The AI Rabbit Hole

Artificial Intelligence is easily one of the most powerful tools available for content creators today.
It helps outline ideas, polish prose, draft emails, and structure complex projects in seconds.

Until you ask it to fix a tiny visual bug in WordPress.

It starts simple: “How do I remove this padding above my header?”

Your AI assistant confidently provides a line of CSS.
You paste it into your site, hit refresh, and the padding is gone! Success. But then you notice your mobile menu has vanished, your footer is suddenly aligned to the right, and your contact form no longer sends emails.

When you have limited technical knowledge of WordPress, troubleshooting becomes a game of digital Jenga.
You ask the AI to fix the new issue, which creates two more, and before you know it, you’ve spent four hours down a rabbit hole trying to undo a problem you didn’t have when you woke up today…

Why WordPress & AI Can Be Tricky

Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized my writing and brainstorming process.
From outlining entire blog posts to suggesting snappy email subject lines, it’s an incredibly powerful efficiency tool.

Until I asked it how to stop the bots from spamming my contact forms.

The advice was brilliant on paper: “Use Cloudflare Turnstile! It’s better for users than old-school CAPTCHAs, just activate the feature or add a quick snippet.”

That’s where my problems really began.
It seemed so simple.
I enabled Turnstile through a plugin and suddenly, it seemed, all was well—the spam stopped.
But then I noticed my actual customers were getting blocked too. The verification widget was appearing weirdly.
So I asked my AI assistant how to fix that.

What followed was an exhausting back-and-forth were trying to troubleshoot Turnstile with AI assistance, while navigating an ecosystem I barely understood, ultimately created ten new issues for every one it solved.
I broke navigation menus.
I accidentally blocked entire regions.
It reached a point where the frustration of managing this one security fix became so all-consuming that I decided it wasn’t worth it.
I just wanted my forms, and my peace of mind, back.

In a final, desperate move to gain sanity, I made a choice that seems extreme but felt necessary at the time:
I didn’t just disable Turnstile.
I canceled my Cloudflare account entirely and deleted all the forms from my website.
My website is no formless but its working fine.

WordPress can be very difficult sometimes.
Many plugins offer to do things like speed up your site especially for google page speed tests.
Many of these I find are just gimmicks. They hide things and break others.
If you have many pages, it might take a while before you check that page only to discover something that used to work no longer does.
This is what started my problems with my contact form.
I was getting lots of rubbish messages on my site log and followed AI;s advice to install cloud fare .
This then created a red warning message every time i tried sending a test form.
I did everything that Gemini suggested but It wouldn’t go away.
In the end i deleted the forms plugin.
It is no great loss as nobody has actually filled in my contact form since I created the blog.