WordPress 7.0 RC1 is out and the April 9 date is still holding. The AI work worth watching sits in the AI Experiments plugin: C2PA provenance, content classification, and the MCP adapter that lets models discover what a site can do.
Claude Code forgets everything when the session ends. The setup I use: a post-mortem command that writes to CLAUDE.md, skill files for the quirks of the stack, and a daily pass over the logs.
Dashboards answer what happened and leave the acting to you. Decision intelligence systems recommend the action instead, which only works if the WooCommerce data feeding them is clean and consistently defined.
WordPress Playground MCP connects Claude Code or Gemini CLI to a Playground instance running in your browser. The agent reads files, runs PHP and queries the database itself, which cuts out most of the copy-paste during plugin testing and debugging.
Offline evaluation for LLM agents: routing accuracy, LLM-as-judge scoring, and RAG faithfulness, plus the quality gate I use to block a deploy when the scores come in under threshold.
AI 0.6.0 turns experiments into a type of feature, adds iterative image editing in the Media Library, and renames hooks. C2PA content provenance is queued for 0.7.0.
WordPress.com has added 19 write abilities to its MCP integration, so an agent can create posts, pages, media and terms. Drafts by default, explicit approval before every change, and your own role still caps what it can reach.
An agent turned a missing database index into a 500-line middleware layer. What I do differently now: plan mode before any code, core WordPress functions first, and a read through the tool calls rather than just the final file.
The @wp-playground/mcp package lets an AI client drive a Playground instance over MCP: run PHP, write files, query the database and check the front end, all inside the browser.
Efficiency is one slice of AI value, not the whole thing. Where automation, augmentation and innovation each show up, why the accuracy tax cancels out saved hours, and how to queue an AI fraud check so it never blocks checkout.