I’ve been writing about this journey for a few weeks now. Setting up agents, teaching them skills, figuring out the rhythm. But something shifted in the last few days and I want to try to articulate it.

Over 430 commits across more than a dozen projects since February 1st. That number surprised me when I looked.

Some of those projects:

  • A Design Kit that makes it easy for anyone to build concepts for WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and more.
  • Concepts around WordPress Studio as a vibe coding workbench.
  • A design and spec for WordPress Site Editor entity navigation in Gutenberg.
  • A workshop curriculum for teaching designers AI workflows.
  • An agent I’m building from scratch to understand how it all works under the hood.
  • A Chrome extension that adds dark mode to P2, a WordPress theme we use at Automattic.
  • A personal RSS reader built just how I want it.
  • A real-time dashboard for monitoring what my agents are doing.
  • A WordPress plugin that turns a site into an agent dashboard.

And most recently a theme design exercise using 9 briefs for small business websites, each with a specific design style. I tasked my agent to read each brief, gather 30-40 reference screenshots, compile a design system, and then spawn parallel sub-agents to code every page. It then created 6 more design briefs on its own, generating 100 pages. Each self-contained HTML/CSS with its own visual language. Wiener Werkstätte. Risograph zine culture. De Stijl applied to dog grooming, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds.

None of this is the interesting part.

The interesting part is how this all compounds. To let my agent gather screenshots, I had to build it a headless browser so the agent wouldn’t interrupt me with browser windows popping up. To generate a design system from a collection of screenshots, we built a skill to analyze them and generate colors, space, and type tokens. The skill system means each solved problem becomes a permanent capability. The theme design pipeline is now a reusable skill. Brief in, coded prototypes out. Anyone can run it.

To manage all my in-flight projects, my agents built a project tracker. And we build a skill for updating project docs and logs automatically throughout the day.

Each thing makes the next thing faster. And faster compounds. A project that would’ve taken a weekend now takes an afternoon. An afternoon project takes an hour. An hour project can be done with a telegram message.

Nobody tells you about the second-order effects. You teach an agent to screenshot websites and suddenly your design process works differently. You build a project tracker and suddenly 20 projects feels calm. Each capability quietly reshapes what’s possible. You don’t notice until you look back and the starting line is gone.