"When you're a lone programmer, you both cherish and dread tech support tickets. You cherish them because interactions with users often result in a better understanding of what your code is doing out there in the wild. You dread them because sometimes those interactions result in fairly large homework assignments where you need to fix broken code. Last week, I got one such ticket. A user wrote in to tell me that she couldn't get my security tool to block access to her website."
"I sometimes get complaints that the plugin won't block access. The solution is almost always one of two steps: turn on compatibility mode, which changes blocking behavior for certain themes, or turn off caching because cached websites ignore changes in status. I sent back a response to her, but she told me neither fix worked. We went back and forth for a while, but none of my normal tips seemed to work."
A lone maintainer of a WordPress privacy plugin received a support ticket where the plugin failed to block website access. Typical remedies—enabling compatibility mode or disabling caching—did not resolve the problem for that user. The blocking setting failed to persist on sites with a specific robots.txt-related configuration tied to a previously added feature. Using Codex through a ChatGPT Plus plan identified both code bugs and hosting-related issues, applied fixes, and helped draft support communications. The AI intervention reduced the time required to diagnose and remedy the issue and improved the support workflow.
Read at ZDNET
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