Freshly Pressed is back in the WordPress.com Reader, with people picking the posts instead of an engagement score. If you are self-hosted, that only helps once your Jetpack sync is actually working, so here is what to check.
Chat history arrays are a log, not memory. This walks through the LLM memory layer I build instead: DSPy signatures for extracting atomic facts, QDrant for per-user vector storage, and a maintenance agent that decides when an old fact gets updated or deleted.
The February 4, 2026 dev chat put client-side media on the road to WordPress 7.0: libvips compiled to WASM, running in a worker thread, with image resizing done in the visitor’s browser instead of on your server.
The WP AI Client merge proposal would put a provider-agnostic AI API in WordPress 7.0: one PHP interface, a fluent prompt builder, WP_Error returns, and no outbound calls until a plugin configures a provider.
The Core AI team put out a Call for Testing for the AI Experiments plugin. Here is what is in it: MCP server support, markdown feeds, extra providers and AI request logging, plus the $400 API bill that convinced me logging is the part you cannot skip.
WordPress 7.0 may merge the WP AI Client into Core, giving plugins one provider-agnostic API for calling models instead of each shipping its own SDK. Notes on the Connectors keychain, the package size argument, and what it changes for developers.
Cron jobs and hope are not a data pipeline. Ahmad Wael walks through an ETL setup for crime trend data with Python, Prefect and PostgreSQL, including schema validation, automatic retries and a Metabase dashboard running in Docker.
WordPress 6.9 shipped the Abilities API, and the MCP Adapter is what lets AI agents find those abilities and call them. Ahmad Wael covers flagging an ability for MCP, the two transport methods, custom servers, and keeping permission callbacks tight.
A custom VS Code theme takes hours rather than weeks once you move past CSS variables and into TextMate tokens. Ahmad Wael on scaffolding the first pass, debugging scopes in the Extension Host, and picking contrast that does not fry your eyes by lunchtime.
The January 2026 Towards Data Science pieces I actually used: Ryan Pegoud cutting LLM memory 84% with Triton fused kernels, ACE context engineering, and Hugo Lu on the ceilings at Databricks and Snowflake.