AI coding agents in WordPress Playground, wired with MCP
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.
Tag: AI Assistants
Hours saved is the wrong way to measure AI value
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.
When self-hosting an LLM beats paying per token
The API bill is the usual reason teams look at their own hardware, and privacy is the better one. Which benchmarks to trust for agents, how far you can quantize before logic breaks, what a single A100 on GCP costs, and serving Qwen 3.5-27B with vLLM.
What the plugin directory MCP server gives your IDE
WordPress.org now runs an MCP server for the plugin directory, so an AI assistant can validate readme.txt, check where a submission sits in the queue and read the guidelines from the source. The review team still holds you responsible for the code.
What AI coding assistants still get wrong in production
AI coding assistants write decent functions and miss the system around them. A naive REST endpoint next to a reviewed one, two outage stories, and the workflow I use to keep an agent on a leash.
Generate a WordPress theme with Telex, then fix the gaps
Telex is Automattic’s experimental tool for generating block themes from a prompt. What the output actually contains, the templates you have to ask for, and why I test every generated ZIP in Playground first.
Shadow AI governance and the desire paths at work
Shadow AI shows up because the official workflow is slower than the shortcut. Here is how I read that usage as a signal, and what a governed option looks like inside a WordPress stack.
AI coding assistants and the WordPress code they get wrong
AI coding assistants write PHP that reads fine and falls over in production. A WooCommerce audit, the naive fetch they keep producing, and the refactor I run it through.
Reviewing Claude Code output is the new bottleneck
Generating a thousand lines of PHP takes seconds, so review is where the time goes. The review skill I run before opening a PR, why I ask for HTML reports, and the WooCommerce checkout bug that nearly shipped.
Building a Claude Code Skill that actually triggers
I moved a 500-line prompt into a Claude Code Skill and stopped re-pasting it every morning. This covers the three loading stages, how to write a description Claude will act on, and the three implementation patterns.