Notes from WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai: plugins and themes landed on every paid WordPress.com plan, the speed build put AI against raw FSE work, and Nirav Mehta’s session covered where LLMs still break. Here is what held up as useful for real builds.
Claude Code is not only for refactoring PHP. Three things I run through it that never touch a codebase: LaTeX decks kept in Git, cross-app search over Slack and Notion, and prospect research.
LLMs forget your stack the moment you close the tab. Here is what actually sticks: a project rules file in the repo, global rules for your own preferences, and MCP when the assistant needs data from outside the codebase.
One LLM cannot draft emails, read documents and optimize a sales pipeline well. A look at splitting the work across reasoning, orchestration and execution layers, with TD learning doing the sequential decisions.
WordPress AI Plugin 0.7.0 adds content classification that can stick to your existing terms, context-aware meta descriptions, bulk alt text in the Media Library, and a filter for system instructions.
WordPress 7.0 ships three pieces of AI plumbing: the Abilities API for registering what a site can do, the AI Client for provider-agnostic model calls, and the MCP Adapter that exposes both to assistants like Claude.
Vectorless RAG is accurate, slow, and expensive to index. Proxy-Pointer RAG puts the document structure into the embeddings and metadata instead: regex skeleton trees, breadcrumbs on every chunk, and pointers back to the full section.
Claude Code will scaffold a WordPress plugin faster than you can spec one, which is the problem. The workflow I use: a CLAUDE.md spec first, the terminal agent second, and a manual review of everything before it ships.
Two bad defaults for agent UIs: hide everything behind a spinner, or stream every raw log. What I map instead, and how I decide which agent decisions a user actually needs to see.
The Core AI team has a draft guide for anyone presenting on Abilities, the AI Client or the MCP Adapter at a WordCamp or meetup. Comments on it close on 21 April 2026.