Tammie Lister joins Luke and Jonathan to discuss vibe coding, product thinking, and breaking free from a designer typecast into a reputation for product engineering. They also discuss the importance and relevance of WordPress, themes, and cricket.

Transcript#

Jonathan:
Luke, Tammie, this is a unique opportunity to have a conversation with the both of you in the same virtual place at the same time across these time zones and spaces. AndThat was everybody’s.. still is on some developers, but it’s not of fashion anymore to have a snippet library that is sat there, right? one of the things I’d love to talk about is the experience that you guys have had making products. And the first thing that’s top of mind for me is what types of tools are you guys using these days? What are you actually having fun with especially over the past couple of months?

Tammie:
So my toolkit kind of remains the same at the foundation level, but always kind of evolves with the technology. And the foundation level is always going to be my whiteboard to the side of me and then a good pack of post-its. That’s always my good friend and my iPad to sketch or whatever happens to be to sketching.

And the reason I mentioned that is I feel that whatever we’re going to make, even if we use like whatever I want to use, it really is important to kind of do the sketching. But I really just like getting the prototypes out. Be it Cursor.. I’ve been using Telex, just trying to get that idea out really fast to a prototype enough, whatever format that needs to be done. And it could be any number of different tools lately. And I’m trying to be relatively tool agnostic. Like I use Figma, but I also use Pen Pot. And then getting it to a point where I can then refine it. That’s always important to me.

Jonathan:
What about you, Luke? What have you been enjoying making things with?

Luke:
Well, I think Cursor is becoming less and less great, actually. I’m not speaking against vibe coding in this instance. I think the Claude code is probably the premier tool when it comes to that sort of thing. But Cursor, I feel like Cursor has had its time now, you know, like I think it’s on the.., do you agree, Tammie?

Tammie:
I do, I think it’s had its time particularly. I had a little mini rant, a very English rant this week about, I feel now it’s got like site builder in it. I just want to go back to the terminal with Claude and then it just feels like the right space to vibe because I’m still prototyping.

Luke:
Yeah. Yeah, give me one tool that does one thing.

But in term, to answer your question, I haven’t been working on a ton of little side projects. I mean, I’ve always got like little things bouncing around in my head, except that at Enqueue, Tammie said to me, you know, there’s no great tea timer apps. You know, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept of tea Jonathan, you know, you take some leaves..

Jonathan:
..Is that something you drink?

Luke:
Yeah, that’s right. And, ⁓ so, so usually if you’re making tea properly, depending on the type of tea that you’re making, you want to have a particular..

Jonathan:
Well, yeah, I just get the Celestial Seasonings box and I take out one of those little packets and drop it in. ⁓ It’s good to go. Isn’t that proper tea?

Tammie:
Oh dear. Oh no.

Jonathan:
Carry on, carry on.

Luke:
You need a particular temperature and you need it to brew for a particular amount of time. And there are some apps that help you with that, but they were all ugly. So Tammie and I decided, ⁓ like, let’s see what it’s like to try to build something. And she was sitting next to each other in this conference and while we listening to some of the talks, she’s got her iPad out she’s doing some sketches and she in free form and she shared the free form with me. So then I had access to it too.

And then in the breaks without any vibe coding, by the way. And I maintain by the way that vibe coding is not faster than regular coding, although it does make it more accessible to people who aren’t as comfortable regular coding. So I put together, I guess the prototype. I put together the first version of that and we did it in SwiftUI because screw Android man, who needs that?

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Luke:
I’ve built Android apps before, it was a nightmare. And so we built it in SwiftUI, it all works, it looks terrible. But we’ve got the prototype, you know, it looks like a fat market sketch turned into a SwiftUI app.

Jonathan:
Cool. One of the things that’s been interesting for me, so my initial draw to WordPress all those decades ago was that I, as a relative non-developer, could build things. WordPress opened up this possibility for me to, like, a client project would come along, like, yeah, I can find a plugin for that, I can assemble the things I need to, I can make that happen. And then I steadily added, I remember when I first started working with, like, being able to do some of those, I’m forgetting some of the.. there’s some functions in WordPress that you let you like cURL, pulling stuff from remote URLs and processing it. And like that was pushing the edges of my capability, starting to work with the file system and do all that stuff. and I really enjoyed that. And then over the past couple of years, I’ve done a lot less of the like actual development with all this, this AI stuff though. My friend Kevin Ohashi finally made me install Cursor and he’s like, you got to actually like play with this. This was almost a little less than a year ago.

And I remember I started to get excited again about how I could like take ideas in my head and get them out. And I remember, and we talked about this in Crossword earlier, Luke.. I’m like, I’d made something, but and this is maybe just something for my own therapist to talk to, But like, I didn’t want to show it to you because I’m like, ⁓ Luke, this is not going to be a proper this isn’t proper. I’m like, but I wouldn’t have made a plugin if I didn’t have the ability to do this. And yet I really wanted to do it well.

So it’s been interesting to me for you two are both more technical than I am by quite a bit in terms of just the comfort that you have being able to do stuff yourself. And while I can understand the code and work on it, in practice, what I found interesting about these new wave of tools is that it let me express my interests in a way that just wouldn’t have been as accessible otherwise. But then just brought up a new of like, man, is this like going to be good enough or whatever the case but I’ll talk to my therapist about that.

Luke:
Well, it sort of brings up something I wanted to ask Tammie about. I’ve been, I’ve been developing slowly this like theory of mind, this idea that… Vibe coding is not for everyone.

You know, we often say like, programming is not for everyone. Coding is not for everyone. It suits some people more than others. And my experience with vibe coding has been that people say about it, everyone can code now. Right? That’s the thing that people, you know, they lift it up, they go, vibe coding, it makes coding accessible. Anyway, but.

The only people who are actually Vibe coding are software engineer adjacents. I’m talking designers, I’m talking product managers and product owners and all this sort of stuff, right?

I don’t know myself, anyone who is like a beauty therapist or works in a grocery store or is a barista who’s also interested in vibe coding independent of other interests in tech. Do you think that’s sound? Am I heading in the right direction there or have I made a mistake?

Tammie:
So to me, and bear with me a minute, the analogy I would use is sketching to actually creating art. And that kind of is what vibe coding is, you’re kind of sketching the idea out. We’ve just put a different term on it, but that’s kind what you’re doing, right? You’re sketching it out. And if we think that vibe coding produces anything more than a sketch, that’s adorable.

But we maybe should, like, should be refining it a little bit more than that. Sketches can be amazing. And, you know, you look at some of the fine artist sketchbooks and you see them in display in libraries and you’re like, wow, like they’re incredible. So it doesn’t dismiss what is produced at all.

But that’s the way that I see vibe coding and to assume that everyone can sketch is complete fallacy. So to assume that everyone can vibe code is complete fallacy. I don’t know if you need to have the knowledge. think nowadays, if you have the knowledge how to plan, like what you were talking about where we sat down, I sat down and I planned it out and then you could do it. That was kind of sketching. That was vibe coding. just would, that was vibe in quotation marks, but we just would use our knowledge and we were using our process. It’s the same kind of process. It’s just people using different tools. We used to use snippet libraries, right? That was everybody’s.. still is on some developers, but it’s not of fashion anymore to have a snippet library that is sat there, right?

Luke:
Paste into functions.php.

Tammie:

Yeah. Or also have like an app that has it. There used to be like this massive thing where you’d have your app and you’d maintain like your docs files and everyone would pass the doc files around. And that was kind of vibe coding because you’d be sharing your libraries of doc files like back in the day with all the different languages. And we’ve always been looking at shortcuts to get the sketches out. So to me, it’s sketching and to presume that everyone can make a mark. ⁓ on a piece of paper, not everyone can sketch and absolutely, unfortunately, it is true, not everyone can do art.

Jonathan:
Well, and would it make sense to you guys to argue that sketching is like, it’s a form of communication. So there’s doodling where you’re just putting something out there, but sketching is often like you’re trying to communicate an idea. ⁓

Tammie:
Well, I think doodles do communicate an idea because doodling is a communicative form of ⁓ sketching, but that’s maybe a nuance because of my art background.

Jonathan:
I think it can convey the idea that I’m bored or that, like, least, what I’m talking about too is the difference between absentmindedly putting marks on paper while you’re doing something, like as a way of just occupying yourself versus the intention.

I think about this from my own skills at sketching. I can do a decent job and I’ve noticed I’ve gotten better at that of being able to put something on a paper and convey it. But even that is a whole set of skills and it’s about communicating an idea and then going to just higher levels of fidelity in code, right? Where it’s like, okay, how does this actually interact?

Tammie:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that doesn’t mean that people can’t learn the foundational, that they can’t use these tools. It just means that different tools are needed to be available. And I think that’s the thing to say like, oh yeah, we’re done with the modern tools, the modern or the tools we have now are done. No, they’re not accessible to everyone. They’re not the, they’re just the first piece that we have to get this power and knowledge to be in the hands of everybody. We need to create the next lot of those of us that are as excited by these tools. We need to create the next wave of tools so that people can then unlock what creativity they have.

Now everybody has creativity that is something I would argue I would just argue that not everyone can create art there’s a fine line between that right just everyone has creativity in a different form.

Luke:
You said your tools earlier included a whiteboard and iPad. Do you ever use pen and paper or pencil and paper?

Tammie:
Mm-hmm. Yep, I do. And in fact, I’ve found more and more kind of over the past kind of couple of years, I’ve gone a little bit back to it. And again, I always go back to my post-its. There is something about if I’m doing a talk, I have a wall where I form out.

things if I’m doing a user flow I will form out a user flow on that wall. There’s something about physically like walking through that flow and when I’m talking about whiteboard I have literally to the side of me a whole wall covered in white paper so like a whiteboard so I will there’s something about physically standing up there, like CSI style, but there’s something about that that really gets me.

I had, I think it was over decade ago, I was like, I’m gonna be completely paperless. ⁓ And I do create more digital art, but I’ve gone back to painting a little bit more as I get older, and I’ve gone back to sketching a little bit more with paper as well. I still will lean more into the iPad, but I use my iPad like you would use a notepad.

Luke:
Mm. So we can’t. So we can’t burn all the paper yet.

Speaking of burning paper. What do get when you burn paper?

Tammie:
Choco? Don’t you? Lashes? Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

Luke:
Ashes. Ashes. Speaking of ashes, I have to ask.. have you been watching the ashes?

Tammie:
I haven’t, but that’s the name of my dog.

Luke:
really? Well, I can tell you that-

Jonathan:
So she’s been watching the ashes indirectly through her border collie.

Luke:
Okay..

Tammie:
I’m not even sure what the ashes are.

Luke:
Well, I just thought it would be a real, um, I thought it’d be a real waste to have an English, an English woman. I almost said Englishman. I can’t really say that. Can I? What would you say? Is that, is that right? English woman? Yeah. English, English person..

Tammie:
No, English person, let’s go with that.

Luke:
It does feel a little awkward, um, to have an English person and an Aussie on the, on the podcast. We won’t go into how Australians shorten everything to like fiery and posty and how that’s all chengwe.

Tammie:
You can call me a Brit if you need to. There you go.

Luke:
A Brit. There we go. That’s what I’m looking for. Thank you.

Luke:
And I could not bring up the cricket because England are getting a lot at the moment a little bit.

Tammie:
I mean, unless it’s the women football team, I’m not surprised. Because our women football team’s pretty good. Well, maybe we’ll beat yours.

Luke:
Yeah. So is our women’s football team. ⁓ I think yours is good too, Jonathan. Yours is one of the best.

Jonathan:
Yeah, the women’s football it actually is.

Tammie:
This one’s pretty good.

Luke:
We can chop all of that out, but I just had to bring in cricket as an option. I needed to try. I needed to try.

Jonathan:
No, no, we have to get a cricket reference in. No, not chopping.

I wanted to bring up something else that I’ve been thinking about and started with you, Luke, this last year. This question of where effort fits into this product making space. Because the experience that I had, I put a couple of hours into prompting, getting that plugin, and then I’d ask you for feedback.

And one of the things that you, I’m thinking about the things that you both have brought to my attention that has sort of impacted my thinking. With you, Luke, one of the things that I learned in that process is when you’re working on the plugin review team, you guys have to deal with a lot of low effort submissions, especially lately with AI, right? Where people are, know, vibe coding the plugin, dropping a submission to the plugin review team.

You guys are manually doing, even though you have automation, there’s still real human time and effort going into reviewing those. You’ll give detailed feedback, and then you’ve seen circumstances where folks will just give that to their AI model and feed it right back, and you’ll not even bother to have read either side of the response. And that really stuck with me because I don’t want to do that to a fellow human. It bothers me when the same happens.

And so something I’ve wrestled with is where does effort play into all this? Because you can have a lot, even as tools get better, they still require effort to wield them and to put them to what you’re trying to do. And it may be less just overall time. So I don’t know, that’s something I’ve been wrestling with that I think you, helped me become more sensitive to, especially in my interactions with others. Like if I’m going to use AI tools to generate something.

It’s like, well, what’s the purpose of it? Is it just for my own like prototyping? And if I share it, what expectation is being attached to that about the effort that I put to create it? Because I find myself questioning a lot more now too, when I see something of like, someone showed me something, like how much effort did they really put into that? Which is also a reflection of like the thoughts behind it and the intentions. I don’t know, I’m curious for both of you, like how do you think about the role that effort plays even as our tools are evolving and changing like the amount of time it might take. Even though Luke, sounds like you don’t think vibe coding really saves time.

Luke:
It definitely doesn’t. There are studies that show that it doesn’t. Wat it does do is it increases developers confidence in their abilities to achieve something. And it might also increase their abilities to achieve something. Although that’s not what the studies have measured. ⁓ But it doesn’t actually save time.

Where I think people think it saves time is this. If you said to me, hey, can you build this Node.js backend? I’d say back to you, look, it’s going to take a lot of time because not really that familiar with Node.js. It’s been a while. so I’m going to have to re-familiarize myself with it. It’s going to be a lot of Stack Overflow and I’m going to have to go back and forth a lot. And so…

But now with AI tools, maybe that does save me time because I am more familiar. But when it comes to something I’m already pretty good at, say like writing a WordPress plugin, that I’m not saving time by vibe coding there.

Tammie:
Yeah, think it depends on the person. It’s very individual and your process and your flow. With me, I definitely use it as part of my ideation phase. So I would say it, as a result, saves me time during that. So it’s like, rather than me spending, I mean, I have it.

Jonathan:
That makes sense.

Tammie:
It’s been a while since I prototyped in Figma now. I will dive straight into prototyping something real in like code now. So it’s saving time and also it’s saved time because I can get that in, I can get user response directly that way. I can also save time in the sense of I can find out whether something’s a good or a bad idea pretty quickly that way. So I think that that… that is where it can save time.

I would possibly push back and I know that the studies but I think the studies have looked at people who are incredibly skilled. What I don’t it’s looked at people who are hybrids as much and I don’t think it’s looked at people who are on the cusp. And that’s kind of me And I think those of us who are hybrid skilled. I think it actually does save us time.. And it is a tool that has been incredibly empowering to those of us that kind of bridge between different spaces.

Luke:
Yeah, you’re right.

Tammie:
I don’t have an equivalent to that for product. There is no like vibe shortcut for product. I mean, yes, there were tools that use AI and that, but not really, right? But it allows me to be able to get things out enough in that space. And I can’t pay attention to two. I don’t have a time traveling machine. I don’t can’t pay attention to the spaces 100%. If you are 100 % in one space, then no, think your point is valid.

Luke:
Can I ask.. with a lot of this discussion so far in no small part because of your art degree, it’s all been sort of in this realm of design and product design that we’ve been talking about. Now I know that for a lot of people when they hear your name, they think Gutenberg design lead. And I know you’ve been like boxed in a little bit in that design role in word.

Tammie:
Mm-hmm.

Luke:
Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and what it’s like trying to break out of being the design person?

Tammie:
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting for me because I wasn’t the design person. I was the theme person and doing themes before that. And I’ve done just as much software engineering and why actually when we’re talking about like, vibe coding, why I really like prompting is because I learned algorithms and I loved making a good algorithm back in the day, like in shell and all those kinds of stuff. So yes, that kind of experience.

For me, I think it is something that I want to make sure that we embrace hybrids. I think that’s the feeling. I do feel that now we are starting to in this day and age. I think almost everyone is having to be a hybrid. I think that is very challenging for some people. And I would love to be able to make that easier for some people because I do think if you’re a developer, you’ve now got to know enough about experience to be able to like… be nuanced about what you create and use a design system with the intelligence of someone who knows enough about experience and that’s not belittling you but maybe you’ve just been in a corner doing code and you’ve never had to do that before but now because of design systems you don’t have a front end like we have this term full stack developer which is adorable but it it doesn’t it affects people on both ends of the stack as well.

Luke:
Mm-mm.

Tammie:
So for me personally, I gave up a while ago trying to disprove any of those kind of things and I just tried by the work that I do to prove that I do both things. It has given me a freedom though, I think, to be able to just bounce around in different spaces because no one necessarily expects the designer to know stuff about code sometimes, so I can kind of surprise by knowing about code, which is always like a sneak attack.

Luke:
Nice. Yeah.

Tammie:
But it is a kind of an interesting space. But we do that to a lot of people in WordPress particularly, but in general, like if you as a developer, it will be presumed, okay, you absolutely have no product knowledge. You absolutely do have a vast amount of product knowledge. And we’ve had the conversations about that, but that’s not necessarily something at all that people know about you. And Jonathan, people don’t necessarily know that you have the development background you have. It’s the same kind of thing. They look at the one thing that they know you for doing.

Jonathan:
It’s been interesting for me in my own experience, like, I guess a lot of my outputs are ⁓ writing, right? Like whether it’s emails, whether it’s agreements, you know, etc. And I noticed recently I was working on an important piece of writing and I did not use any AI either in my thinking in that particular case, like I went for a walk to do some thinking. And I really like these AI tools.

And I’ve noticed for myself, ⁓ the primary value that I found is bridging gaps in my knowledge and like as an educational tool. And as a, I’ve seen a lot of value as like a prototyping assistant for sure. And in my experience, like building a plugin, it was my knowledge, hard earned and effort connected to prior mistakes that I’d made that helped informed how I guided the tools to make what I needed to. And also I’m like, Luke’s gonna see this. ⁓ What are the things that I need to be aware of?

But just thinking about my own usage of it, I find these tools to be great to bring new things to me, to make something accessible that wouldn’t have been readily as accessible otherwise. But at the end of the day, after all this, I’m finding that I don’t really use AI tools to help me with my writing, for instance. To your point, Luke, it wouldn’t make that faster for me. Because when I read something that’s generated, I’m like, ⁓ no, this isn’t the way I’m, this is, it’s close, but it’s not good enough and I’d spend just as much time trying to like fix that.

Luke:
Mm-hmm.

Tammie:
But that’s also because writing is kind of one of your things. So for me, Grammarly, more than anything, has always been one of my things since I found it before AI, because ⁓ it’s an interesting thing that happens between my brain and words and the way that they come out. And the AI in Grammarly really is useful for me. It takes my word soup and generally makes it kind of comprehensive as well. But writing like that isn’t necessarily my thing.

And comprehension for me. If someone shares a big piece of writing, that can be a lot for me, particularly if it’s late in the day. So I actually will then get the kind of the notes from it, particularly, and then I can kind of get a point and then I can read it when my brain’s a little bit less overwhelmed by life. then so things like that are useful for me.

And I also want to say these are the first wave really of a lot of these tools. And it’s a little bit like the kind of like the kids first Christmas. So we’ve played with everything, the wrapping’s on the floor, and now we’re just like, meh, what’s next, right? We’ve a lot of this stuff. So we’re looking at that, and that’s kind of what I’m excited with is which of these tools do we take? And I’m finding that I don’t use all the tools anymore that I was using beginning of the year, or even the middle of the year. And then what do we use going forward? I started to use voice more than I never used voice before, and I started to use that a little bit more now as well.

So we’re starting to use these tools in different ways and find things that fit into our lives.

Jonathan:
I love that you mentioned Grammarly. think this is a good example where I don’t judge anyone, and in fact quite the opposite, like for using AI tools to assist with things. What I notice is like, I’ve noticed that the quality of all the emails and LinkedIn communications I get has gone up in one sense, but I actually ignore a lot more of it because it’s pretty clear to me that that wasn’t a real human.

Like, who wrote the message, right? So it’s like, from my perspective, it’s like, where’s the effort in the writing? It’s like, there’s no, there’s no judgment of like using the tools, but I still pay attention to like, did a human actually pay attention when they sent me that message that seemed really well crafted to my unique circumstances, but was often a few key ways that let me know that they didn’t even bother reading it themselves. And those are the things that even though it’s objectively a better quality than the things I was getting before I ignore them more and I pay even more attention to when I see what I would determine as genuine effort on the other side.

Tools like Grammarly have actually helped me like fill gaps in my like knowledge of things. But at the end of the day, with that new equipment, those new skills, I go back to using those skills and appreciating the effort that others put into using tools to make their communication and what they do better.

But yeah, I don’t know. That’s been my experience. It’s like, if I can tell that someone, if it feels like someone didn’t put much effort into it, similar to your frustrations, Luke, on the plugin review team, it’s like, I don’t want to put my efforts back.

Luke:
Yeah, I’ve always been a pretty good writer, but I guess because I know a lot of the rules and now I’m seeing a lot of the tokenized language, if you will. I’m using it as an opportunity to break the rules and I’m having fun with that. know, ⁓ this is obviously not AI generated, you know, the stuff that I’m producing because that’s, that’s the whole point of it. And it can be fun, but I’m waiting for it to get old.

Tammie touched on design systems earlier. And this is something that we’ve talked about a lot is the fact that WordPress doesn’t really have a design system.

And when EventKoi came out, we praised it for being a sort of WordPress-ish, even though it sort of did invent its own design system. And for other plugins, we slam them for not being WordPress ish. Is that something that is going to change?

Tammie:
So 7.0 is having quite a piece of that, not to kind of get into like a news version of this kind of podcast and more topic talking. I think it has more of a design system than it had and it’s getting more like HPR. I think that’s the point, but whatever design systems we have now, really, we’ve been talking about AI and we’ve talked about this, a design system now has to be a design system for systems, as much as it has to be a design system for like the end use. So it has to be one that is really the tokens have to be there to be able to be pulled in. And it’s not just humans that are going to pull it in. It’s kind of what I’m pointing out. ⁓ So we’ve had like storyboard documentation, check, check, check, right? All those things.

It’s now about like wwhat components do we need? What pieces do we need? how did all these combinations go? And even down to like, CSS has changed. What browsers do is change now so much that the whole everything, and do we need to even have this? I think one of the bigger questions, which I find fascinating is how much has to be in WordPress or how much is outside WordPress? So yes, we have variables, but how are those variables stored?

All of those kind of questions. There’s many questions to answer. I do feel that this coming year is going to be a lot of like working out what the version going ahead is. There’s a lot of really interesting opinions and kind of PRs floating around about that. And I’m kind of interested to see kind of how that works out. And it’s not like Figma, thank goodness. And it’s not all those kind of pieces. It’s actually a living system, which is really good.

Luke:
And really like foundationally built up from a documentation layer so that AI has, it’s sort of built AI first in that sense. Interesting. That’s cool.

Tammie:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan:
Tammie, one of the things that stood out to me in my experience working with you over the past couple of years, if someone asked me what I think product means a couple of years ago, I think my go-to, and I wouldn’t have meant this dismissively, but I would have thought of it more as design. That was how I thought of product, more of like, okay, yeah, it’s like how something looks. And think I could have gone a little bit more deeper than that.

But over the past couple of years, and especially working with you, I’ve seen a shift in my own thinking. And I think there’s something about, I think to me, it starts with asking different types of questions. Like what are you actually trying to do with this thing? And I’ve noticed that in your line of work. ⁓ But that’s been interesting to me, because as that shifted, and as I’ve begun to think about, product isn’t just how something looks or even how it operates, there’s this deeper level thing.

It’s been interesting to see that we don’t really have that as much as I would have thought we would in the WordPress ecosystem, like that product first thinking. So I don’t know, I’m curious, if you were to describe, how would you define what it means to bring product first thinking to the work that you’re doing?

Tammie:
Yeah, so I think we’re getting in more and we do have it in ways. I think we have it from a lot of engineer people ⁓ and we often overlook the engineers that think product. I’m going to kind of look at Luke on that aspect because we often, as you’re saying, we kind of look at people who are designers and we kind of link it to. And again, product can be just about as much as shipping and getting things delivered as it can be about ⁓ a design system.

To me, again, I go back to if I want to make something beautiful for beautiful sake, I will make a piece of art. If I want to make, if I want to do something that is functional and an experience, I will do design on its own.

I am lucky that I can do hybrid routes, right? If I want to do something that I know is going to be for a particular market and has an objective and has a delivery, for me that that’s and has those kind of aspects and technical, then that’s product. Doesn’t mean that I don’t do it with design and design and product do merge a little bit. ⁓ We can have so many debates about whether they should or they shouldn’t. For me, I do see product a little bit more technical.

Luke:
Hmm.

Tammie:
And I see product a lot more as a process and delivery. I do still see a need for project managers, 100% as well as product managers. And I think that’s also whenever you say about delivery, that’s also like, we don’t need project managers. You absolutely do because they’re very different roles. But it really to me is about looking at all aspects and should this even get shipped? Should it get made? Should it get shipped? Those are the questions.

It’s not just like, we got a roadmap? Yay, product’s done. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Luke:
We did a lot of that sort of thing when we were first developing the Gutenberg editor. I remember lots of product surveys and lots of user testing and all of that sort of thing. There was a lot of product work, but since that launch, it sort of disappeared. So I’m excited if that’s going to come back, especially for sort of like these sub features or like, how do you call them? Like highlight features, like collaborative editing.

Tammie:
Yes. Mm-hmm.

Luke:
I think also if we’re going to redesign the WordPress admin…

Tammie:
But that work is hard. Yeah, product work is hard and I think… A lot of the people who focus on product had to go and make products within the ecosystem as well. And that’s something that we often think about. have people who are contributing and then people who are working within the ecosystem as well. And you can always be focused on core as much as you can be on the ecosystem. So, but that productized thinking, as much as we say, like WordPress has design thinking, I would maybe push back and say it’s product first thinking as well. And bear in mind that the word product came after the word design. Sometimes like we really like to attach a term to something you know, vibe coding product but the term product evolved around us. It didn’t even exist when WordPress started as a project. I mean it did from like manufacturing but in the digital age it absolutely didn’t so we couldn’t have it as a concept. Product manager didn’t exist, linear didn’t exist.

Luke:
Yeah. My experience working with you with products over the years is that you always bring like, I’d say your primary motivation or the main thing that you bring to the table in terms of your priorities is a calm product design. That seems to be really important to you. Can you describe for me what you mean when you’re talking about creating calm products?

Tammie:
Yeah, so there actually is a methodology about calm products as well. But for me, it’s about is the product doing harm is one of the big things. What is this trying to create? Is it trying to function in this space as well? ⁓ We can get into like philosophy a little bit as well..

Luke:
Yeah, I’d be happy to.

Tammie:
I’m just as interested in the sustainability of the tech. And when I’m talking sustainability, yes, I absolutely mean environment, but I also mean, is this going to live to just make something that is frivolous..

We’ve kind of used the term of slop, like the AI kind of thing that just comes. I don’t think we necessarily need to build more and more products that are like that. I don’t think we need 100 more plugins that are like that. We need to be thinking about does this thing even need to get made? What is this going to benefit in the ecosystem that we’re going to make in this?

That’s kind of is where I take it to be.. from that kind of, and then in your own processes, how am I actually making this in a way that it gets made? How am I making it in a way that brings all of those ideas in?

It also comes into how am I looking at the latest technology and taking the best from the latest technology. So one of the kind of calm products, if you look at kind of those ideas, is a lot of e-ink screens. Now I personally love E Ink screens. That is to me, I actually think the way forward to have screens, it’s a lot healthier, better.

As much as I love my little iPad Mini, the interaction that you have from an E Ink screen is 100% better. Because as a human you can consume better that way as well. So making experiences that way just feels better on the longer term. Again, it’s like if you’re making something, what’s the impact of it making? And then what’s the impact of the process that you’re making as well?

Jonathan:
So you guys talked to talking about tools coming and going, I was thinking about through some of the tools that I’ve been using. And one particular highlight that I know you both are familiar with is a tool called Granola that keeps transcripts of your meetings and then gives you summaries. And I found it to be quite useful, practically speaking for a number of different things. They did this Granola thing that they call Granola Crunched, which is like this end of year summary. And I had a really interesting experiences I went through it.

So first, for those who don’t know, with Granola, I would describe it as because there’s a lot of tools that have played in this space. And at least from a user experience perspective, I found it to be like the best. And it was also something that it was interesting to see how a lot of other tools pretty quickly kind of faded out over time. But when I went through this this Granola Crunched thing, I had this experience as I went through it.. it’s given me a recap of my year and some highlights and it had some funny, pretty funny things in it.

And I was like, this was definitely AI generated and at the same time I noticed that I didn’t care because there was something about the intentionality I felt a craft to it because it was like there like you you know one went through and manually did all these right but there was something and similar to like YouTube does their Replay at the end of the year you like using data and it did this thing granola crunch where it gave you awards and it called out some stuff that some of it was inaccurate, some was like right on the spot.

And I noticed something I like this and what I at least interpreted, I could be wrong about it, is that product thinking was applied to it. And an experience was designed that they then use the technology to fill that experience. And in that sort of generative way, and I found that I actually like enjoyed that experience, even as I was aware that this was like generated.

Tammie:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so something that I’m really, I’m coming to more kind of as I get older, it feels weird saying stuff like that, but it’s as I get older in the work that I do, and I think we all change in the work we do, is I think like you go through this phase of like the new thing and chasing it like, I remember the new Mac I had to get and all the new products I always had to get and the new bits of software. And I’ve noticed like the pattern of my behavior is, is this actually useful for me? Am I actually gonna use this in my process? Do I need this upgrade? Is this gonna be useful? Does that work into what I’m going to make? Does this fit into my life? Is this product going to be or this thing that I’m making like is it useful?

Sticky is a horrible word because it’s been overused but is it benefiting me and what I do? And when new technology comes out I’m definitely looking more critical at new technology and I’m looking at how that kind of fits in. Is it adding noise or is it adding a benefit? And honestly a lot of technology can actually add a huge benefit.

We’ve been talking about AI, for me, memory is a massive thing. Being able to, as I get older, you know, I had quite a big birthday this year, and for me, being able to know that I can do my job longer, I can have access to me through Obsidian and MCP or whatever the heck it is, whenever it evolves into whatever it does, that is incredible. And quite a few people I’ve spoken to are putting their brain or them into more markdown files so they can have access to it. And those kind of technologies that that’s about like the more human and we kind of comes one way but also I think it’s more human technology is putting that human first into what we’re doing as well.

Luke:
I wonder if it’s as you get older or if it’s just as the world we live in is more and more inundated with technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody at every age is thinking more critically about technology these days.

Tammie:
Mmm. Yeah. I guess I can’t speak for anybody else apart from the meat sack I’m wandering around in. To me, potentially, I do think there is something about age that comes from it because there was, comparatively, there was equally a lot of technology. I’ve had the luck of being seen so much technology and so much technology that doesn’t even exist today, because it was ridiculous and it didn’t need to be around, right?

There is different technology. I would say there’s more.. It feels more seismic, but if you think about the first time the internet happened, that was pretty seismic for us, right? The first mobile phone, that felt really seismic. And we’re often like, oh my goodness, AI. I remember first time I had to access the internet. That was pretty incredible, right? First time I had a mobile phone, that was pretty incredible. And I’m not dismissing any of this, but it feels like…

Luke:
Mm-mm. Yeah.

Tammie:
We sometimes belittle the past technology when we’re feeling like it’s such a massive thing. I think the saturation of technology now, you are onto something. It is almost over saturated now. And that is something for me, I’m very aware that I try and desaturate. I’m not going to go with that analogy, but whatever it is, I try and balance that. And particularly this past year, I’ve been like, nah, I’m going to turn off a little bit more.

Luke:
Mm. Yeah, you inspired me. I recently changed my phone icons to all the clear tint, which at first I thought, that looks terrible. But now I’ve got a black and white background with the clear tint and there’s nothing vying for my attention with the bright colors.

Tammie:
Yeah. So good. Have you installed a focus app as well? That’s like the next level. You install a focus app.

Luke:
⁓ no, I haven’t done that.

Tammie:
Yeah, so you have a focus app that like locks certain apps down so you can, make your phone super dumb. So you are forced into dumb jail. Yeah.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my, yeah, my phone’s pretty dumb as it is. That’s something I’ve always been really, on try to stay on top of and, you know, not on social media and things like that. Try to pass that onto my kids, but trying to relate this back to WordPress, ⁓ how you’re saying like there’s these big waves of technology and things, you know, they feel relevant and then we start to take them for granted and then they feel important and do you…

Do you think we’re taking WordPress for granted? it still important? Is it in that calm sort of definition you were giving earlier? Do we still need WordPress the same way that we really did when it started?

Tammie:
Many questions. So I do think, so I’ll start at the beginning and you may have to kind of point me.

The first bit of do we take WordPress from granted? Absolutely. I think we take contribution and those that build things for granted. And I say that with an open heart and maybe give a contributor a hug. Because we take for granted that there’s going to be a release. We take for granted that tickets are going to be done, that plugin reviews are going to be done, that things are going to be shipped, that a design system is going to be grown, that people are going to sponsor contributors, you know, that all of this is going to be done we take for granted.

Yes, we take for granted that we have an ecosystem. We don’t grow it. I think about a plant, if you don’t nurture the plant, what happens to it? Well, one, it might survive, but it’s not maybe going to flourish and it certainly isn’t going to give you fruit. I had a hoya that I think it was like six years before it actually had a flower. I was so glad when that gave a flower, but I actually had to like finally find out fertilizer for it and I had to finally find out like the right pot for it. And I, it’s a weird thing, but ⁓ this hoya I was trying to figure out how to get it to flower because it should have been a no-brainer and it really wasn’t for me. So that we take advantage.

I think we often ignore the fact it’s part of open source and we in the sense of like, it’s a corner, it’s a piece.. and it’s part of a wider world of open source. And we just think that that isn’t part of it. So I think more, a lot of us came from open source and kind of ended up in the WordPress project. So I think those of us that kind of got there, maybe we should start going out a little bit more and kind of go and say hi to the other open source project. I think I’ve forgotten a few things that you said to me though.

Luke:
Yeah, that’s been a big theme in Australia at the moment is after the WordCamp Sydney debacle, it was, well, let’s start doing conferences with other open source products.

The main part of my question, maybe Tammie was more, is WordPress still relevant? We’ve got all of these other page builders, ⁓ I don’t mean page builders in the WordPress sense. We’ve got Wix, we’ve got Squarespace sponsoring every podcast..

Do we still need WordPress? And especially with AI. Now, like I don’t have my blog on WordPress because it’s easier to have a static blog for me.

Tammie:
Yes. Yeah. So I think people having options to own their own content, and I’m going to kind of step back and then step forward, is relevant. Having an option of a WordPress is 100% relevant. Having the ecosystem, and let’s be real, there is an ecosystem, there are people making money, still from plugins, still from hosting, still from, that is still relevant. So I think on those factors, check, check, check.

Again though, if we take all of that for granted, that goes. And if we forget that people turned up to write on WordPress and use it for their blog, that goes. If we forget what you were saying, Jonathan, at the start, which was you wanted to make things, if you can’t do that just as easily, then it all kind of goes away.

Luke:
Are themes still relevant?

Tammie:
This is an interesting question. I’m going to give a personal answer. I personally think they’re less relevant, but I think a style and being able to do your own style is. And that’s because I think that what the word themes has become isn’t what they were originally to me.

And originally they’re things like, you know, we had fun. First themes is like saying close to my heart. That’s where I had my roots. And themes were super easy. We all learned off Kubrick. They were super easy to do. They were a way we express. We had CS Reboot. was, ⁓ you know, everyone had a new theme. We had theme switchers. I had like, you know, we’d have winter, you’d have autumn. Yeah, all the seasons each time, you know. Valentine’s Day, suddenly we’d have hearts everywhere on your blog and all those kind of things. And headers were header features.. headers and moving headers and I think at one point I had like a rotating header different things because I was they were an expression of your style and I don’t feel that we are doing that anymore so to me I that is what should they should go back to and if it’s a style pack and we have to change the name so they go back to that great

Luke:
Mmm. Right. That’s, what I refer to lovingly as the ugly web. And I mean it in the nicest possible way. Yeah. I absolutely wish it a hundred percent. I go back to the ugly web and I wish that there was a way to do that in WordPress, but it, feels difficult. It feels hard.

Tammie:
I love the ugly web. I would refer to that as the creative web. I think one of the, this is just, it’s just human nature. We homogenize because we kind of, and it’s also times. If you think about recessions, you think about politics, you think about times, all those kinds of things. People start to homogenize more.

I mean, if you look at the Pantone Color of the Year, I mean, bless it, it’s white. Right?

Jonathan:
Cloud Dancer, I think it was Cloud Dancer. I was like, wow.

Tammie:
Like, I was there a couple of years ago. Like, if we don’t need an indication about the, like, all of that kind of, and I’m all for minimalism, and I’m all for, like, if I’m actually expressing myself, it’s probably pretty minimalist, and it’s probably that kind of way.

However, we still should have, particularly on your own content, you should have the way to be able to be creative, particularly now when you can do animations like that. So I personally think it’s coming back. I personally think that if you look at design trends ⁓ and design trends tend to be like future thinking.

There’s a lot of that coming out of design schools. There’s a lot of that coming out. A lot of the younger designers are not happy about white being the Pantone color, thank goodness. Even though I love it. My minimalist heart’s very happy. And that will lead to the weird web coming back. All those kind of things.

Jonathan:
Tammie, one of things that I really enjoyed, back in October you did this Blocktober.fun project. And that’s actually where I also had some of the most fun was like generating some like basic blocks. And I hadn’t been able to quite get it over the hill myself. And then when Telex came out and you started like, it got me thinking like, like, I had fun with the blocks that you made, which were expressions of like your thinking and applying your creativity. And B, it got me thinking like, oh, I could do this too. And it planted those seeds of like some of the things I loved early on with WordPress, of being able to, but the barrier to me, at least to me, had been very high. Like the idea of being able to like create a block and I’m like, oh, am I gonna have to learn React or do this or do that?

It was fun to watch you playing with that and to see like, this is not nearly as, and that was actually important because at least to me, and I think to others as well, it helped lower the barrier of like, you can make these things. And the ones that you came up with were a lot of very unique expressions that was good fun.

Tammie:
And I think that’s the thing we need to be doing more of, going back to that sketchbook kind of idea. We need to be just creating more. Most of us have stopped blogging, like in this space, like myself. I know you’re still blogging. People are still blogging a bit, but a lot of us have stopped blogging like our creative ideas because we’ve just been so busy making or we just been so busy caught up in like life or whatever.

I’m hoping that that kind of comes back. I’m definitely feeling the urge to do it again. That was part of what blocktober was to get out and just it’s worked for me doing that I did it with patterns back in the day and it’s when I kind of as much as like you enjoyed it for me it’s a way that I it’s an old way of making me get recreative that I learned back in school and it helps me by doing something every day. It shifts my creative pattern back in. ⁓ And just sharing and sharing experimentation, I think we really need to do that because we can’t get things out there.

You say weird, from those ideas come the next waves because then we test what WordPress is and we test what WordPress can’t be for us. So then we look at other tools that are that for us and then we combine them with WordPress and then we come up with like WordPress and this and then you know we find our different toolkit and our toolkit you know we often have just tried to use WordPress for everything and WordPress isn’t for everything and that’s okay. WordPress is for the things it’s really good at and then there’s other things that we can do because we’re in such a cool space that we have so many cool open source things that we can pull together and then mix and match.

Jonathan:
Last thought from me on this. In my own experience building, I recently redid my personal website and that was like, I wrote all the code by hand. I used AI tools to help fill in some gaps, like refreshing me on some of the changes in HTML and CSS. And in that particular case, I had this dilemma of like, would I really not build this on WordPress? I ended up using 11ty as like a static generator.

And it’s also been a lot of fun working with Luke on the Crossword site, which we do in something else..

Luke:
Hugo.

Jonathan:
Hugo, thank you. And my own experience building for my site. ⁓ I like not just for nostalgia reasons, but for practical, I wanted WordPress to continue to be the blogging piece because I actually like the writing experience. I like being in the editor in WordPress. I like that sort of context and see that evolve. So one of my next projects is going to be to complete that loop, which takes me all the way back to where I started in my career, which is integrating WordPress into existing things. So was a fun full circle for me that let me express my own, like I took out paper and was able to execute on some ideas that I couldn’t execute on before. And it requires effort, but there’s also something just really satisfying and getting there and building it and.

I really appreciate how the two of you in particular have inspired me to be willing to put more effort into that. Also, it’s helpful knowing that if I get stuck, I can say, Luke, Tammie, what am I missing here? And you guys have been great. It’s been lot of fun to watch that.

So Tammie, if folks are interested in following along what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Tammie:
You can find me at Karmatosed on all the things or where I’m hoping to blog more at binatethoughts.com