Last week, the company I work for rolled out an initiative called Radical Speed Month. The idea is that every engineer, designer and product person at Automattic teams up with a colleague close to their time zone, and spends a month building whatever they like. No approval required.

Officially:

We’re running an internal experiment at Automattic called Radical Speed Month — a one-month initiative where two-person teams are given full autonomy to build and ship projects without the usual approval processes. The company is energized and excited at the possibilities this month will bring.

I’ve been part of Automattic’s Special Projects team for roughly a year and a half. Internally, I’m a big advocate of Sensei LMS, an LMS (online course) plugin for WordPress. I spent the better part of my career at Automattic working on it, and would still be doing so if circumstances allowed. Now though, given that we can work on whatever we like for the next month, it was a no-brainer for me to spend that time improving Sensei.

As part of this initiative, I want to dive deeper into AI and go beyond just using it for development work. Especially on my mind is building agent pipelines so that AI (i.e. Claude Code) can triage and fix issues independently. It would be amazing if there was some proactive automation in place whereby CI failures on pushes to trunk were handled automatically.

I don’t expect I’ll ever have another opportunity quite like this during my career, so I don’t want to waste it! Let’s see how far I get. 🙂