Last year I talked with a client, a sharp developer himself, who was heading to WordCamp US Contributor Day. He wanted to get into the Core AI table, but he came back saying he felt lost. He showed up ready to code, and without any pre-reads the size of the project left him overwhelmed and unable to find a starting point.
The WordPress Core AI initiative isn’t some minor bug fix. It’s a large, evolving project with several building blocks that connect to each other. Show up cold and you spend half the day just getting your bearings, which is time you could have spent actually contributing.
How to prepare for the Core AI table at WCUS
The Core AI team has been busy. To be useful at WordCamp US Contributor Day in Portland, Oregon, on August 26, you need to do your homework first. They laid it out clearly over on the Make WordPress AI blog. Here’s the short version:
- Read up on the AI Building Blocks so you understand the overall strategy. This one isn’t optional, it’s your roadmap.
- Get familiar with the core project repos: PHP AI Client, Abilities API, MCP Adapter, and AI Experiments. You don’t need to be a committer on day one, but know what each one does.
- Skim the #core-ai Slack channel. It’s full of context and recent discussion.
- And register for Contributor Day, get a WordPress.org account, and join the Make WordPress Slack if you haven’t already. The basics.
This year they’re running Contributor Day more like a hackathon for Core AI. The focus is on building: proof-of-concepts and better contributor workflows, rather than sitting and learning. That’s where knowing the building blocks pays off.
Say you’re working on an AI experiment plugin that integrates with the Abilities API. You might have something like this, just as a rough example:
<?php
/**
* Plugin Name: bbioon AI Experiment
* Description: Demonstrates basic interaction with the Core AI Building Blocks.
* Version: 1.0
* Author: bbioon
* Text Domain: bbioon-ai-experiment
*/
if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) {
exit; // Exit if accessed directly.
}
/**
* Example function to interact with a hypothetical AI client.
*
* @param string $prompt The input prompt for the AI.
* @return string The AI-generated response.
*/
function bbioon_call_ai_ability( $prompt ) {
$response = '';
// In a real scenario, this would involve using the PHP AI Client
// and Abilities API to make an actual API call.
// For Contributor Day, you might be helping to build out these interfaces.
$api_client = new \bbioon\AI\Client(); // Placeholder for actual client.
$response = $api_client->process_prompt( $prompt );
/**
* Filters the response from the AI ability.
*
* @param string $response The AI-generated response.
* @param string $prompt The original prompt.
*/
return apply_filters( 'bbioon_ai_ability_response', $response, $prompt );
}
// Example usage:
// add_action( 'init', function() {
// $ai_output = bbioon_call_ai_ability( 'Generate a blog post idea about WordPress performance.' );
// error_log( $ai_output );
// } );
?>
This bbioon_call_ai_ability function is only conceptual, but it shows how you’d likely talk to the Core AI components. Your task at Contributor Day might be refining an API like this, building out adapter functionality, or creating the AI Experiments that use the underlying building blocks.
The bottom line for Contributor Day
The takeaway is simple: preparation is what makes you effective, not just polite. With something as new as Core AI in WordPress, knowing the project ahead of time is what lets you spend the day building instead of working out what to build. You’ll thank yourself when you’re actually writing those proof-of-concepts instead of staring at a GitHub repo.
This stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
