I have spent over 14 years wrestling with WordPress, and I have watched every “next big thing” arrive and fade. The current argument about critical thinking in AI feels different. This is not one more API to learn; it changes how we ship code. I keep running into devs who paste LLM snippets straight into functions.php without checking whether those hooks still exist in the version of WooCommerce they are running. It tanks performance and leaves behind hallucination-ridden slop that somebody will be debugging for years.
The reversal: generative AI, discriminative human
We used to be the creators. We wrote the logic and leaned on discriminative tools, linters and unit tests, to tell us where we had messed up. That dynamic has flipped. AI is the generative side now, pushing out code blocks, UI designs and marketing copy faster than we can match. Which leaves us as the discriminative human in the loop.
Less writing, more judging: does this hold up, does it have the context it needs, and where is the race condition the model never considered? I reviewed AI-generated code for a client recently that called get_option inside a high-traffic loop with no caching at all. It ran fine in the dev environment. In production it would have melted their database. That gap is where your critical thinking in AI turns into the difference between a working store and a 504.
For how this is landing in core, I went through the WordPress 7.0 AI updates separately.
Stop using LLMs as calculators
Every time I see someone hand complex WooCommerce tax logic to a large language model, I lose a little faith. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic, and a tax total has to be exact. If you need a calculation, write a PHP function. If you need to understand how two messy data sets relate, use statistical methods. Picking the right sub-branch, symbolic AI when you need explainability or classical machine learning for anomaly detection, keeps you out of the trap where every problem starts to look like a prompt.
The cost of letting AI do the thinking
Handing the heavy lifting to AI has a quieter cost: your own mental muscle. A study from the MIT Media Lab found that LLM-assisted groups felt less ownership of their work and underperformed over time. Stop solving the hard logic yourself and you lose the ability to speak for your own code, or to debug it once it breaks. You also give up the moment where the answer finally shows up after three hours of staring at a broken SQL query.
That is the argument I made for context engineering. Use AI to extend your logic rather than to hand it off.
<?php
/**
* The "Lazy AI" vs "Discriminative Human" approach.
* AI might suggest a direct DB query, but a Senior Dev knows better.
*/
// NAIVE APPROACH (Commonly generated by AI)
function bbioon_lazy_get_orders() {
global $wpdb;
return $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}posts WHERE post_type = 'shop_order'");
}
// THE DISCRIMINATIVE HUMAN APPROACH
function bbioon_senior_get_orders() {
// 1. Check for transients to save DB hits
$orders = get_transient('bbioon_top_orders');
if (false === $orders) {
// 2. Use official WooCommerce APIs, not raw SQL which breaks on HPOS updates
$query = new WC_Order_Query(array(
'limit' => 10,
'orderby' => 'date',
'order' => 'DESC',
'return' => 'ids',
));
$orders = $query->get_orders();
set_transient('bbioon_top_orders', $orders, HOUR_IN_SECONDS);
}
return $orders;
}
Adoption moves fast, diffusion does not
The hype cycle makes it feel like the world changes every Tuesday. In enterprise WordPress, adoption crawls. Invention takes days, while diffusion, the part where a technology grinds through cultural and organizational barriers, takes years. So there is no reason to automate every task on your site this quarter. Get the safety and ethics questions settled first. Frameworks like the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI put accountability on the human rather than the machine.
If critical thinking in AI is eating your dev hours, or you are tired of cleaning up code the model got wrong, hand it over to me. I have been working with WordPress since the 4.x days.
You are still the pilot
Right now AI looks like the automobile in its first decade. The engines run, and we are still working out the seatbelts, the road signs and the licenses. The failure mode to avoid is the reverse centaur, where the model leads and you follow its prompts. Keep doing the judging yourself, and ship code you can explain.
