A client’s plugin kept bouncing back out of the queue, so here is what changed: 60,187 plugins in the directory, 7,670 submissions this year, and 85.3% of first reviews started by an automated scanner rather than a person.
A client shipped a custom plugin to the WordPress repo and got twenty-four violations back. Most of them came down to one habit: escaping data at the moment you output it instead of trusting the sanitization you did on input.
Fifty layers of function_exists() held a membership site together until the LMS renamed its methods. The Abilities API in 6.9 gives plugins a registry to declare what they can do instead.
A synchronous OpenAI call on image upload hung the admin for five seconds. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 points at a different route: registered Abilities, the WP AI Client, and MCP.
Pointing an LLM at an undocumented WooCommerce extension produced hooks that never existed. Extracting the real hook list with PHP first, then prompting, is what separates a usable draft from a liability.
I once spent three weeks bolting a permissions layer onto custom REST endpoints so an AI agent could not wreck a client’s product catalog. The Abilities API landing in WordPress 6.9 is the standard that job was missing.
A client’s AI recommendation engine turned out to be raw curl calls dropped into single.php, pinned to a deprecated API version. Core’s PHP AI Client and Abilities API work is the standard that kind of build has been missing.
Plugins have always exposed their features however they liked, so integration meant writing a wrapper per plugin and repairing it after every update. The Abilities API in WordPress 6.9 replaces that with one registration format.
A client’s AI plugins each shipped their own settings screen and each asked for API keys they had already entered. The Core AI check-in from October 8th, 2025 covers both fixes: categories on the Abilities API, and one provider settings screen.
An off-the-shelf AI plugin left a client with a slow backend and alt text that had nothing to do with the images. The core AI discussions point somewhere better: content summaries, post titles and image descriptions behind one PHP AI Client.