Zapping pesky bugs
Our team just submitted 150+ bug fixes to more than 20 products across our catalog, in a matter of weeks. It’s changing how we think about what’s possible in the future: let’s talk about it.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Beau, WooCommerce’s Artistic Director/Lead, about something we both feel strongly about: that known bugs shouldn’t sit in a backlog when our people often already have an idea of what the fix could look like. We agreed we could do better, and pulled in Lance, the head of quality at Automattic. A week later, all Woo Happiness Engineers (what we call our support teams) were invited to try to fix bugs, at a fast pace. Lance called it a “bug blitz.” The concept was simple: try to fix as many bugs as you can, and the quality engineers from Lance’s team will review so we can ship fast.
After that, several things happened simultaneously.
Process to progress
First, we saw some of our more technical support people emerge not just as leading the way, but as coaches. One Happiness Engineer wrote a Claude Skill to set up a WooCommerce dev environment. Another team wrote a skill based on Claude’s Superpowers plugin to assist with bug fixes. Several teams organized tutorials during their weekly meetings. People weren’t just building the product; they were building each other.
Second, a buzz was floating all around the division. It’s a great feeling to help a customer — I think that’s why most of us have a career in support — but an equally amazing feeling comes when you build or contribute to something tangible. When we announced the bug blitz, we got several messages like this one from Happiness Engineer Kamlesh Vidhani:
This looks really amazing. Excited to work on this. 🙌
Kamlesh Vidhani, Woo Happiness Engineer
Having the dedicated time and focus to help build the product created a type of excitement we hadn’t seen in a while. As AI becomes more powerful, people in the support industry (and many others) can’t help but wonder about the future of their jobs. Experiments like this one make it clear that the future is not about answering simple customer questions, but about closely connecting interactions with building our product.
Finally, we of course contributed to our product. In the weeks of the bug blitz, we submitted more than 170 fixes. Several of those were small, but incredibly impactful. Many had been flagged ages ago and fallen off the radar, or seemed less urgent in light of other high-priority engineering work.
So, what’s next?
It’s clear that support engineering is changing as a profession. At Woo, we’re already expecting everyone to consult with AI tools regularly, but more and more we’re seeing a move toward an agentic approach, where the AI tools actually perform parts of that job. In that light, I recently wrote that everyone in support will need to manage and lead several AI-powered agents in the near future: an agent to review drafts, an agent to help troubleshoot, an agent to submit a bug and another to fix it, and so on.
Our bug blitz was an experiment in that very direction. Happiness Engineers with Claude Code experience focused on skills and agent creation, while those without got their feet wet and plunged into vibe coding. It went beyond using AI as a copilot (although we extensively used GitHub’s Copilot in the process) and went all the way to Claude Code and other tools writing much of the bug fix. I expect us to do several similar experiments as we shape the future of support.
We’re also walking away with a clearer picture of that very future — one where our influence on the product will be more direct than ever.
This experiment also brings us a step closer to our ultimate goal of a rapid-fix mentality, where anything that is broken gets fixed nearly instantly.
We still have a while to go for that to become a reality, but we’re feeling inspired. A next practical step for us will be to figure out how an agent can automatically start working on a fix as soon as a bug is reported. Given the current possibilities of AI in development, I suspect we’re at most a few months away from that reality.
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