445 – More fun in WordPress: How Nick Hamze uses AI to build unusual WordPress blocks

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 445, entitled more fun in WordPress, how Nick Hamze uses AI to build on usual WordPress blocks. It was published on Thursday, the 13th of November, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and before I am joined by Nick, a few bits of housekeeping.

The first thing to mention as I have done over the last few weeks, and probably will do over the next few weeks, is to mention our Black Friday deals page. Head to wp builds.com/black. Currently we've got about 250 submitted WordPress Black Friday deals. So it's things like blocks, plugins, themes, hosting, all of that kind of thing.

And there's an easy way to search and filter. So for example, if you were into, I don't know, something to do with the admin area, you can filter by that. You can filter by the discount, the price, and obviously the name of the product.

If you want to get your deal onto that page, there's an add a deal button, and typically we end up with about 400 deals on there, which pretty much represents everything in the WordPress space in the run up to Black Friday, once more, wp builds.com/black.

If you would like to have your product pride of place at the top of that page, you will see some black cards at the very top. Click on the little button in one of the available cards and we will make sure to get your deal featured heavily in the run up to Black Friday. And I can assure you that that page gets lots. And lots of hits over the next few weeks.

The other thing to mention is that if you enjoy this podcast and you would like to be a part of it, you can help sponsor the podcast to keep the lights on. In a moment, you'll hear from an advertiser who has done that for many, many, many weeks. We're very grateful to them. Head to wp builds.com/advertise to find out more.

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As I said, if you would like to be a part of it, there are some slots available. Head to wp builds.com/advertise to find out more.

Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I am chatting with Nick Hamze.

This is a bit of a riot. Nick, it turns out is an awful lot of fun. I'm gonna pose the question, which is in the podcast. I bet you cannot guess what Nick does for a living. I am almost gonna guarantee that nobody who doesn't know Nick will have any idea that this is even a thing. He certainly does do what he does, and you'll find out that in the podcast.

We have a chat about AI and about Nick's role in WordPress. Nick is a big proponent, as you will hear, of keeping things fun, and he's been using AI to come up with some ingenious, unusual, quite quirky blocks in the WordPress space.

He has lots of opinions about WordPress, the community, AI in general, and is a barrel of fun as you're about to find out. I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Nick Hamze. Hello, Nick.

[00:04:00] Nick Hamze: Hey, how's it

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: I am good. We have had quite a, we've had at least 20 minutes of, silliness before this episode began.

I suspect this episode will end up being quite silly. I don't, I dunno

[00:04:12] Nick Hamze: Yeah. Yeah. Everything I do is

[00:04:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, good. Okay. if you've never heard of Nick, firstly, why, where have you been? Nick came onto my radar about nine weeks ago, something like that. But apparently, as Nick is about to tell you, he's been around for ages.

He's, he's not nine weeks old. let's put it that way. but he's got a, blog, which is increasingly getting everybody's attention. It's certainly captured my attention. I'm just gonna read it into the record so that you can pause this and go and have a look at it. It's a fabulous design. it's iconic io so it's I-C-O-N-I-C-K.

So like ICO Nick, dot io. Go and check that out, and then come back. So first off, Nick, very nice to have you with us. Tell us a bit about yourself. don't go right back to the, the very beginning, but tell us a bit about you, WordPress, whatever you do, tell us what you do. It's so interesting.

[00:05:11] Nick Hamze: So I don't even know. So I, for some reason, back when I was, I'm a lawyer, but I never practiced. But when I, my last leader of law school, I was like, I really need a job to pay back all these student loans, and for fun, me and my brother used to go to WordCamp San Francisco. And so automatic was hiring and I was like, Hey, maybe I'll apply. 'cause I was like messing around with WordPress for a couple years. since then, it's very different than it was now. But my entire application was, I didn't have a resume. I didn't have any experience. I said, Hey, I like WordPress.

Could I have a job? That was it. I have it somewhere. I kept it 'cause I thought it was funny. And then, that, that was it. Like they didn't have a process. They had an email address and like for some reason they replied. And then, I went through a trial and I was a happiness engineer for, that's my title, but I made myself Chief Swag Officer about halfway through because for some reason that's how like I became friends with Matt. 'Cause like he really liked like merch and swag and whatever. And nobody else really ca because again, if Automatic is a serious company, I don't know if you know this, they're like a real, like a.

[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: They actually do things. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:21] Nick Hamze: yeah. They do things. They have proper jobs. Like they're, trying to make money, but I just wanted to have fun the whole time.

So, I would just find increasingly like silly things I could do. And so I would make, I would make like all my own like automatic merch, like with my own money and show people and give it out at meetups and yeah, it would, it was, it was weird, but I enjoyed it, so it was fun.

But yeah, I did that for, four years. and then, my brother started his own company, so I went to go work for him. And then, he sold that company and then I needed a job. So I was like, Hey, So in, in the interim, I, I was consultant for automatic, for I don't know, like three years now. He brought me back to work on Tumblr merch.

[00:07:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:07:03] Nick Hamze: Because when they, 'cause when they bought Tumblr, I was like, Hey guys, Tumblr's really fun. You guys should make some merch. And I posted on LinkedIn somewhere, and then someone told Matt's Hey, because every time I like dip out of the WordPress community.

Matt brings me back because for some, I don't know why, I don't, sometimes I, I get a Slack message from a billionaire. I was like, why is this guy talking to me? I don't know why. he's always very, nice to me, even it's weird. And yeah, so I came back to work on the Tumblr store. For a while, and then that kind of, fizzled. Not fizzled, but it was, fun for a while, but it didn't make, we, I got, I told Matt that I believed that we could, make up all the Tumblr, like revenue shortfalls from merch. Yeah. we actually did some pretty good stuff, but again, it was for like, we made like a lot of cool stuff and we actually made a lot of money.

But, it was surprisingly, it wasn't enough to run a, a website with hundreds of, hundreds of, millions of

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That, seems to have gone on, on the back burner. A little bit of

[00:08:02] Nick Hamze: Yeah. it's a, it is a, it's a tough nut to cry. again, like Tumblr couldn't figure it out. Yahoo couldn't figure it out, so I don't blame them for not being to figure it out.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: but I went to your website when I started seeing different posts and things, people would linking to things that you'd been writing. and I just assumed that you were, I don't know, a developer or you were, you were, making websites for people. But when we joined, this c call, you told me what it's that you do for a living.

And wait, before anybody hears the next sentence that comes out of Nick's mouth, I'm going guarantee that if you don't know what Nick does. You will never guess what he's about to say. so let's pause for five seconds. Let's give people a moment to think. There we go. Tell us what you do.

[00:08:52] Nick Hamze: I run a Pokemon card shop.

[00:08:55] Nathan Wrigley: What, what is that like genuinely. what is that?

[00:09:00] Nick Hamze: sell Pokemon cards.

[00:09:04] Nathan Wrigley: if you haven't had kids, I've had kids, so I know what that

[00:09:06] Nick Hamze: yeah. Oh yeah. The funny thing is kids are like the smallest portion Of the, of the customer base. It's mostly like, people my age that are like, they realize that life sucks and, they need, they wanna go back to when times are simpler and now they got adult money so they can just go and buy, all the cards they couldn't have as a

[00:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so it's a bit like, so in the UK we have this small collection of people who like collect stamps or something like that, and they're prepared to pay seemingly outrageous amounts of money to own the little stamp basically. And it's the same in Pokemon, is it? There's just people who've got adult money who just for some reason a totally into it and are willing to buy. And you are a trader for that. You buy and sell poker. That's so interesting.

[00:09:50] Nick Hamze: Yeah. No, it's it like again, and we, I kinda just fell into it and it's like the wildest rod we've ever been on. it's insane how many, cars we sell on a weekly basis. How many people, like my brother jokes, I'm starting to cult. But there's some people that literally, I think if someone came to rob me, they'd be like, people that would like jump in front of the, bullet for me.

I don't know why they're just so happy to have, 'cause again, it's not just for us, it's not just selling cards. Like we have a, like an event space. Like people will come. we open at 10, they'll be there at nine waiting to get in, and they'll stay all

[00:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: For cards, Pokemon

[00:10:21] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

Yeah. Again, I think the cards are like, what you, it's almost like it's what you collect, but there's more to it than that. Like it's about the people. It's about the atmosphere. It's about like a place to belong. Like it's just, funny how many, and then there looks, Yeah.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, can I ask what? What do people. so for example, if I was an art dealer, and I'd be selling, costly art, I'm imagining it goes on a wall and it sits there and, in many cases I think it's probably never seen again by the general public. I wonder, these, cards, do they do, is it something that people actually play with?

In other words, do they take them home and then hang out with their mates and play with them, or do they go into a cabinet or on a wall in a frame or something like that?

[00:11:04] Nick Hamze: so po most people don't play the game like as it was meant to be played, but like the people, like their cards are not something that they like put and forget away, so in, in the Pokemon deal, most of 'em organize 'em in binders.

And so they, so like, putting them in, like organizing them is more like, not work, but like more of the time is spent actually like figuring out how you want your cards organized, displayed.

Like people have like checklists. They wanna find all of one character, all of one artist, all of one era. And like people bring their binders to show us. That's my favorite part is I'd like, they'll say, oh, I got, this, section done, or I got. I got this card last week from so and no.

It's so, it's not like other collect, like there's some collectibles, like Yeah, that's what happens is that you buy it, put it, on a shelf and then forget about it. But like for this Pokemon is more, it's almost like a living, breathing, like especially too, like you don't just put in your binder, like you read your binder.

It's every week when you get new stuff, when a new set comes out like it. And so we actually are starting a podcast to, talk to our customers because it is so fun how you have the same pile of cards. Everyone does it differently. everyone collects different things. Everyone organized 'em different in their binders.

Everyone, there's no rhyme or reason to it. there, like for me, I only collect, two Pokemon, one called bdu. He's like a big beaver. And then Magia, she's like a, she's like a, pretty little girl dinosaur. that's the only two I care about.

[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: That's so interesting. it really doesn't matter where you go in life. If you penetrate deep enough, if you look, if you prize it open, there are, there's people like obsessing about literally everything isn't there, so Pokemon cards or stamps or, archeology, whatever the heck it is, dig into.

[00:12:44] Nick Hamze: collectings like in our

[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think

[00:12:46] Nick Hamze: has to to some, even I know there's in the tech world's, all the minimalists, like even to them, they collect things, they collect quotes, they collect, you know what I'm saying? even if it's not like physical objects, people like to amass things.

[00:12:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But what's curious though is that there's a bus, there's a business for you in that with your brother, you know that there's enough throughput and enough, I don't know, value attached to those things that you can make a living out of it. I think I find that absolutely fascinating.

[00:13:12] Nick Hamze: we, we've only, we started in March and we've already sold millions of dollars to

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: just it.

[00:13:16] Nick Hamze: Yeah. no. it's weird. It's totally weird. I

[00:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say, did you know this was gonna happen in your life? Or if you go back to February, did you have any clue?

[00:13:25] Nick Hamze: No, not in the slightest. So the store, the store is called Izzy's Gym. So after like a Pokemon gym, and so ba basically my dog passed away. we had, I had our first dog ever. Her name was Izzy. She had a really rare genetic illness passed away at three. And I was just like sad. And so when I get sad, I like to do projects, so I was like, Hey, I always wanna build a store.

So I built a store. I was never gonna open. So I bought the display cases. I bought the signage. And then my dad and brother got involved and they were like serial entrepreneurs and so they said, no, we're gonna do this. I was like, okay, fine. And then, and so that they just kept building the store.

I don't know if we're ever gonna open it. But then, unfortunately, my dad passed away in

February. And so then we needed, then, the whole family needed a project. We're like, you know what, let's just open this thing. And we thought, no one was gonna come. We thought we were gonna lose all this money.

And like the first day it was like wall to wall people. We, we like ev every weekend. It's like a new record. Like it's, it is absolutely insane. It's like taking over every aspect of our life. Like in a

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Gosh, that dear listener, I'm sorry for the foray, there, but, 13 minutes in and we're still talking about Pokemon, but I just think it's absolutely fascinating. let's get back to the sort of WordPress stuff. So you obviously work with automatic, you've had an interest in WordPress, you've now got, irons in different fires, but you are, you.

If you go to the website, you'll be able to see a whole litany of posts where it is pretty clear you are really fired up about WordPress. Where does this fit into your life? If so, it's not something that you do for a living. Is it more of a sort of hobby that you know that you're just really passionate about?

[00:14:58] Nick Hamze: since the beginning, like ever, WordPress always been like my obsession, like always, I don't know why I, and the fun thing was like, I always loved WordPress, but so like after I left Automatic, I, I just kept hiring like random people to do cool things. Like I had a, I had a. A block company for a while.

I had a theme company for a while, and my biggest problem was that every time I'd make something cool, the, developers would use my cool stuff to get hired by somebody. not like a mean way, but they would say, oh, look at this cool stuff I'm making for Nick. And then they would get hired when one, one guy got hired by GoDaddy, one got hired by automatic, one guy was like, so after a while, but so I was burnt out on that cycle of I would think of a cool idea and I would spend a bunch of money to make it and then I would have to shut it down.

'cause I didn't know how to maintain it. Don't. I can barely write CSS, like I don't know how to code. But, then this whole AI thing came and it like, blew my mind what I could accomplish. there was nothing. There's absolutely nothing I can't do. Like I, I know I shouldn't go back to Pokemon, but if you go on my, my, my Pokemon, card site, the izzy gym.com, like there's eight or nine features that website has, you can't find anywhere else that are built with ai. it just blows my mind anytime I want to do something. Just this morning before the podcast, we decided we're trying to get into Legos and so I built an app that basically goes on Brick Link, which is like the secondary market for Legos. And it, and you put in the set that you wanna sell and then it goes to Brick Link and pulls the, the six month average, selling price for it.

And then it applies our, buying percentage. And it'll tell you like instantaneously what we pay you for that Lego set.

[00:16:32] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:16:33] Nick Hamze: And it's a word, it is a WordPress block, and I built it all with AI in, in, a morning, and I, literally like, it uses like technology. I've never even heard of like TypeScript, I dunno what TypeScript is, but it built it like that.

there's all the time people like do things like, oh, it's doing this build process. Like I have no clue what that is.

[00:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: So did you just keep coming back to WordPress? Just 'cause you've got some innate. I fascination with it because if you do, I totally identify with that. I find myself even in periods where I've got no business being in WordPress, so I've done it for a living now for quite a few years, but even in downtime moments where really I should be just doing something else, I'm in WordPress just poking about and having a little bit of a play.

It's like a guilty pleasure. It's a bit weird. Nobody else that I know understands it. Apart from the WordPresses, who more or less all get it, but I just wondered if it was a bit like that with you, this sort of little pleasure that you just keep going back into.

[00:17:25] Nick Hamze: Yeah. No, but Matt calls me mercurial 'cause I keep going in and out. But it basically is I'm, I love WordPress and I'll get really, excited about something and then there'll be some sort of roadblock Some sort of problem that I can't do, and then I just I can't like, deal with the frustration, so I leave for a bit and then usually Matt brings me back.

But like I just, I don't know, I just feel and now it feels different 'cause it feels like with AI, I could figure out a way to make, a living from WordPress and stay in WordPress because for a while it was like I was always at somebody else's. like I either, if it was a, like I couldn't find a developer if it was some sort of. Like systematic change in how things work that I could have to, that I would have to like get frustrated and go away. But now I can't, like there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing I can't do. Like I, this morning, like I was trying to figure out how to, 'cause I, I hate, the SVN system.

Like I hate, like the way we manage plugins is absolutely insane. I was like, why do I have to do this? I just told Claude, to make me an app that basically sits in the middle and I'll upload a zip and then it will go and do all the SVN stuff.

[00:18:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:18:33] Nick Hamze: And so I was like, 'cause I, because for me, I used to try to, like, when I first started the blog, I got myself in trouble a few times because I kept trying to say oh, we should change this, and this.

guess what I'm not gonna change anything. If I wanna do something, I'll do it on my own. I'm not gonna be the guy that like, oh, we need, this in core. We need that. I don't care record. Like I'm happy that they're there. I'm happy that they're doing stuff. Like I'm not gonna make my projects depend on them changing something.

[00:18:55] Nathan Wrigley: Have you always been like this? Like in whatever you touch in life E even since you were a kid, have you always been like basically really curious?

[00:19:04] Nick Hamze: Yes. Oh, of course.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but also not just curious like it, so some people are curious in that they always say, why is it like that? And why is it like that? But they're never execute on anything else to, it's just the question all the time.

Why is it like that sort of dissatisfaction? But it sounds to me like, although you don't necessarily try to roll it into something that everybody else has to use, like a, a plugin that you then put on the marketplace or what have you, but you get curious and then you just fiddle and tinker and try to fix your own, scratch your own itch.

[00:19:32] Nick Hamze: yeah, oh yeah. All the time. Everything. be, like before, before WordPress, it was like classic video games. And like I, I have a, I used to have a new hobby every year because I just like to learn things like, and I like to see how things work and I like to go and put my own spin on it.

like when I was in the video games, there was fun. Like I figured out the whole system to make my own cartridges. Hey, you know what, I'm gonna get a, I'm gonna get a PCB and I'm gonna load a custom game on it and I'm gonna. Make the label for it. And for a lot of my life it was, it was very like, like visually driven.

That's why like the merch, like was huge. I would go and make I don't know how many times I made a WordPress swag store. I probably made like, five or six over the years because it was just so easy. Like I, I have an idea and I could just go and make a design for it and then put on a shirt that nobody would buy. And I was like,

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: So did you get really, so the bit that coincides with me is, the more recent postings that you've done and I'm, saying it's nine weeks. I've really no idea. It feels like something like that.

[00:20:27] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: did you, collide with AI for the first time in WordPress and just suddenly get interested again? Or were you like 10 weeks, 11 weeks, 15 weeks ago? were you doing it but just not writing any of the stuff down on your own blog? 'cause I feel it was the, it was when you put your ideas down in the blog that. People started to, put you in my, feed if you like.

[00:20:52] Nick Hamze: Yeah. so yeah, AI definitely helped. So I think it was the, tipping point was that telex.

The automatic tool like that really got me. 'cause again, like for me, I always it made me it seems like blocks were the biggest missed opportunity in the world where I remember for a while everyone was making blocks, everyone under the sun.

And we had, it seemed like we had this like good momentum and then everybody figured out that it's hard to, monetize blocks. And they all fizzled. And then Rich Tabor, like he was Mike, my. My creative, like we get kept like bouncing. And then he got, hired by automatic and then started working on core stuff.

And so it, like that was always my thing. And so when someone said, Hey, you can make blocks and you don't have to hire somebody, I don't have to like, 'cause like funny developers is very difficult. Like absolutely crazy. Especially like ones that want to do, 'cause again, like I, I, for me, I always love like the simplicity of the core things.

Like I don't want to build for page builders. I don't want to use what's that custom fields like? Everybody wants to take these things, like use these frameworks. Like I want just straight up. Like Gutenberg blocks and that you usually can't find people that do stuff like that.

So then, I just kept experimenting. And then after a while, 'cause I always like, I, I talk to Matt all the time and he's always supported me. He's Hey, if you wanna make this cool stuff, like, I'll help you with it. he, whatever, like I think I have like a little monthly retainer that he pays me to make cool things.

I think it, I think it really came down to, as I remember once we had a conversation where he was trying to find his friend, a, website theme and he is like. they were looking around, it was like, there's nothing, good. not like good in the sense of like it's this, like you could find a lot of things, but none of them were, I dunno, I didn't like any of 'em.

I don't, I'm a very, I'm a, I especially, 'cause I want them to be weird. I can't take another minimalist or whatever. and so the, main idea was he was like, Hey, if you wanna make cool. Cool themes, I'll, support you. And then you just go and put them on wordpress.org and then wordpress.com.

And so like that's how the whole thing, that's what it got me really serious about it because I was like, Hey, if he's gonna, if he's gonna back me up, like that's, that takes, that's, one like, thing I don't have to worry about because 'cause for a while I was always like funding things on

[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really, great. You get exp expect, you get a like a stipend to just

[00:23:06] Nick Hamze: yeah. It, was, so, weird. I didn't expect it. I didn't like. Then I had to try to explain it to the rest of the people at

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's hard to explain. Yeah.

[00:23:14] Nick Hamze: Yeah. He'll like, just say something to me and I was like, Hey, What do you call, the accounting people was like, Hey, Matt said you're gonna gimme some money.

I was like, do you have a contract? no. what do you guys like, I have two sentences where Matt said, make cool stuff. it actually, it, what actually it started with is I made a, wahoo. It's like I have Wahoo do blog and I was just, I, yeah, I was just making like cool little variations, oh, WPU as a Pokemon trainer and Wpu is whatever.

And I was like, I showed Matt and he's oh, this is like a fun site. I want to figure out how do we get. Themes that have this energy. I was like, I could make 'em all day if you wanted me to. It is okay, prove it. I was like, okay, I can do it. So I think I, I actually have four themes ready to go, but the, I'm bogged down in the theme review process. I don't

[00:23:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:59] Nick Hamze: I, don't know when they're gonna see

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: can be quite a lengthy process, but you've just mentioned telex and for those people who are listening who don't know what that is, so essentially, I, think the URL is telex dot automatic ai, Then you'll find this, incredible interface where, and the whole point is that it'll build a block for you. So you know, you chat with it a little bit, like something like chat GPT, but something like this must have been music to your ears. 'Cause suddenly you can just speak at it and it'll make things. And so off you've. Been the last eight or nine weeks just pushing out extraordinarily interesting stuff the whole time.

[00:24:35] Nick Hamze: I was just I couldn't even put into words how, good it felt to literally have an idea. And again, like, when people were like first started with this, they would make what do you call it? like a tech demo. oh, isn't this cool? I did one prompt and it made something. It's that's not fun for me.

Like I love it that I can do. 12 prompts, 15 prompts, and it's perfect. And it's production ready, and it's secure. You know what I'm saying? that's like really, excited me that the possibilities for like, the thing, like that's, my Pokemon website. I don't have a single, plugin from the repo, like every single piece of functionality I made. Like I, I couldn't find a contact form, like I made my own contact form. I have a little deal on the top. header that pulls in the open and close status from Google places, along with my phone number and map links. That's all, was made with telex. I literally have every, everything I could ever want. It has been made with telex and it's just like, I, I don't even understand how people aren't more excited about

[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: Have you, ever hit a roadblock though, where you've decided you want to try something and it just couldn't figure it out in the end? Or have you always had like joy? It is always come through in the end,

[00:25:40] Nick Hamze: Yeah. there's some things that are harder to do, but like I've never found something he couldn't do, so my brother jokes to me, but I seriously do this, that if I can't get to work, I'll go and ask another ai.

[00:25:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.

[00:25:51] Nick Hamze: so telex uses Claude, and so if, Claude doesn't, have the answer, I'll go and put the code into Gemini or whatever, like GP chat, GPT. I'll say, Hey, Claude's having trouble with this. what would you do to fix this? And usually they figure it

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: And so what kind of things do you, I mean you can go and look on the website, but what kind of things pique your curiosity? 'cause it feels like you enjoy the peculiar and the interesting and the little bit left field. What kind of things have you been playing with? Some of them have obviously seen the light of day. Maybe there's a few that you've got in your back pocket still.

[00:26:24] Nick Hamze: Yeah. Oh yeah. Most of the, like I have a lot of stuff in my GitHub repro that I haven't posted yet. Mostly 'cause I just, like again, I get, I make something and I was like, this is cool. And then I get, I, then it gives me an idea for another thing and I go

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Instead you get lost. You go down

[00:26:37] Nick Hamze: Yeah. 'cause it like, because there's limited, I, I've always had ideas. there's no limit to the amount of ideas I have, so I'm never gonna stop building. But like for me, I'm really excited about the, like I, maybe this will get me in trouble, but, WordPress is boring. if you look at. If you look at Webflow, you look at framer, even like Squarespace to a deal. Like they have, they have, motion, you know what I'm saying? They have they style, they have things that again, like I feel bad saying this, but you'll also look at a woo, like a WooCommerce site or WordPress site, and it looks like that.

I want something that doesn't look like the quintessential, the normal, the whatever. it's not just about being weird. It's about I almost wanna go back to you remember like Geo

cities. And you remember, like, I used to use a front page website

[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: yes, I remember that.

[00:27:24] Nick Hamze: were very, ugly, but they were, mine. Like I felt like, it was like, it was unique to me. It represented like what was going on in my head, what I loved, and I feel like WordPress needs that and like now I can do it.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: so tell us about some of the things that you have built. Like you can lean into the stranger ones or the more pedestrian ones, whichever you know, or even ones that you've just got an intuition you feel like building because.

[00:27:48] Nick Hamze: Yeah, I, might actually pull the list. It's so many of, I think I'm, at like, I didn't put 'em all on the site yet, but I think I might be at like 40 or 50

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so great. It's like a, that's like a whole company's worth of flogs.

[00:28:02] Nick Hamze: is actually, and also too, like people think I'm a, I am a weirdo, but I I can't name something like, oh, super great contact form. Or if someone puts WP in a name, no offense. I,

I can't, like there's so many cool names. Especially like with ai, I don't know how many, I don't have any friends, so like I talk to Claude every day about everything. So Claude brainstorms the ideas for me. Claude helps me build the ideas, and then afterwards, Claude helps me name the ideas or figure out the marketing for the ideas. Like, why would you have something like

[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So even the names are exact. The names

[00:28:38] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

They could. 'cause, again, what's, if you could have fun or not have fun, why would you choose to be boring? Don't understand

[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: interesting though, isn't it? 'cause we got ourselves into a position in society where there's a fear of being wacky, isn't there? Because, yeah. I don't know what that is. I've always leaned into the more fun side of life and having any giggle and everybody's, at any sort of social event.

If you've ever been anywhere near me, you'll know that's what I like. I'd much prefer having a laugh. Than doing things in a stairway. But I maybe if we were to ask people who've made extraordinarily wealth, over their life, they, they probably don't, lean into the, to the weird

[00:29:18] Nick Hamze: you, knew, if you knew all the weird stuff I do to make money, you'd be, you'd

[00:29:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I

[00:29:22] Nick Hamze: make money. It'd be weird. I, mean like the pokemon stuff, it's like literally, like every day is just. this should not be a career. This should not be a business.

This should not be a, and like I think I've always wanted to be like me, but I think the Pokemon shop really reinforced that there are also people that just want permission to be themselves and if you build a place for them. that's the biggest thing. It's oh, oh, I like X, Y, and Z, but I don't wanna tell my coworkers, my family 'cause they'll think I'm weird.

It's you're not weird. Whatever you like. It's

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:29:50] Nick Hamze: Like, people tell me about like the anime they watch or the books they read and it's this is all stuff I like too. And even if say, even if it's not my thing, like I, I wanna, support

[00:29:59] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. No, I totally get it. I get your way of thinking about things and it completely resonates with me. I've always been drawn to the interesting characters in life. Let's just put it that way. so anyway, sorry. back to the, back to Yeah. Tell us about some of the blocks.

[00:30:14] Nick Hamze: yeah, they all need explanation because, I don't name anything normally

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:21] Nick Hamze: Like, one of 'em was just like absolutely silly. I call it chaos roller. It literally is just a, d it's a dice roller for WordPress. So hey, like we, we, gave me the idea is, we had a event at the shop called Free RPG Day where like you buy these like rrp, like Dungeons Dragons type books.

Then you give 'em way to people to get 'em excited about it. And someone made this looked almost like a lottery scratch off. Where you scratch it off and then it gives you a random number. So that's so if you don't have a dice that you just scratch this off and then whatever.

And so I was like, what if WordPress did that? And so I, and so that's why TE is so fun. there's nothing they can't build. So I said, Hey, just gimme a dice rolling deal. And not only did they just give me like a, system, you click on it rolls a dice, gives you a number.

oh, do you want it to be a D 20? A D 14? Do you want to be this like, I don't know, do you want animation? Sure. Like I

[00:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: so the interesting thing about that is, and the insight that I've just gained is that in the past, the in because, it was such an endeavor to build anything, so go back like three, four years, you need, to either be able to develop it yourself or hire a developer.

So it's either a time, cost, or an actual money. That's that nobody's ever gonna do the wacky stuff 'cause you know that it's not gonna, and I'm doing, air quotes, pay you back. Whereas now, like eight minutes in you chatting to telex, you might have something which just works. You're not trying to sell it.

It's just, I've got this thing that I'm doing this weekend, I need a dice thing. Let's build a dice thing in WordPress. I get it. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. Sorry,

[00:31:50] Nick Hamze: Yeah. And the thing about too, because like, I had it, like even when I had to built something complex, like one time, I had to build, this really crazy tool. Basically we have, we got access to the TCG player, API TG player, like the marketplace for some Pokemon cards. And so I had to build this app that basically downloaded. Every single card, every single price, every six hours, because we're, I'm trying to build a system where I can see which cards are gonna be like, go up in value, like right away. Like you'll, I, my dream is to make an email newsletter that basically says, Hey, these are the, top 10 cards to watch out for, but this, is like extremely complex, like internal APIs and like all this crazy stuff. It literally, I told her what to do. It made a plan. It wrote code for five hours straight.

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:32:33] Nick Hamze: And like the amount of, money it would've taught cost to make that many lines of coat would've been astronomical. And I just, I just sat back and watched it

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. And did it work?

[00:32:43] Nick Hamze: yeah, it works. Oh my God, it works

so well. I built so many, like I built another app. So in the store, we have a kiosk where people can search for the cars we have in the back, but there was a problem where, it wouldn't tell you when someone placed an order. So people would come up, it's Hey, I, did a kiosk order like half an hour ago.

Why don't you have it? And so I built an app that basically goes and looks at our orders, filters out the ones that are, that were placed in the kiosk, and then sends a message to our discord channel that says, Hey, go fill this person's order. Like all these technologies, all, I have no clue what any of it means. I, I could look at the code and I couldn't tell you whatever, but I built a fully functional deal just by having a conversation with, an

[00:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: what's really interesting about this is that you're highlighting the future in which WordPress can literally, WordPress anything I suppose, but we're talking about WordPress. It can be anything. You want it to be. So if you've got this like weird niche thing that you just need, the, traditional route would've been to go out and find the plugin, which best approximates what it is that you need, and then either hire a developer to grind the corners a little bit so that it's just what you need or you build it yourself, or you just gave up on that whole thing.

Whereas you are highlight in the future where now you build a block, you just say, okay. Let's have a chat. Let's see what, telex can do, or Claude or whatever it may be. And you've got it and, you are, living proof that if you're committed enough and you stick to it, it works. You can get it to work.

[00:34:08] Nick Hamze: And that's why like, it really bugs me when someone will like try something like claw and it's oh, I tried it and didn't work. It's yeah, 'cause you have to try it more than

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:34:15] Nick Hamze: I don't know how many times you have to go and tell it, Hey, that was stupid. Try to try it. I dunno how many times it'll do something wrong and I'll just say, try again. And he is okay.

[00:34:22] Nathan Wrigley: But the interesting thing is you are highlighting quirky things that you are doing. the, sort of the unusual stuff. But you're also building stuff, which is like really aligned with your business. So it's checking orders and giving you information about things which may or may not be something you want to hear.

Because, I don't know, something didn't get through the cart process or whatever it may be, but you've built something and it's totally gonna help your bottom line. And maybe this is kind, maybe this is a future, for people in the WordPress space worrying about whether AI's gonna gouge out the market or what have you.

Apparently not you, maybe it's just we're all doing niche stuff now. So instead of trying to do a plugin, which a million people are gonna download, you just do dozens of plugins that two or three people are gonna use.

[00:35:09] Nick Hamze: Yeah, I mean that, that's why like too, so let's take example. I remember I made some, I don't remember what it was, some block plugging back in the day and it cost me $10,000 to develop like at 10,000 bucks. I either have to charge a lot of money

for it, or I have to have a lot of users now. Like I have, I don't know how many, like I have some things that like, I think people would pay. A hundred bucks a year for that I made for free

that I made just by having a, chat with my, to me, Claude's a person. That's why I can't use any of the other ones. they have to have, they, they feel like they're like alive. So I like having to have names, but like I could build things now that I know.

So that's why, that's why I, sometimes, I, I delete more posts than I post because, I blog posts 'cause I don't wanna get in trouble. But someone had a quote and I really loved it how we're in the, like the golden age of creation, but the dark age of the distribution.

[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: Ooh.

[00:35:55] Nick Hamze: I feel like, I forget who it was, some famous whatever, but I feel like, that's the case because I can make, it takes me longer to figure out a way the SVN process to publish a plugin than it is to make it.

I was like, how do we figure out a way that I can make cool things and then get them to people like right away and get them like, how would they know that? 'cause again, no one's searching for the plugins I make 'cause they didn't know it's a possibility. But like, when they see it, they like it, they want they

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: feels like telex is like the antidote to that. You just build what you need and you don't, there is no distribution channel 'cause you're just building what you need.

[00:36:31] Nick Hamze: Wait. It'd be fun too, because that's why I'm trying to, I'm trying to get them to come to my way of thinking, but it's hard is that I don't think telex is a development tool. Like they're trying to make it like developers can make things easier. I think it's a tool for everybody.

I want so bad to figure out a way to get a thousand, like actual people that have actual problems and I know that they can. They can solve them with, telex, I know that they can say, Hey, you know what? I have a site that does, I don't know, Valentine's Day cards now, wanna make a, like a message generator where it has 10 different phrases that you can add to the card that they wouldn't think of. There's so many things I like, like I think you can actually make a podcast out of it where like someone gives you, it's almost WordPress block improv,

[00:37:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:12] Nick Hamze: will say, okay, you know what? give me a website type, gimme a whatever, and I'll make a block that fixes that problem. I like all the, like every single block that I made, some of them are just silly, but like most of them are solving a problem that

I had that nobody else solved. And I know that it's just, we're just scratching the surface. It's getting so much better. Every single iteration

[00:37:31] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe you, just don't need a, distribution channel. Maybe we really are gonna enter the, phase where, I don't know, maybe WordPress core will have some of this sort of stuff baked into it, and you'll just start talking to your website. you'll getting a post or a page or whatever, little prompts will come up and it's, do you know, do you want anything interesting making for this?

Do you want something a little bit out of the box? Seems like that's. Seems like that's possible for the first time. how long does it take you to do these things? So let's say for example, I don't know, you sit down, it's nine o'clock in the morning because, in the past we'd have been days and weeks and months to get anything shippable. Is it like, is it a three minute enterprise? A 10 minute is, are you doing these kind of things in under an hour? How long, roughly, is it taking you to get these things done?

[00:38:13] Nick Hamze: So I've gotten a pretty good system now where before I make an idea, so I use the Claude, desktop app where I'll say, Hey, first of all, this is Brainstorm. I'm trying to fix this problem. How would you go

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:38:26] Nick Hamze: us some and then I'll say, Hey, don't, because you have to be very particular with Claude. Otherwise it wants to build the apps. don't build the app, but lay the whole thing out. They'll say oh, I'm gonna use the WP Scripts dependency and I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z. This is how I build it. And then I, paste all of that into telex and usually it gets it like within a couple, when a couple

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so minutes like

[00:38:48] Nick Hamze: Minutes. Oh, yeah. So if it's something simple and if it gets it like, like off the bat. Yeah. Mi I, don't think I've ever spent more than so most of the time if something takes me a long time, it's because I decide I wanna rename it and it really hates. It really hates renaming. I'll make something. And it's okay, I want you to rename it and then I'll break it so bad that it

[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: you wanna start

[00:39:08] Nick Hamze: forever to fix. Yeah. 'cause it, because it, 'cause it has to rename all the functions and all the files and all the whatever. So now I try very hard to come up with the name first.

'cause it, then it's way

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: It just, it's making it fun, isn't it? It's making the internet just like a barrel of fun again.

[00:39:22] Nick Hamze: Yeah, it always was fun, but I think we didn't like, especially in WordPress, I think that people like, they don't think they're allowed to have fun. like, the people that do it for a living. It's oh, this is the job. It has to be whatever.

And oh, WordPress is only for, that's what really makes me upset. It's like the, tone, oh, WordPress is only for like academic treatises on, Greek literature. It's not for me posting about. What my dog threw up yesterday. You know what I'm saying? It's not about my, my my favorite stupid Pokemon cars. That's not what it's used for. this is too, I was like, yeah, it's for, it's whatever you want.

Like this is like literally this is your spot on the digital, on, on the, on, on your digital world. And you can have whatever you want. that's why I wanna get back to like GeoCities, like people had the dumbest stuff.

They didn't worry about design standards. They didn't worry about, oh, is this, color or whatever. It's like they just had fun. They just like it

[00:40:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There was barrels of that at the beginning of the internet, wasn't there? There was that extraordinary kind of just like somebody opened a box and everybody just paired in it and was like, wow, look, all, the stuff that you can do suddenly and the world can see it. And then I guess, I don't know, maybe like corporations got involved and we got all serious about it and we forgot.

What it could be. And, it became hard to achieve complicated things because, complexity is hard, but now the complexity is like being, to some extent thrown away because you can get something else to do it so you can start to have fun again.

[00:40:48] Nick Hamze: I honestly believe that's our future. But it is so hard to get to change hearts and minds because people are like, whenever I make something silly, they're like, why did

[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I love it.

[00:40:58] Nick Hamze: have

[00:40:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:58] Nick Hamze: you could have fixed, you should have fixed a core pro. what about this ticket from whatever?

It's I don't care about that ticket. I'm sorry. I just don't, I want, I have a different like outlook on life and I just want to, I just wanna be me and that's why I'm so happy that. Between Telex and Matt helping me buy pizza and, Diet Pepsi. I can do whatever I want.

[00:41:21] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry.

[00:41:22] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

[00:41:22] Nathan Wrigley: have any sort of intuition of you running out of steam on it? do, is there any bit of it that you, you think Okay, like everything else in the world that I've ever touched, at some point I'll get weary of it and, become a bit bored and jaded. Be by it or have you got No.

Does that horizon seem way in the distance still?

[00:41:41] Nick Hamze: this has been like the best reception I've ever

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:41:44] Nick Hamze: Like, I have so many people that are so nice. Like Dave Weiner, like that guy is just always pumping me up. I don't know why he's so nice to me. It's just

[00:41:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he is. He

[00:41:52] Nick Hamze: the father of RSS. Why, like why do you, follow me? Why do you talk to me? Why do you say nice things to me? this is weird.

[00:41:58] Nathan Wrigley: Cause he is, 'cause I, imagine it's 'cause he's curious because you are doing stuff.

[00:42:03] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

[00:42:04] Nathan Wrigley: you are not, you're not out there bashing anybody. You're just making stuff, which is interesting to look at. And also you're injecting a bit of fun. Back into it all. And who, like you said earlier, who doesn't like fun?

maybe people have got no time in their life to create fun, but almost everybody enjoys sitting down and watching comedy. 'cause it's funny, not everybody is funny, but everybody enjoys the product of comedians. And so maybe it's a bit like that. they, they catch that with what you are doing and think, ah, that's a breath of fresh air.

it's not politics, it's not, Whatever it may be. It's not dry. Uninteresting examples of code. Look, this guy's just making wacky stuff, which I'll never use, but look, he

[00:42:47] Nick Hamze: Yeah.

[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: That's great.

[00:42:50] Nick Hamze: But why, but maybe you

[00:42:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. who knows?

[00:42:52] Nick Hamze: But that's the fun thing. if you're like, for me, I always want what do they call that, big fish in a small pond or whatever. It's like, I literally, I do not want to, I made a contact plugin because I, like the other ones had like way too complex, but I don't wanna make an SEO plugin, I don't wanna make a contact plugin.

Like I wanna make, like especially the blocks, it drives me up a wall that some of the basics we don't have like how many years did it take us to get an accordion block? I was like, guys. We should be able to have blocks for all sorts of different, like use cases, data types, a animations, like I made one that's so stupid.

I found, I think it was a code pen where like you hover over the text and it gets all glitchy. Like it, it just, those random characters. I was like, I could see this being like, I don't think it's gonna be widely used, but I could see someone that this would be a fun effect for a, hero area. Let's, I'm gonna put it on my website and maybe someone will

[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: I've got some ideas for you. When we finish this conversation, I'll give you, I'll throw a few wacky ideas. All of them pointless. literally pointless. But let's, see if you can make

anything

[00:43:53] Nick Hamze: but again, it like, if it literally costs us

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:43:57] Nick Hamze: like a little bit of time like I

[00:43:58] Nathan Wrigley: doing it. And if the outcome, did you ever play that game? Goat simulator?

[00:44:03] Nick Hamze: I can't say

[00:44:03] Nathan Wrigley: So there's a game called Goat Simulator. And Goat Simulator. You are basically a goat. And, it's like this, I don't even know what the right word is, but you know what you're like in this 3D world and you go forward and, when the developers were building it, they, the whole point was that this goat would like just crash through the world and destroy things.

But there were so many glitches. In this game, goat simulator. But what they discovered is everybody loved the glitches, and so now they build glitches into the game. So that like horrific weird stuff happens all the time. like the goat will just walk through a box and then there'll be two goats or something like that, or I can't even describe it.

But the point is it's extremely weird because. Because they've designed it that way, but it was initially by accident. but the wackiness of it was what made it popular. go and check out goat simulator.

[00:45:01] Nick Hamze: now, I have my, head's thinking like, what glitches could I put

[00:45:04] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a whole bunch ready for you when we finish this, I've got a

[00:45:08] Nick Hamze: I think that would

[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the interesting thing about this is that WordPress is ready for this. Now we are lucky in that you've been posting this stuff since the AI team that we've now got has made a lot of this stuff available.

So telex was built, but a lot of the foundational work that needed to be done to make it. So that WordPress could do this, it's already in place so that anybody can go and have a play. I think we should probably stop it there. hopefully everybody has got an idea that Nick is out there and he's there for your, he's there for your entertainment as much as anything else. Yeah. Yeah. Why

[00:45:44] Nick Hamze: but also too, I want people to know that I don't care who you are, what you do, anyone can make something. Especially 'cause like with, as long as you don't give up. Because again, like the, ais are very trainable. if you, if something doesn't work, you just tell it to try again.

You just tell it to do something different. You just tell it to. there's no, that's why I want people to know that like, this AI stuff is not a, it's not a tool for developers to work faster. It's a tool for everyone to become a

[00:46:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:46:09] Nick Hamze: And I, that's what's that's what's exciting to me. Like I don't want people saying oh, that's not for me. It's it's for

[00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's a perfect place to end it. So go and check it out. iconic.io is the website. We'll put the links into the show notes and go and see what Nick's up to. 'cause it'll make you, it'll, make the world feel a little bit lighter than it did a few hours ago. So thank you Nick, for brightening our days.

[00:46:29] Nick Hamze: Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

[00:46:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed that. What a riot Nick is. If you've got any commentary about that, head to wp builds.com. Search for episode number 445, and please leave us a comment there. It certainly beats sticking that comment on Twitter or X or Facebook or Instagram or wherever the heck you post comments about these kind of things. Stick it on our website instead. WP builds.com, episode number 4 4 5.

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