Notes from the core performance chat the day before WordPress 7.0 ships: on-demand block style loading for classic themes, Performance Lab moving to PHP 7.4, npm ignore-scripts, and an FTP filesystem install fix.
MCP servers are becoming the plugin bloat of the AI era. Why a sandboxed CLI gives an agent more capability per token than a menu of narrow tools, and how to keep shell access from being a liability.
I stopped hand-holding Claude Code and gave it a nightly review instead: a self-reflection skill, a 2 AM cron job, and a rules file it edits itself. This is the setup I run on real WordPress work.
Every AI harness keeps its own memory, so moving from Cursor to Claude Code means starting from zero context. Here is the shared layer I build instead: lifecycle hooks writing into Neo4j, plus the batch job that turns raw events into notes.
WordPress Workspace for Mac is in beta. It puts a site-aware agent, voice dictation and screenshot uploads on the desktop instead of in another browser tab, and it previews the Guidelines feature headed for Core.
Rust-based data libraries keep shipping, but Pandas still runs most of my production pipelines. Vectorized string operations, ast.literal_eval instead of eval, and the DataFrame constructor trick that beats df.apply(pd.Series) on big datasets.
Most AI pilots never make it past the demo. These are the five kinds of production debt that kill agentic AI systems in WordPress, from brittle prompt handling to the legal review nobody booked.
Recursive language models get a pointer to the data instead of having the whole thing pasted into the prompt. Why that beats ReAct and CodeAct on long-context work, and what it means for auditing a large WordPress codebase.
I refactored a workflow I had already optimized in Pandas over to Polars, and the runtime went from 0.31 to 0.20 seconds. The harder part was the mental shift from eager to lazy evaluation.
Raw variables are rarely the best way to represent risk. How binning and Weight of Evidence keep a logistic regression stable and interpretable, and why missing income is a risk category of its own.