I build WordPress plugins on my own, and I started using Claude Code for the obvious reason: to write code faster. Six months later, the part it actually saved me wasn't the code at all. It was everything around the code.
Every release, I ran the same small gauntlet. Bump the version, update the readme, write the changelog, check the translation files for gaps, draft the announcement. None of it is hard. All of it is fiddly, and every one of those chores pulled me out of the part of my brain that was actually building the thing. By the time I'd finished the release ritual and came back to code, I had to reload the whole mental context I'd just dropped.
That reload is the real cost, and it took me a while to see it. The chores don't just eat their own time. They evict the code from your head, and you pay again to bring it back. So I started handing the chores to Claude Code instead of the code, and that was the version that worked.
The chore that breaks releases silently
The one I least wanted to get wrong is version mismatch. In a WordPress plugin, the displayed version comes from the Version header in the main PHP file, but the readme's Stable tag points at which tagged version is "stable." They are two separate fields with two separate jobs, and when they disagree, updates can reach users wrong. No error fires. You find out from a bug report.
