Case study - WordPress.com
Write Brief with AI
Write Brief with AI helps people write confidently in the WordPress editor. It flags long sentences, complex words, and uncertain language as you type. I started it as a side project called Breve—Latin for brief. I designed the interface, coded the first version, and guided its evolution into a full release. It now runs in every WordPress.com editor.
Writing grounded in principles
At Automattic, we follow writing principles inspired by “Write like an Amazonian.” Clear. Specific. Concise. Sentences under 20 words. Grade level between 8 and 12. Tools like Grammarly help—but they don’t enforce our voice. And they live outside the editor. We needed something native. Something opinionated. A way to give writers, including ourselves, real-time feedback right where the work happens—so our communication is objective and grounded in data.
Prototyped, polished, shipped to customers
I prototyped Write Brief in code and demoed it to the company and CEO via our internal design blog. Once we secured buy-in, we refined every visual element to match the WordPress Design System. We used the tool ourselves, “eating our own dog food”, to uncover rough spots and iterated until it felt natural in the editor.
We iterated a few times on a compact popover that could both provide suggestions and leave space for more controls like Retry.
80% suggestion acceptance rate
The release appeared in TechCrunch and 31 other publications. It ships to every WordPress.com user and maintains an 80 percent suggestion acceptance rate.
Internally, it sparked new AI initiatives and inspired reuse of Write Brief’s interaction patterns across other products.