Hey there,
It's an important time of the year for a lot of people right now - Lunar New Year celebrations, the beginning of Ramadan, and in my corner of the world... pancakes.
Today, every single class in my kids' school was handed frying pans and batter and told to go for it. The fire alarm went off three times. I'm not sure what they expected to happen when you give 200 children access to open flames and tell them to flip things, but apparently nobody thought that through.
Anyway, I read an article today that stopped me in my tracks a bit more than the fire alarm did.
It was about how applications for computer science degrees have dropped significantly since AI became mainstream. Students are looking at tools like Claude and Codex writing code in seconds and thinking "why would I spend three years learning to do something a machine already does?"
And I have feelings about this, because I studied computer science at university. I spent years learning to write code by hand, debugging things line by line, and believing that understanding how to build software from scratch would be the most valuable skill I could ever have.
Now my kids' generation might skip all of that entirely and I'm not sure they'd be wrong to.
I'm not saying technical skills don't matter anymore. They absolutely do. But the type of technical skills that matter has shifted. It's more about knowing what to build, what to automate, and when to let AI handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the parts that actually need a human brain.
Which, funnily enough, is exactly what's happening with email right now.
A few years ago, managing your WordPress emails meant manually checking that everything was sending, troubleshooting delivery failures one by one, and spending way too long on tasks that should have been automatic.
Now there are tools that handle the boring bits for you, from making sure your transactional emails actually get delivered, to setting up sequences that run while you sleep, all the way up to AI tools that can draft and send emails on your behalf.
I just published a guide that walks through all of it, level by level. Whether you're still doing everything manually or you're ready to experiment with AI-powered automation, there's something in there for you.
The small business guide to email automation (from simple to AI-powered)
And for the more technically adventurous among you, the guide also covers the new SendLayer MCP server, which let AI assistants interact directly with your email setup. It's genuinely cool stuff.
You don't need a computer science degree to set any of it up. Trust me, mine hasn't been particularly useful for a while now.
I'm off to eat some pancakes. Catch you next time,
Rachel
Product Educator, WP Mail SMTP
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