Login Lockdown: an AI-created Craft CMS plugin

I recent­ly pub­lished a new plu­g­in for Craft CMS called Login Lock­down. It mon­i­tors login attempts on your Craft CMS site and, if failed login attempts sur­pass a thresh­old you define, the login process from that IP address is locked down for a spec­i­fied amount of time. You can con­fig­ure the plu­g­in to noti­fy you about lock­outs (via email and/​or Pushover noti­fi­ca­tions) or let the sys­tem run silent­ly on its own. The con­trol pan­el shows a log of lock­outs from the past 30 days.

The idea for this plu­g­in is not a prod­uct of my own cre­ativ­i­ty. It’s the result of envy — specif­i­cal­ly, envy of func­tion­al­i­ty I have on a Word­Press site that I main­tain for a friend.

My friend’s Word­Press site uses a secu­ri­ty plu­g­in that does rough­ly what Login Lock­down does. That plu­g­in sends me an email when­ev­er a lock­out occurs.

I’ve been sur­prised by how much mali­cious traf­fic his login page receives, and I want­ed some­thing sim­i­lar for my Craft sites. I decid­ed to tack­le build­ing this plu­g­in from the jump using AI.

From code monkey to code conductor

As of Jan­u­ary 2026, I’m deep into my AI-cod­ing jour­ney. Unless you’re ignor­ing AI entire­ly, it won’t sur­prise you to hear that my AI tool of choice is Claude. That said, I’ve been on this path since the ear­ly ver­sions of Copi­lot were intro­duced in 2022.

I’ve proven to myself that AI-assist­ed devel­op­ment makes me a more pro­duc­tive devel­op­er. Proof? I went all-in with Kiro, Amazon’s AI-pow­ered IDE, in late 2025 and entered the Code with Kiro Hackathon with a project called Upload Dri­ve-In. I won first place. 

That suc­cess only increased my use of AI. The capa­bil­i­ties of AI cod­ing agents seem to improve every week. This bul­let train has left the sta­tion.

Back in the old­en days — mean­ing a cou­ple of months ago — I used AI as an assis­tant. I would build out the skele­ton of a project myself and have AI help fill in pieces. I’ve since tran­si­tioned from cod­ing the frame­works of an app on my own to rely­ing on AI as the pri­ma­ry coder, work­ing from project require­ments that I define.

In this set­up, I see my role as an orches­tral con­duc­tor rather than a solo musi­cian. If you’re an AI skep­tic, I can already imag­ine your reac­tion, because I went through my own process of com­ing to terms with this way of work­ing. In my opin­ion, you can choose to work this way or not — but using AI cod­ing tools makes you more pro­duc­tive, and being less pro­duc­tive is a choice that comes with its own costs.

A Daily MVP

I want to show you what I mean by pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

I cre­ate new things with AI near­ly every day. When an idea comes to me, I try to build it and see what hap­pens. Not every­thing I build is pol­ished to the point where it’s ready for oth­ers to use.

I’ve read the argu­ment that many of these cre­ations could be con­sid­ered ​“slop­ware” or ​“shov­el­ware.” And yes, many AI-gen­er­at­ed projects prob­a­bly are. But the ones you run through your own per­son­al fil­ter — your stan­dards for what makes good soft­ware — don’t have to be.

I think of these cre­ations as micro-MVPs: min­i­mum viable prod­ucts built just far enough to solve a sin­gle prob­lem for me. If some­thing proves use­ful over time, I might invest more effort to pol­ish it, make it reusable across my own projects, or share it with oth­ers.

Here are just a few of the things I’ve built recent­ly with AI. Not all of them link to code, because some aren’t usable by oth­er peo­ple — at least not yet.

• A screen­shot ser­vice built with Lar­avel for use on my Links page
• A Gem­i­ni-pow­ered tool that writes descrip­tions of book­marked pages
• A Craft mod­ule that enables passkeys for front-end login forms
• A TRMNL plu­g­in to track Metro-North trips
• Draw Agent, a work­space for exper­i­ment­ing with gen­er­a­tive SVG art
• A set of gen­er­a­tive art util­i­ties forked and extend­ed from an old­er repo
• Upload Dri­ve-In, the hackathon project my clients use to send large files
• A fix for a mem­o­ry leak in my pro­gres­sive share web com­po­nent
• An update to the Bespo­ken plu­g­in to close a long-stand­ing issue
• Upti­mer, an uptime mon­i­tor­ing tool built with Lar­avel
• A self-host­ed secret-shar­ing tool built with Lar­avel
• An invoic­ing site with Stripe inte­gra­tion
• A Type­Script library for cre­at­ing and dis­play­ing Deep Zoom images
• A script to sim­pli­fy fav­i­con cre­ation in Craft CMS while pre­serv­ing my exist­ing build process
• A script to gen­er­ate crit­i­cal CSS using Beast­ies in Craft CMS
• And the list goes on

Login Lockdown — an AI-built Craft CMS plugin

Most of my AI-dri­ven devel­op­ment has been PHP-based, pri­mar­i­ly using Lar­avel. I have a base­line knowl­edge of Lar­avel from the pre-AI era and have built non-com­plex client projects with it. That said, most of my PHP work has been pow­ered by Craft CMS.

Login Lock­down is one of those projects that felt gen­uine­ly use­ful beyond my own needs. I built it using Claude and decid­ed to share it with the Craft CMS com­mu­ni­ty in the hope that it helps some­one else.

Break out your dream board

Every devel­op­er I know has a list of ideas for things to cre­ate that they’ve nev­er got­ten around to build­ing. Go find that list.

If you’re curi­ous about AI-assist­ed devel­op­ment but hes­i­tant to trust it with ​“real” projects, Login Lock­down is proof that you don’t have to start big. Start with some­thing small, use­ful, and con­tained. You might be sur­prised by how far you get — and how your role as a devel­op­er begins to shift.

AI makes ideas cheap to explore. With­out AI, Login Lock­down might have remained a note in a text file. With it, I was able to move from idea to work­ing plu­g­in quick­ly, iter­ate with con­fi­dence, and ship some­thing real.

For me, that’s the real sto­ry here: AI didn’t replace my judg­ment. It ampli­fied it.

And that leads to my final thought. If you’re read­ing this, you’re like­ly a Craft CMS devel­op­er — or maybe a Lar­avel devel­op­er. Regard­less of what you’ve read in blog posts or seen on YouTube, AI cod­ing may bring cod­ing to the mass­es, but expe­ri­enced devel­op­ers still have a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage. You know how to shape ideas, eval­u­ate trade­offs, and ensure that what’s gen­er­at­ed actu­al­ly match­es your vision. Use the skills you already have to your advan­tage.

If you end up build­ing some­thing with AI that you want to show me, I’d love to see it. Good luck.