From Notepad to Guiding AI: Why You Shouldn't Be Worried

Michael Thomas discovered Craft roughly ten years ago and never really looked back. He'd followed Brandon Kelly out of the ExpressionEngine world and has been building almost exclusively with Craft since version 2. He's also, as he puts it, not touched WordPress in four years.

Splitting a 130-person agency

This February, the agency he worked for split in two. Pàu had grown to more than 130 people across two very different businesses, staffing and consultancy on one side, project work on the other, and the friction between them had started costing them clients who couldn't tell what the company actually was. Michael went with the project side and helped start Bleu Chaud, deliberately sized down to a team of five. Six months in, he's clear that the hardest part wasn't the work. It was the first three months of onboarding clients, splitting tooling, and having no capacity to be proactive about anything.

Bleu Chaud isn't a marketing-site agency. The work sits on bigger platforms where integrations matter and where compliance is a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have: the European Accessibility Act, GDPR, NIS2, SOC 2 Type II. Which sounds like the least glamorous corner of the industry until Michael explains what it actually involves. Legal departments with very specific rules about how documents are structured and versioned. Investor relations gating content by the reader's country of residence. A different set of constraints on every project. For someone who describes himself as a problem solver by heart, that turns out to be the appeal.

Teaching Claude how Craft works

The other half of the conversation is AI, and Michael has thought about it more carefully than most. Out of pure frustration, because Claude kept writing fields into project.yaml and forgetting that Craft still needs to run craft up, he started writing skills: small rule files that trigger on keywords and tell the model how Craft actually works. That grew into a full set covering plugin development, content modelling, Twig, DDEV and deployment, including what Andrew Welch reckons is the best documentation Garnish has ever had. It's open source, it gets installed around a thousand times a month, and he now spends half a day to a day every week on it. A compliance-grade MCP server for Craft is next.

None of which makes him relaxed about what the tools produce. He still reviews everything and sometimes spends a month on something an AI drafted in two days. He has strong opinions about the plugins now arriving in the store, though his objection turns out not to be "AI wrote this" but "nobody thought about this." What he actually trusts is whether a maintainer will still answer an email in a year's time.

Twenty-five years of tools that were going to change everything

And then there's the title of this episode. Michael started out writing HTML in Notepad, in tables, because nothing else was possible. He watched CSS arrive, then JavaScript, then the frameworks, then Grunt and Gulp and webpack and Vite, then CI/CD and automated testing. Every one of those shifts made somebody's job easier and somebody else nervous. He's seen developers leave the industry because they wouldn't move past HTML and CSS, and he doesn't think AI is a different kind of event. It's a tool, and the question is what you do with it.

We also get into Craft 6 and the move to Laravel, what it unlocks for agencies that already run Laravel applications, the one thing Michael would change about Craft tomorrow (soft-deleted assets that can't be restored), and his advice to anyone starting out now: stop staring at the programming language and learn how things connect.