ELT gave analysts more power and took away the discipline that kept SQL logic sane. What a real transformation layer needs: modular models, version control, tests, and lineage you can read before you drop a table.
WordPress 7.0 ships the PHP AI Client, and the community has already built connectors for Grok, Mistral, Ollama and OpenRouter. What each one covers, how provider registration works, and the switching case worth testing first.
Core now ships a provider-agnostic PHP API for AI work. The SDK and wrapper split, the fluent builder for text and image generation, feature detection before you draw any UI, and why bundling php-ai-client yourself now fatals.
Gutenberg 22.7 puts editorial rules in the database instead of a forgotten PDF. A look at the wp_content_guideline post type, the REST endpoints, and what a persistent rule set gives an AI assistant.
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.
PodClip was built over a weekend with Replit: Spotify OAuth, Whisper transcription, Postgres. The scaffolding held up. The Spotify playback limits and the transcription costs are where a human had to step in.
Agentic loops fail quietly: the same query retried with new wording, retries with no circuit breaker, a context window full of raw JSON. Three patterns, how to measure them, and a PHP budget gatekeeper.
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.
OpenAI prompt caching takes 90% off repeated tokens, but only for prefixes over 1,024 tokens and only when the static part of your prompt comes first. Here is a Python example plus the ordering mistake that kills cache hits.
WordPress 7.0 ships the Client-Side Abilities API, which gives JavaScript, browser agents and AI tools one way to call server-registered logic. This covers both packages, registering an ability with JSON Schema validation, and handling permission errors.