I’ve been working with WordPress for a long time. First, I just used it for my personal writing, but my love for the platform grew so much as I begin exploring how to extend and design for it. I decided to even get into WordPress consulting (the business was called Siolon, hence the name of this site), and I even got into publishing themes, plugins, and a few core commits.
However, in recent years things haven’t been smooth for WordPress/Automattic. There have been rampant security issues with their plugin architecture, lots of corporate drama, and many questionable design decisions in recent years.
One of the decisions, the Gutenberg editor, has never really clicked for me. It feels finicky and clunky. Clicking into the wrong block, wrestling with the block switcher, watching a carefully formatted paragraph rearrange itself because I hit the wrong key. I got so fed up with it I stopped writing, and I don’t want to use the classic editor because it’s really classic at this point. I wanted a native macOS WordPress app to get around Gutenberg, and while a few native Mac apps exist for WordPress, none of them hit the mark for me.
So I decided to build something better, and that led me to desire to build a native Mac app for WordPress. There’s just one problem: I’m not a Swift developer nor do I particularly want to be.
Enter Claude Code
I’m going to be honest from the beginning—I am a huge Claude fanboy. After consulting with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is a good product in its own right, I didn’t know how good GenAI could really be until I started working with Claude. The chat experience, Cowork, and of course Claude Code are all spectacular; and Anthropic pushes out so many updates it’s bewildering (although that’s true right now for any GenAI company).
I wanted an application that was native to macOS, did all the basics of WordPress content management well, got around my frustrations with modern WordPress, and ultimately allowed me to enjoy blogging again.
This is the very first prompt in Claude Code for this app:
That kicked off the Superpowers skill for the first of many times, and three days later I had a first release. The result is Quill, a native macOS app for writing and managing WordPress content. No browser required.
What Quill Does
Quill connects to your WordPress site using the built-in REST API and application passwords. No plugin to install, no third-party service, no subscription. Just your site URL and a password you generate from your WordPress profile.
Once you’re connected, the sidebar shows your posts, pages, and media library. It feels and runs like a great Mac app. Below is a screenshot and highlights on its capabilities.
The editor is built on Tiptap, a modern rich text framework, running inside a native web view. It supports everything you’d expect: headings, bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, code blocks, tables, and links. And it outputs clean Gutenberg-compatible HTML so your posts look exactly right when they reach WordPress. That compatibility had to be a defining aspect to this application, and it turned out way better than I imagined.
Local drafts let you write offline. Start a post without a WiFi connection, keep it in Quill until you’re ready, then publish. When it goes to WordPress, it disappears from the local list automatically.
The media library is fully integrated. Browse your uploaded images in a sidebar, drag a Finder image straight into a post, resize it by dragging the handles, and set alignment with a click.
The link picker is a small thing that makes a real difference. Click the link button, start typing a post title, and a popover shows matching posts from your site. It works the same as the Gutenberg editor.
Post settings live in a collapsible panel alongside the editor: categories, tags, slug, excerpt, scheduling, and discussion. Pages get a parent page picker instead. Everything you’d expect from managing content in WordPress.
And there’s an AI writing assistant powered by the Claude API. Highlight a selection and ask it to expand, contract, or reformat into a table or list. It can also generate an entire post from a prompt. Quill first learns your writing style from posts you’ve already published (you can select which posts to use for analysis), then uses that to match your voice. It’s optional, gated on an API key, and genuinely useful to get over that dreaded blinking cursor. I continue to explore avenues to integrate the Claude API in things I build.
Quill also intentionally doesn’t follow many UI approaches from Tahoe. I find Tahoe to be aesthetically and interaction-wise really bad. Claude Code did generate for me in its first pass a Tahoe-esque UI, but through iteration with Claude Design and my preferences, we got to the current look. I recognize it still could benefit from more aesthetic, interaction, and copy improvements; but for a 1.0, I am very pleased.
The Build Process
I had been experimenting with Claude Code to build WordPress themes, plugins, and other static web content. This, however, was a whole different project. I was entering territory I knew nothing about. The only thing I had was an idea and a lot of opinions on what it should be.
I loved everything about the process. It was so much fun to iterate and see progress so quickly. Keep in mind, this app took all of three calendar days (and a lot of maxed 5-hour limits!) to create. I kept thinking Claude Code couldn’t do what I asked, but whether it was a small tweak or a totally different approach to something, it kept pumping it out.
I can say that even though I understand next to none of the code Claude Code produced, which is arguably the biggest negative of vibe coding, I could not have gotten to this point without my experience and foundations in UX and software development. AI generated code doesn’t become meaningful and useful until someone who understands how to move from concept to production uses it. Claude Code is the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced, although I know it’s anything but magic, it seems functionally indistinguishable. However, that doesn’t excuse us from understanding how to do software development, and the more that person understands about what is being generated only leads to a better result.
If you’re interested, here are the architectural highlights:
- Swift 6 with strict concurrency
- SwiftUI (macOS 13+) for all native UI
- WKWebView hosting a Tiptap editor loaded from esm.sh
- SQLite.swift for local storage
- WordPress REST API — no plugins required
Download Quill
I decided to not open source the application but make it available for anyone to download and use. The product microsite is below hosted on Github Pages.