Episode 3: The sentence your plugin has to pass before it ships
In this episode
Christopher built an AI feature that worked the first time, then could not write the one sentence that describes it on the plugin page. Frances asks the question that matters most: who has to explain this to their boss? Why a feature you cannot describe in plain words is not finished yet.
Takeaway: Nobody buys a feature they can’t explain to their boss.
The artifact: The Plugin AI-Disclosure One-Liner template. You can grab it from the blog.
Full transcript: Episode 3
CHRISTOPHER: Two weeks ago I built a small AI feature that worked the first time, which honestly never happens. I made a coffee to celebrate. Then I sat down to write the one sentence that describes it on the plugin page — got four words in, and froze. Frances thinks that frozen cursor told me everything I needed to know about what I’d actually built. She’s right, and I didn’t enjoy it.
FRANCES: This is Sites I’ve Never Seen, the show where Christopher and I open up the work behind the work — the code, the experiments, the proud little moments that come apart the second you have to explain them out loud. I’m Frances. I run my own shop, I’ve paid for software I couldn’t describe to my own staff, and my job here is to make Christopher prove what he believes before he says it to you. And today I’m starting, because he wrote a sentence he couldn’t finish. Chris — read it to me again. The whole line, not the part you like.
CHRISTOPHER: It suggests where a new post might link, based on the rest of the site.
FRANCES: That’s the part you like. Keep going. What does it read to do that?
CHRISTOPHER: It reads the draft, and it —
FRANCES: the draft. Just the one open in the editor?
CHRISTOPHER: I’ll come back to that.
FRANCES: You always come back to that. Heh. Okay, Chris, set it up for the people who didn’t watch you stall just now. What did you build?
CHRISTOPHER: So, two weeks ago I had a small AI feature working in one of my plugins. And I was genuinely pleased with it. A writer is drafting a post, and the plugin looks at what they’ve written, looks at the rest of the site, and says, you might want to link this to that older piece over here. Saves them digging through three years of archives for the one post they half-remember. It worked the first time, which never happens. It linked a piece on application passwords to an older one on user roles, and it was the right call. I’d have made the same one by hand in ten minutes.
FRANCES: And you sat back.
CHRISTOPHER: I sat back. I was proud. I made a coffee. And then I went to write the one line that goes on the plugin’s listing. The sentence a shop owner reads before they click install. I got four words in and I couldn’t finish it.
FRANCES: Four words. Which four?
CHRISTOPHER: “This plugin lets the AI —” and then nothing. I sat there with the cursor blinking. And the not-finishing told me something I didn’t want to know yet.
FRANCES: It told me something too, and I wasn’t even in the room for the building. Here’s where my head goes the second a developer says I’m proud of it but I can’t describe it. I think, fine, you can’t describe it. Who’s the person who has to?
CHRISTOPHER: The buyer.
FRANCES: Not even the buyer. The buyer’s boss. The person who didn’t read the plugin page, didn’t watch the demo, and is going to lean over a desk and say, what did we just put on our website? That’s who has to explain it. And he wasn’t in your editor when you were having a nice afternoon with your coffee.
CHRISTOPHER: Okay, but before we put it all on the explaining — let me lay down what actually changed, because the building got easier and the explaining got harder, and that’s the whole knot. WordPress seven point zero shipped a few weeks ago. And it added a standard way for plugins to talk to AI services.
FRANCES: Standard meaning what, in a sentence I can repeat?
CHRISTOPHER: Think of the day a town finally agrees on one shape of electrical outlet. Before, every appliance came with its own odd plug, its own adapter. After, things just fit the wall. That’s what seven point zero did for AI in plugins.
FRANCES: Right. So the plugins I already trust can add AI help without each one demanding its own account and its own bill.
CHRISTOPHER: Exactly. That’s the good news, mostly.
FRANCES: Mostly. I heard the mostly. A standard outlet doesn’t tell you what’s plugged into it.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s the line I keep landing on. The wall is solved. What’s plugged in is still on the person who installs it. And that’s where the cost lives, and the cost isn’t mine.
FRANCES: No, it really isn’t. Let me run the bill, because I had a client who walked straight into this, and it had nothing to do with the developer’s hours. Her name’s Priya. She runs a small firm, twelve people, does fulfilment for a handful of e-commerce shops. She installs a plugin because it promises to save her an hour a week, it’s got a new AI feature, it came recommended by someone she trusts. She doesn’t look too hard. Who has time.
CHRISTOPHER: Nobody has time. That’s not a flaw in Priya.
FRANCES: It is not. Six weeks later somebody on her team asks the simple question. That tool you added — does it send our customer list anywhere? Does it write the replies that go out under Priya’s name? And she does not know. She genuinely does not know, because nobody ever handed her a sentence she could hold onto.
CHRISTOPHER: And now she’s doing the expensive thing.
FRANCES: Now she’s reading documentation she doesn’t have the background to read. She’s emailing the developer, who answers in three days, and the answer has the word “embeddings” in it twice. And then it stops being hypothetical. She’s at the quarterly board meeting, and one of her directors — a guy who actually reads the contracts — puts down his pen and asks her, plainly, in front of everybody: when this tool writes a reply under your name, does a customer ever see something a human didn’t approve first? And Priya opens her mouth and nothing comes out. Not because the answer was bad. Because she had never been handed the sentence. She sat there in a room full of people she answers to, and the honest thing she could say was, I’ll have to get back to you.
CHRISTOPHER: And “I’ll have to get back to you” in that room costs —
FRANCES: it costs the thing you can’t put on an invoice. It cost her the look on his face. After that meeting she didn’t trust a single AI feature on that site, ripped three of them out, two of which were fine. That’s the bill. The plugin saved her an hour a week. The meeting where she couldn’t answer cost her a fortnight of cleanup and the quiet confidence of the one director she most needed in her corner. The hour was real. So was everything it set on fire.
CHRISTOPHER: And the feature was probably fine.
FRANCES: The feature was fine! That’s the part that gets me. The thing worked exactly as built. I’ve watched a whole sale stall two weeks for this — different shop, bigger deal — nobody on the vendor’s side could say, in one clean line, what their software let the AI touch, so the buyer’s procurement lead just sat on it. Not because the answer was bad. Because there wasn’t one.
CHRISTOPHER: So the silence read as the risk.
FRANCES: The silence is the risk. A buyer can price a yes and a buyer can price a no. What stalls them is a shrug. What cost everyone two weeks was that nobody could put it in a sentence the buyer would repeat to the person signing the cheque.
CHRISTOPHER: So here’s the part I want to defend, and then you can take it apart. I think the building is the hard part. I can wire a clever feature in an afternoon. Writing one honest sentence about it — that should be the easy bit. It’s just describing what’s already there.
FRANCES: Should be. Go on, though, because you don’t believe that. You stalled at four words.
CHRISTOPHER: I stalled at four words. Yeah. — let me back up, that came out more confident than I actually feel. Because here’s what the sentence does that the code doesn’t. The sentence forces a decision the code lets me dodge.
FRANCES: Now we’re talking. What decision did it force?
CHRISTOPHER: When I write the line, I have to admit exactly what the feature reads, where it sends that, and who sees the result. And my link-suggestion feature sounded simple until I tried to write its sentence. That’s when I realized I’d quietly given it permission to read every draft on the site.
FRANCES: every draft. Not the one open in the editor. You went there a minute ago and skated off it.
CHRISTOPHER: I skated off it because I didn’t like it. Every draft. The unpublished post about a price change nobody’s announced. The half-written apology to a customer. The thing somebody saved at eleven at night and never meant for software to read. When I built it, I wrote one query, the convenient one — give me all the drafts so the suggestions are richer. Made the feature better. The code did the broad thing happily, and it never once asked me to describe it. I didn’t decide to read everything. I just didn’t decide not to.
FRANCES: And there it is. The decision you didn’t make is the one that ends up in Priya’s board meeting.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s exactly it. The narrow version — read only the open draft — would’ve been a little less clever and a lot easier to stand behind. I picked clever without noticing I’d picked it.
FRANCES: So the complexity you were proud of —
CHRISTOPHER: was the part that should’ve worried me. I had it backwards. I thought clever meant good. Clever just meant I’d built something I couldn’t put in a sentence.
FRANCES: And see, that’s the part I’ll actually admire, and I don’t say this often, so write it down. The judgment to stop at four words instead of shipping the clever thing — that’s the real craft. Most people would’ve shipped it and written some fog around it. You sat in the discomfort. That’s the part the worksheet can’t teach.
CHRISTOPHER: Heh. I’m going to keep that, because you’re going to deny you said it by Part Four.
FRANCES: I’ll deny it now. Moving on.
CHRISTOPHER: This is the same lesson I hit when I tested three different ways of asking an AI to review one of my themes. Three prompts, three completely different reviews, same theme. The loose question got me a flattering answer that hid the problems. The precise question dragged the real ones into the light.
FRANCES: And the honest sentence is the precise question. Just pointed at your own work.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The disclosure line isn’t marketing. It’s the precise prompt turned inward. A vague description lets me skate past what I built — right up until the day I have to write the precise one and decide whether I’m proud of what it says.
FRANCES: Nobody buys a feature they can’t explain to their boss. # APHORISTIC LINE
CHRISTOPHER: Say that again.
FRANCES: Nobody buys a feature they can’t explain to their boss. And it cuts both ways, Chris, that’s why it’s the whole episode. The buyer won’t install what they can’t repeat upward. And the seller who can’t say it cleanly — usually can’t because the thing itself is murkier than he wants to admit.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s the half I was hiding from. The murk wasn’t in the buyer. It was in what I’d built and hadn’t looked at straight.
FRANCES: Okay. So what do you actually do with this. Because I don’t want a listener nodding along and then installing the next clever thing on Tuesday.
CHRISTOPHER: Right, here’s the part anyone can do this week, and it costs nothing. Before you trust any plugin with an AI feature, finish this sentence out loud, in your own words. This plugin lets the AI, blank. And you fill the blank with three things — what it gets to look at, where that goes, and what it hands back. Three blanks. That’s the whole skill.
FRANCES: Three blanks. Looks at, sends, hands back.
CHRISTOPHER: Looks at, sends, hands back. And do it on a plugin that isn’t mine, so nobody thinks I’m being clever about my own. Take one of those support-desk plugins that drafts replies to customer tickets. You walk the three blanks out loud. What does it look at — it reads the customer’s message and probably the past tickets from that same person. Where does it send that — out to whatever AI model the vendor wired in, which lives on somebody else’s servers. What does it hand back — a written reply that a staff member can send under the company’s name. Say those three out loud and you’ve already learned the thing the listing page tried not to tell you: your customers’ words leave the building, and the answer comes back wearing your face. I didn’t decide any of that for you. The sentence did. That’s the part I keep coming back to — the sentence makes you say the thing the feature was quietly doing.
FRANCES: And now you can price it. A hair salon shrugs at that. A medical office doesn’t.
CHRISTOPHER: Right, but that’s the next decision, not this one. This one’s just getting the sentence out of your mouth. The judgment about whether you can live with the answer — that comes after, and that’s the part I had to learn the hard way on my own feature, the part I didn’t understand until I wrote its line.
FRANCES: Say it on yours. Out loud. Right now, the real one.
CHRISTOPHER: This plugin lets the AI read every unpublished draft on the site, send the text to a model, and suggest internal links back to the writer.
FRANCES: See, now I can price that. Read every unpublished draft — that’s the line that makes Priya’s lawyer sit up. Not because it’s evil. Because now she has to decide if it’s acceptable, and she can’t decide what she was never told.
CHRISTOPHER: And the fixed version is one word shorter and a lot easier to say. This plugin lets the AI read the draft you’re working on. That one a buyer repeats without flinching.
FRANCES: And if you can’t finish it at all?
CHRISTOPHER: Then that’s your answer for now. Don’t install it until someone gives you the line. And if you build plugins, same sentence is your gut check before you ship. Write the line the buyer reads to their boss before you write any marketing. I’d rather lose a clever feature than ship one I can’t explain to your boss for you.
FRANCES: I made you a download for this, didn’t I.
CHRISTOPHER: You did not make it. I made it. It’s called the Plugin AI-Disclosure One-Liner template, it’s free on the blog. Gives you the blanks and a couple of finished examples so you can see the shape of a clean one.
FRANCES: And now here’s where I stop being nice, because I priced this. The template’s the cheap part. The template can show you a sentence is missing. It cannot tell you whether the answer that sentence reveals is one you can live with.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s the judgment, yeah. Whether a feature that reads your customer messages to draft replies is fine for a hair salon and a problem for a law office.
FRANCES: That’s not a checkbox. That’s a number with consequences. I had a client — different one — who held a federal contract. For her, what does this software touch isn’t a preference. It’s something she has to defend in a file when somebody serious asks. Get that wrong and the cost isn’t an awkward meeting. It’s the contract.
CHRISTOPHER: And that’s the AODA side of it. The accessibility and compliance audit a federal vendor actually asks for — same shape. The question stops being do I like this and becomes can I stand behind this when someone puts me on the spot.
FRANCES: So hand the listener the honest split. What’s the free part and what’s the part they’re hiring you for? In your words, not mine.
CHRISTOPHER: The free part is getting the sentence written. Anyone can do that over coffee. The part I’m hired for is the thing I didn’t understand about my own feature until I tried to write its line — knowing whether the sentence, once you’ve written it, will actually hold up when someone serious reads it back to you. That’s not a habit. That’s nineteen years of building these things and watching which sentences held.
FRANCES: And here’s mine, because it’s a different sentence and you can’t say it for me. What the careful version is worth is the meeting it doesn’t cost you. The clever feature saved my client an hour a week. The sentence she couldn’t say cost her two weeks and nearly a board’s confidence. Careful, here, is just the cheaper invoice arriving later instead of the expensive one arriving by surprise.
CHRISTOPHER: I had the whole thing backwards two weeks ago. I thought the clever part was the work.
FRANCES: The clever part is never the work, Chris. You know who taught me that? You did. Two episodes back, you were the one defending the forty-item audit, proud of how thorough it was, and I was the one saying who’s going to do forty things. And you backed down to three.
CHRISTOPHER: I did back down to three.
FRANCES: Well. This week you’re the one who stopped at four words because forty would’ve been dishonest. So congratulations. You’ve turned into the person who annoyed me in episode one.
CHRISTOPHER: Heh. That’s the warmest thing you’ve ever said to me, and I know it cost you.
FRANCES: It cost me plenty. Don’t let it go to your head.
CHRISTOPHER: Here’s the one thing to try this week. Pick one plugin you already run that’s got an AI feature in it. Just one. Finish the sentence about it — this plugin lets the AI, blank. If the words come easy, good, you know what you’ve got. If they don’t, you just found the question worth asking before anyone else asks it of you. The template that holds the blanks is on the blog. This is Sites I’ve Never Seen. Glad you were here.
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