I had a client come to me a few months back with a classic performance headache. Their WooCommerce store was lagging, but it wasn’t the usual suspects. No massive images, no bloated tracking scripts. The culprit? Five different plugins—one for SEO, one for translations, two for “chatbots,” and one for product descriptions—all hitting external LLM APIs on every save. Each one required its own API key, its own configuration, and its own billing account. Total nightmare.
My first thought was to just build a custom wrapper to centralize the keys. I figured if I could just proxy the requests through a single utility class, I’d at least stop the redundant overhead. It worked… sort of. But I was still chasing my tail every time a plugin update broke the integration. It felt like we were back in the early days of web dev when you had to manually handle file pointers because nobody agreed on a standard database. That’s when it hit me: the problem isn’t the AI features. The problem is that AI as a WordPress Fundamental doesn’t exist yet.
The “Bring Your Own Database” Problem
Imagine if every time you installed a plugin, it asked you for your MySQL credentials and wanted to create its own isolated database instance. We’d call that insane. In WordPress, we take the database for granted. You call get_post_meta() or hit $wpdb, and it just works. You don’t care if it’s MySQL, MariaDB, or some high-performance cloud instance. The platform abstracts that away.
Right now, AI in WordPress is in the “Bring Your Own Database” phase. We’re forcing users to juggle Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google keys just to generate some alt text. It’s a massive friction point. But as I saw recently in a deep dive into the upcoming core AI roadmap, this is about to change. We are moving toward a world where the LLM is just another service provided by the environment, much like the database or the filesystem.
Code That Works (Finally)
The vision here is simplicity. Instead of managing curl requests and headers, we’re looking at a standardized client. In WordPress 7.0, we’re expecting the Ai_Client. Trust me on this: it’s going to save you hundreds of hours of debugging weird timeout errors. Here is how we’ll likely be handling something as simple as alt-text generation in the near future:
/**
* Using the new AI Client to fix my client's messy alt-text problem.
* This is clean, abstracted, and standard.
*/
function bbioon_generate_smart_alt_text( $image_url ) {
try {
$alt_text = Ai_Client::prompt( 'Write a short, descriptive alt text for this image.' )
->with_file( $image_url )
->generate_text();
return esc_html( $alt_text );
} catch ( Exception $e ) {
// Fallback gracefully if no model is available
return '';
}
}The beauty here isn’t just the clean syntax. It’s that the plugin developer doesn’t need to know which model is running under the hood. The host provides the “engine,” and the code just runs. This allows us to build “Abilities”—a concept coming in WP 6.9—that can be chained together into complex workflows without the typical integration spaghetti.
Why Your Host is the New MVP
If AI becomes a fundamental layer, the responsibility shifts to the hosting providers. Just like a good host manages your database performance and backups, a great WordPress host will soon provide the AI model as part of your plan. This eliminates the “API key fatigue” and ensures that these features are actually performant. We’re already seeing early versions of this with things like the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Adapter, which helps different AI tools talk to your site’s data securely.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with the next generation of tech, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
The shift from “AI as a feature” to “AI as a fundamental” is the biggest change to the WordPress architecture since the Block Editor. It’s not about chatbots; it’s about making the entire ecosystem smarter by default. Are you ready to stop managing keys and start building?
Leave a Reply