WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg spent hours venting in the project's Slack last weekend, declaring that "the wheels have fallen off" and blaming self-inflicted governance problems. The trigger was a specific AI feature: the new AI Connectors screen shipping in WordPress 7.0, which lets users link their sites to external AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Mullenweg called the feature proof of the problem, saying it "doesn't even work as it's supposed to" and took "so freaking long" to ship what amounts to "a blank page with 3-4 buttons on it." He contrasted WordPress's pace with Cloudflare's EmDash CMS, which shipped in two months.
The specific incident that set Mullenweg off involved an Automattic employee who committed code adding Akismet, an Automattic-owned product, to the AI Connectors screen during the release candidate period with zero public discussion. Contributor Earle Davies flagged the double standard, noting that external contributors watch their pull requests sit for years while internal ones get fast-tracked. Mullenweg acknowledged the problem but then used it to argue against the very governance processes he built, calling open source norms like consensus-building and public discussion "stupid policies" that prevent shipping.
The irony runs deep. Mullenweg created the governance layers he now complains about. Automattic employs most of the top-tier core committers who can merge code, giving the for-profit company structural control over what gets into WordPress core. The Akismet ticket emerged from a private conversation between two Automattic employees and skipped the process that external contributors face. Hacker News commenters were quick to point out that Mullenweg's complaints about process come just months after he weaponized WordPress governance and trademarks against WP Engine, a direct commercial competitor.