worth more than most $1,000 agent engineering courses Bookmark and watch it today Then read the article below

rari @0xwhrrari

3 weeks ago

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Students at 2 campuses in Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, built 108 websites in 2 weeks. The free, volunteer-led WordPress Campus Connect program helped them learn by building, and most had never created a website before. wp.me/pZhYe-5CP

📣 Call for Volunteers: WordCamp Asia 2027! 🇲🇾 Join our crew in Penang, Malaysia (Apr 9–11, 2027)! Help us build an amazing experience for the global community while making lifelong connections. 🎁 Free ticket, swag & meals included! (Ticket refunds available if selected). ⏰ Closes Nov 13, 2026 📌 Apply: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… #WCAsia2027 #WordPress

@pootlepress Wow, amazing WC Asia in Mumbai was one of the highlights of my year so far. How cool that you are visiting back and spend more time with in India and connect with the community there ❤️

The @WooCommerce team has been really trucking.

Darren Ethier @nerrad

2 weeks ago

You're waiting for my weekly list of merged work in WooCommerce aren't you? 120 PRs were merged last week, here's 10 that I've pulled out for this list...

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My biggest takeaways from Grok @Bot product lead @RomanUgarte_: 1. Two key early product decisions made Grok Bot the success it has become. First, everything runs in the cloud. This means bots can be kicked off from a phone and run while the user sleeps. Second, each bot has access to its own computer. This allows it to operate on tools that have no API because they can simply use the computer the way a human would. 2. “Unshipping” is a big opportunity in product right now. One of the most counterintuitive things the Grok Bot team did in the weeks between internal beta and public launch was remove features. They initially exposed internal model thinking, memory traces, and developer-style observability tools inside the product. They decided to cut all that out. Their mental model for the product is a colleague: you wouldn't ask a teammate for second-by-second updates on every button they're pressing, so the bot shouldn't either. 3. The decision to make it a separate app (vs. inside Cursor) was not at all obvious. The team had the option to build Grok Bot inside Cursor, the way some competitors added knowledge-work tabs to their existing coding surfaces. Roman says the decision not to do that gave them complete control over every pixel and allowed them to build around a single, coherent vision of how an AI assistant should feel. The alternative, he argues, is "shipping your org chart"— and users can feel it. 4. Grok Bot went from the first line of code to a viral internal beta in four weeks. The team moved into a separate part of the office, set up private Slack channels, and made dozens of micro-decisions every day without needing buy-in from the larger org. This allowed them to go from internal beta to global launch in 3 weeks. 5. Roman and his team onboarded 200 to 300 people personally. This was one of the highest-leverage investments they made. When something broke or confused a user, the team felt it and fixed it the next day. Beyond the product improvements, the onboarding surfaced non-obvious use cases the internal team would never have imagined. A coffee shop owner found through a friend of a friend became one of Grok Bot’s most active users and a rich source of Shopify-integration feedback. 6. The Grok Bot team is “colleague-pilled” (vs. AGI-pilled). When the Grok Bot team hits a product decision with good arguments on both sides, they use a test: how would you want a human teammate to behave in this exact situation? Roman says the answer is almost always unanimous and clarifying. This is how Grok Bot landed on hiding internal mechanics from users, on building automations through natural language rather than UI, and on the huddle-style voice experience they’re building toward. 7. Grok Bot’s GTM team became one of its most enthusiastic internal user groups. Sales work depends on tools that often lack reliable integrations. Giving the bot a computer meant it could interact with those products the same way employees do. The resulting feedback forced them to level up Grok Bot’s computer use: the mouse needed finer control to click a particular part of a Salesforce dashboard. The infrastructure team would fix that invisible capability and hear the next day that the whole workflow finally worked. 8. Moats are discovered, not engineered. Roman said that if Cursor had tried to work backward from a moat strategy, it would not have created the product or the outcome it did. What worked was an obsession with building something genuinely useful today, pulling future capabilities forward even when they required significant engineering to stabilize, and then deleting that scaffolding as the models improved. The distribution advantages and data advantages followed from that. 9. Innovating requires the cultural willingness to abandon sunk costs. Roman’s explanation for why competitors haven’t made the same cloud-first, bot-gets-its-own-computer bets isn’t that they missed the insight. It’s that they’re stuck in an existing paradigm with real sunk costs. Most companies can see where the market is going; fewer have the stomach to act on it when acting means deprecating their current product. The advantage of building something new is that you get to be right about the future without the weight of having been right about the past. 10. Roman's advice for new users: connect Slack and email, then ask Grok Bot to go through them and suggest five things it could take off your plate. When he did this himself, two of the five were things no previous AI tool could have done, and he spun off two bots to handle them on the spot.

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

2 weeks ago

Grok @bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three

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Love this one

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

3 weeks ago

I'd always thought AI was terrible at design, but after reading today's 🤯 post by @anshuc, I realized I was just doing it wrong. "AI models are capable of amazing creativity, but that creativity gets stifled. LLMs are trained to be next-token predictors: they look at a sequence

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The WordPress security team has started the Core Security Initiative to strengthen how the project handles a growing number of security reports. The work focuses on better release testing, reducing the backlog of open findings, and using AI-assisted tools to identify vulnerabilities earlier. make.wordpress.org/security/?p=297

Anthropic engineer: "90% of our engineers were already running self-improving loops Now everyone is building the harness around them" "Prompting is basically finished" In just 10 minutes, she builds her complete Claude Code harness live from an empty terminal Agents → Harness → Loops → Graphs → Self-Improving Systems Prompting was the old workflow Harness engineering is the next one This 10-minute breakdown is worth more than most $1,000 agent engineering courses Watch it today Then save the full guide on harness engineering below before everyone catches on ↓

rari @0xwhrrari

3 weeks ago

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In 2027, WordCamp Asia heads to Penang, Malaysia, a UNESCO World Heritage city known for its rich culture, creativity, and warm hospitality. Across two days at the Penang Waterfront Convention Centre, you’ll connect with WordPress professionals, developers, agencies, entrepreneurs, and business leaders from 70+ countries. The last edition brought together 2,627 attendees. Showcase your brand, find new partners, and recruit talent. Your support keeps WordCamp Asia accessible, strengthens the open-source community, and creates connections that last beyond the event. Become a Sponsor: forms.gle/kgWG14F1nvLfSJ…

Love seeing this. If you've been sitting on a redesign you keep putting off, WordPress Studio is a pretty low-stakes place to start.

Andrea Grassi @andrea_sdl

4 weeks ago

If you use WordPress and never tried WordPress Studio (especially the beta) you're missing out on its AI features. I just took it for a spin to restyle my blog using a blog theme on a cheap WordPress.com personal plan and it did a great job.

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