WordPress Guidelines keeps agent memory, skills and instructions in an ordinary custom post type, and it’s headed for Core. Here’s what that means for plugins with their own memory stores, which permissions to test first, and when a separate table still makes sense.
Agent features drift from one helper to a sprawl nobody can put a price on. This post maps four operations research models onto real decisions, like which agents to build and how to route requests, then covers where the solver should live on a WordPress site.
WooCommerce’s beta AI Product Advisor ranks your catalog and suggests copy fixes. The ranked queue and revert log are the useful parts. The WordPress.com connection and the lift math are where it bites, so stage it, clear stray output first, and apply in small batches.
An AI chat over your WooCommerce orders will hand you confident numbers that don’t match Analytics. Let the model pick the question and let your code answer it. Here’s how I’d wire that with one REST endpoint and a strict args schema.
Naive RAG wrappers that just chunk PDFs into a vector store break on real contracts and reports. Here is the four-brick approach I use instead: structured parsing, question parsing with an expert dictionary, filtered retrieval, and typed generation.
Tightening the prompt won’t make an LLM integration reliable in production. Here’s the control layer I put between WordPress and the model: input guards, a circuit breaker, response validation and retries.
A spinner tells users nothing when an AI agent takes 20 seconds to think. These are the patterns I use instead: specific status updates, a thinking toggle, checklists that handle partial success, and a saved audit trail.
Felix Arntz and James are stepping back as Core AI Team Reps, and Jason Adams takes over. The handover lands as the Abilities API matures and the WP AI Client heads into core for WordPress 7.0.
Using Claude for data science now goes well past chat prompts. Three skills I’d pick up: throwaway interactive dashboards for EDA, Claude Cowork for Jira and reporting chores, and Claude Code for tracing broken dbt pipelines.
The WordPress AI plugin 1.0.0 adds Request Logging and Connector Approvals, which give site owners real control over which plugins use AI and what they spend. Here is what changed and what developers should do about it.