WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has delivered a wide-ranging critique of the WordPress project, saying it has spent years doing damage to itself and calling out a release culture he says produces “boring or mediocre crap.”
Mullenweg dropped into the #core-committers channel on WordPress Slack on Sunday evening UTC after catching up on DMs over Starlink on his return flight from WordCamp Asia, where he found a 10-day-old ping about a disputed Trac ticket. What followed was an hours-long rant about a project he said wasn’t being beaten by competition, but was in a state of self-inflicted decline.
“I am very sad at the state we’ve gotten ourselves in on WordPress and WordPress.org,” he wrote.
He described a project that had taken what critics called “bad” technology, “no governance,” and predictions that “businesses and enterprises will never adopt” it, and “kicked the butt of all the people” who doubted it, growing “in an unstoppable fashion even as our success attracted billion of dollars of counter-investment and counter-advertising. FOR 19 STRAIGHT YEARS. That’s crazy.”
Three years on, he said, the project has continued working exactly as it always has, even as the landscape has changed with the introduction of AI. Some contributors still believe the slowdown is down to his public dispute with WP Engine in September 2024, which he rejected.
“We are not being killed by competition, I believe we have done this to ourselves,” he wrote. “We did it by blindly following rules and ideals to a point when they became iatrogenic.”
The ticket that started it all
The ping that caught Mullenweg’s attention linked to a discussion in #core that had been posted on April 2. It was about a Trac ticket that proposed registering Akismet Anti-Spam as a connector type in the new AI Connectors screen shipping with WordPress 7.0.
The ticket had been created by an Automattic-sponsored contributor following a private conversation with another Automattic employee, and committed with no public discussion. The second Automattic employee shared the ticket in the #7-0-release-leads channel for visibility.
Earle Davies, who goes by elrae in WordPress Slack, took issue with how quickly the ticket had been approved and merged during the release candidate period, and had pinged Mullenweg to complain.
“When people complain about WP issues a common response I see is ‘WP is open source, anyone can contribute.’ Sure, anyone can contribute. But that doesn’t mean their issue/PR won’t sit there for years before being merged,” Davies wrote. “Meanwhile a trac item got created by an a8c employee and merged during an RC with 0 public discussion.”
Mullenweg responded on Sunday, writing that he would take a look at the ticket.
Read more: Matt Mullenweg Overrules Core Committers to Put Akismet on WordPress 7.0’s Connectors Screen
“The wheels have fallen off”
After reviewing the Trac ticket, Mullenweg took to #core-committers where he pinged several core committers to vent his frustration.
“I shudder to think how much longer that could have gone on!” he wrote about the discussion in the ticket. “I am in awe of the brainpower and talent of the people in that thread, I think it’s funny how I and we can keep being so smart but so dumb at the same time, and I think we keep repeating these patterns, and I’m also incredibly sad.”
Mullenweg argued that WordPress had spent the past few years undoing what made it successful, and blamed process creep. He said open source norms intended to protect the integrity of the project, including public discussion over calls, broad consensus before decisions, and scheduling that accommodated global time zones, had created a culture that made it functionally impossible to resolve even minor disputes without a weeks-long Slack thread and a cast of dozens.
“We need to stop following these stupid policies as good open source practices, when they are keeping us from shipping more open source to the world,” he wrote.
“How did we allow ourselves into being collectively gaslit into not just trying them out, but far past any point of reasonableness and got our heads out our butts and looked around and saw what was really happening.
“We are operating at a level of collective delusion that is quite impressive!”
He described the Akismet ticket as “a microcosm of all the ways we’ve undone everything that made us successful, made contribution incredibly painful, and end up shipping boring or mediocre crap.”
He also pointed to the Trac backlog, which stood at 8,094 open tickets. He said rather than treating the number as a problem, the project had hidden it behind a custom query and moved on.
“How come instead of addressing that as a real problem and working on it, we have told ourselves it doesn’t matter, and pretended it didn’t exist by making you have to do a custom query to get there?” he wrote. “Stop spending so much time on useless, trivial things that literally don’t matter.”
His argument extended to how the project handles risk. “By definition the things that will give us the biggest wins will be the most non-consensus, so we have to accept the occasional failure or mistake otherwise we will never have any wins,” he wrote.
He acknowledged he had created many of the structures he was now criticizing. In stepping back from day-to-day leadership, he said, he had deliberately delegated decision-making broadly and built committees and governance layers.
“I’m sorry to say it, but while I’ve been gone the wheels have fallen off,” he wrote. He offered no timeframe for when he had stepped back, or when he believed things had turned.
Returning to the channel Tuesday afternoon UTC, he went further. “I cannot do everything, I have to be able to give others the ability to do things without being blocked,” he wrote. “We need to judge on results, not the precautionary principle.”
The AI Connectors Screen
Mullenweg said the AI Connectors screen shipping in WordPress 7.0 was proof of the problem.
“This feature doesn’t even work as it’s supposed to,” he wrote, sharing a screenshot of an errors screen.
The Connectors screen is a central location in wp-admin for users to connect their WordPress site to external AI providers. It was the feature Mullenweg had personally called for ahead of Beta 2, and one that shaped the entire back half of the 7.0 release cycle before the recent delay.
As The Repository reported at the time, the screen was built under genuine deadline pressure — the pull request was submitted just three days before Beta 2 and shipped 81 commits later. Concerns from contributors about extensibility, security, and scope were acknowledged but deferred to 7.1.
Mullenweg said it had taken “so freaking long” to ship what was, at its core, “a blank page with 3-4 buttons on it.”
He tied it back to the Trac ticket that was the catalyst for his posts. “That’s why I was trying to get Akismet and Jetpack and others in there so at least something on the page made sense,” he wrote.
He pointed to Cloudflare’s EmDash CMS, which shipped in two months, as a contrast. “When Cloudflare can ship the entire functionality of WordPress, and then some, in 2 months, we can take longer than that to almost not ship one sub-menu of our Settings screen,” he wrote. “That is an input and a save button, stored in a meta field.”
Nick Hamze and theme reviews
Mullenweg also turned his attention to the theme review process, using Nick Hamze as an example.
Hamze, who launched the Featured Plugins experiment in February, had spent a month navigating review feedback on his Twombly theme submission. Mullenweg called out a requirement to underline all links as a rule no working web designer would consider universal, and said the submission had also been held up over an AI-generated image.
He made a similar point about the Ollie team, whose block theme and pattern library he called among the best work in the ecosystem, and whose Ollie theme had been rejected in 2023.
“We keep driving away some of the most valuable people and rejecting them when they try to contribute,” Mullenweg wrote.
Returning to the channel on Tuesday afternoon UTC, he extended the argument beyond the theme directory. “If Elementor were submitted today, would it be accepted?” he wrote. “If we had brought in Elementor instead of doing Gutenberg, would we have crushed their spirits and ability to innovate as well?”
Akismet and Automattic’s contributions
Mullenweg pushed back on the framing of Akismet as an inappropriate inclusion in core, or as an example of Automattic receiving special treatment.
He said core committers had treated Akismet’s inclusion as “an existential moral crisis we need to draw a line in the sand and say THOU SHALL NOT PASS.”
“Akismet has been in core for 20 years,” he wrote. “And the world hasn’t ended.”
He pointed out that the Connectors page featured OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that hadn’t contributed to the WordPress project and nobody had complained about their inclusion. He said Google had contributed in the past but had since stopped.
“… how ridiculous is it attacking Akismet, and Automattic, and blocking the thing the person who is our [release] lead asked for,” Mullenweg wrote.
“It is pathological that we keep attacking me and Automattic who have by any measure given the most.
“And if you want me to justify why Akismet is in there… how about BLOCKING 569,403,129,437 SPAMS FOR WORDPRESS SITES, ALMOST ENTIRELY FOR FREE… for 20 years!
“If you would like to build a hosted SaaS service doing sophisticated adversarial operations serving thousands of requests a minute for no charge and with a business model that is basically the honor system, please go do it and come back in 20 years and I’ll put your plugin in.
“We should be embarrassed how little we recognize these contributions and instead attack them all the time.”
The State of WordPress.org
Mullenweg clicked through wordpress.org in real time during his posts, sharing screenshots of what he found. He was critical of the News page displaying large headers over sparse content. The About page hadn’t been updated to reflect WordPress’s switch from MySQL to MariaDB.
He pointed out that navigation varied across the site, with the label “Extend” appearing in some places to group plugins, themes, and blocks, a label that doesn’t appear anywhere in wp-admin.
“The most important parts of wordpress.org have atrophied or sometimes even been hidden, we keep shipping ridiculous designs like on wordpress.org where large-blue-information free and giant headers with nothing below it but a date,” he wrote.
“And we keep ignoring me about having the showcase as the first link! I have put it back there several times! Why is news the first link on the homepage? First three menu items should be showcase, plugins, themes.”
He said he didn’t think anyone in #core-committers would allow a design like the WordPress.org News page to ship in core.
“I know why,” he wrote of the “criminal neglect.” “Because we’re spending all our time on trivial don’t-matter tickets and feeling good we contributed.”
“We’re whistling and drinking as Rome burns, and most of you are going to go back to ignoring me again, or undermining what I’m trying to do.”
How core committers responded
Some contributors responded in the thread, most with at least partial agreement. Others haven’t responded publicly.
Core committer David Baumwald called the situation “process creep,” something made to please everyone that ends up thrilling no one. Tammie Lister, also a core committer, said she wanted to push harder on AI-assisted triage as a practical solution to the ticket backlog, something she had written about as early as June 2025. Contributor Anne McCarthy pointed contributors to codevitals.run, an AI-powered triage tool built by Riad Benguella, Gutenberg lead developer.
Responding to Mullenweg’s posts about Akismet and Automattic’s contributions, WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard commented that Automattic had a right to compete like any other company. Mullenweg pushed back. “Stop saying that, it’s playing into the gaslighting,” he wrote.
Core committers The Repository contacted declined to comment publicly.
The reaction
The reaction across the wider WordPress community was mixed, though the substance of Mullenweg’s argument found more support than his delivery.
“I’m not sure I disagree with any of it,” GravityKit founder Zack Katz wrote in Post Status Slack. Katz said the rant aligned with discussions at PressConf last week. “We need to move faster and allow for decisions to be made,” he wrote. “I’d grant ‘War Powers’ to [Mullenweg] for a period of time just to allow WP to compete.”
Developer Andrew Hoyer, who joined the channel and read the full thread, wrote on X that his instinctive first reaction was that Mullenweg was right about how things had been handled. Consultant Jeff Chandler, also on X, agreed: “He’s not exactly wrong about a lot of what he said.”
Agreement on the diagnosis didn’t extend to the delivery. Chandler described the conversation as a “sort of unraveling” and invoked the concept of a “Matt Bomb,” a term drawn from Scott Berkun’s 2013 book “A Year Without Pants,” which documented Mullenweg’s pattern of disappearing from a subject for an extended period before re-emerging with a wide-ranging intervention.
The only bomb is what we've been doing the last few years. 🤠 And yes it's my fault, and I'm going to fix it.
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) April 14, 2026
“He lacks continuity on many subjects and objectives,” Chandler wrote. “He lets all this stuff build inside of him. And then one day, when he has time or decides to get around to it, he dumps out a bunch of trash.”
“I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he said,” Chandler wrote, “but the way he communicates is a blocker to implementing his vision.”
Courtney Robertson from GoDaddy urged those following what was happening in #core-committers to not comment in the channel and leave it to core committers to respond. Chandler responded: “Based on actions that have taken place on this Slack in the last two years, I don’t think anyone wants to walk across the minefield and lay more mines.”
On reflection
Mullenweg returned to #core-committers on Tuesday afternoon UTC to post more, including a comment about Joost de Valk that raised eyebrows, given what he has said about the Yoast co-founder over the past 18 months. De Valk was banned from WordPress.org after publicly calling for an end to Mullenweg’s BDFL leadership of the project.
“As much as I’ve said about @joostdevalk, I really wish we had followed his lead when he tried to help us,” Mullenweg wrote. “I didn’t do enough to support him, because both he and I believed in these ideals of participation, he has great product sense and could have driven some excellent changes.”
In January 2019, de Valk was appointed Marketing and Communications Lead for the project. He stepped down just five months later, citing conflicting views about his role.
In Post Status Slack, where Mullenweg’s comment was being discussed, de Valk simply responded with a shrug emoji.
In WordPress Slack, Mullenweg acknowledged that he had created the structures that produced the current situation, and that he wanted the project to let him lead. “Any good idea can be followed past its point,” he wrote. “Charity can become harmful. Trying to include can end up excluding.”
Disclosure: Automattic-owned Pressable is a sponsor of The Repository.