AI has absorbed the task-level work, and juniors who sell themselves as code writers are getting ghosted. After 14 years in WordPress development, here is what I look for instead: work you actually owned, and a repo that shows a human debugged it.
Most WordPress resilience testing is refreshing the checkout page and hoping. Intent-based chaos engineering starts from a stated hypothesis about behavior instead, with fallback paths around external calls and abort signals tied to checkout completion rather than p99 latency.
Ghost is an agent-first Postgres platform. Notes from using its MCP server and database forking to let AI agents test schema changes and index strategies without touching a shared staging database.
A credit model can score well and still fall apart in production if its variables drift. Two checks before estimation: whether each variable holds a consistent risk direction, and what PSI says about distribution shifts between datasets.
CSS Values Level 5 adds random() and random-item(), which the browser resolves at render time. Why that beats Sass build-time randomization, PHP inline styles and Math.random() for scattered layouts and varying animation delays.
WordPress.com’s new short-form blogging theme stores micro-posts as ordinary WordPress posts, so replies stay comments and reblogs keep their attribution. Here is what that buys you over renting space on a social platform.
Multimodal RAG usually fails at retrieval, not at vision. I walk through the proxy-pointer approach: parse a document into a section tree, keep image pointers on each node, and retrieve whole sections instead of sliding-window chunks.
Some loops will not vectorize, and Python object overhead eats whatever is left. Here is how PyO3 and Maturin let you move a hot loop into Rust, how Rayon uses the rest of your cores, and what the throughput looks like afterwards.
Prompt caching only pays off when the prefix stays byte-identical. I go through the mistakes that break it, a semantic cache layer for WordPress, loading tool definitions on demand, and what to keep or drop between turns.
Notes on serving high-resolution desktop wallpapers from WordPress without wrecking load times: what sub-size generation costs you, why lazy loading hurts a hero image, and where a CDN belongs.