Donovan Maidens

Notes from real work

WordPress engineering for the agent era.

I started this blog to document real work, not to add to the AI noise — the decisions, the failures, the maintenance that most AI writing skips. I've built for the web since the early nineties, the last fifteen years in WordPress, and there's now an AI agent harness sitting in the middle of how I work.

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Donovan Maidens

Thirty years on the web. Fifteen in WordPress. Four plugins on WordPress.org, one agent harness in daily use, and a blog that only covers work I have actually shipped.

Start here

Six categories. Pick the one that sounds like you.
01 Working With AI How I think about AI as a developer, not as a cheerleader. Start here if you tried it and stopped. 1 article 02 Building Bishop Build or inspect a real agent harness. The public bishop-harness repo is the exhibit. 1 article 03 Building Plugins With AI Connects the harness to real, ship-ready WordPress plugins. 1 article 04 WordPress in the AI Era For agencies and site owners evaluating AI-assisted development. 1 article 05 What AI Gave Me The least technical and the most human of the six. 1 article 06 Building Kirsch A new tool, documented from M0 forward. Milestone-tied posts as it ships. 1 article

Latest writing

All articles →
23 Sep 2026 What AI Gave Me Learning a Language With AI as a Patient Tutor A patient AI tutor that never tires or judges — but it can't make you practise, and that's the part that still belongs to you. 6 min read 22 Sep 2026 WordPress in the AI Era How AI Changed the Way I Do WordPress Development How AI changed the shape of my WordPress development work — and why the review, security, and judgement load went up, not down. 9 min read 21 Sep 2026 Building Plugins With AI How I Build WordPress Plugins With AI How I build real WordPress plugins with an AI agent harness — the scaffolding, the review gate, and how one developer maintains a live MSC catalogue. 9 min read 20 Sep 2026 Building Bishop Why My Orchestrator Isn't Allowed to Write Code My orchestrator plans and delegates; it never writes code. Here's why separating decision from execution keeps a multi-agent system from drifting. 5 min read 19 Sep 2026 Working With AI Coding Is Not the Same as Developing Coding is syntax; developing is deciding what should exist. AI is fast at the first and unreliable at the second — that gap is the work that matters. 5 min read 18 Sep 2026 Building Kirsch Kirsch: why a terminal-native agent, when Claude Code exists Why I'm building Kirsch, a terminal-native coding agent that proposes patches, runs policy-gated commands, and keeps sessions local and cancellable. 7 min read

Plugins

Four free plugins on WordPress.org, under the MSC name.

MSC: Post Last Updated Date

Show a “Last Updated” date on posts and pages. SEO-friendly time markup, custom labels and formats, any theme. No JavaScript.

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MSC Post Expiry

Automatically expire posts and pages on a schedule — trash, delete, draft, make private, recategorise or redirect.

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MSC Scheduled Visibility

Schedule posts, pages and products to appear and disappear between set dates, with recurring windows and role-based visibility.

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MSC Stealth Login

Hide wp-login.php behind a custom login URL and stop brute-force attacks — lockouts, allowlist, history, alerts. No tracking.

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