A client called me in over a “smart” recommendation engine that had quietly stopped working. A freelancer had sold them a custom WordPress AI integration and delivered a pile of raw curl calls dropped straight into the theme’s single.php. It was slow, it timed out constantly, and it was pinned to one API version that got deprecated two weeks after launch.
My first instinct was to rewrite the wrapper and put some real error handling around it. A better one-off, in other words. Then I caught myself. Fourteen years in, I know what building on sand costs you later. A custom script was not the answer here. A standardized architecture was. The Core AI contributor check-in from August 20th, 2025 says that architecture is close.
The shift toward standardized WordPress AI integration
AI in WordPress has been the Wild West for a while now, with everyone rolling their own. The Core AI team’s recent update (you can track it on the official Make blog) reports the PHP Client Foundation milestone as complete. That is the boring plumbing work that decides whether the interesting features survive production.
They have asked an AI its first question through a native PHP client. What that replaces is the point: hand-rolled, fragile API calls give way to a structured AiClient, PromptBuilder and MessageBuilder. Once those are part of the ecosystem, you spend your time on the feature instead of on the transport layer.
/**
* A glimpse at how we'll likely handle standardized prompts.
* This is much cleaner than the 'messy' curl approach.
*/
function bbioon_generate_smart_summary( $post_id ) {
// Imagine a Core-standardized way to build prompts
$builder = new bbioon_PromptBuilder();
$builder->add_system_message( 'You are a helpful assistant.' );
$builder->add_user_message( get_the_content( $post_id ) );
$client = new bbioon_AiClient();
$response = $client->send( $builder->get_prompt() );
if ( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
return 'Fallback content';
}
return $response->get_text();
}Abilities, not just chatbots
The other big piece is the Abilities API, which is what lets an AI actually do things inside WordPress, such as drafting a post or changing a setting, rather than only returning text. The team is aiming for a V0.1 release by WordCamp US, and they are working through the awkward parts too, including how AI-generated code sits with the GPL.
If you are planning a significant AI feature right now, read how Core is putting these foundations together before you commit. A developer who locks you into a proprietary stack leaves you with something that will not talk to the rest of WordPress six months from now. Longevity is the whole point.
What to take from this
- Raw API calls written for one project are technical debt you have not been billed for yet.
- The PHP AI Client and the Abilities API are where the standards are being set, so build toward them.
- Licensing of AI-generated contributions is under active discussion in Core, so do not skip the legal side of your own build.
This gets complicated quickly. If you are tired of debugging someone else’s integration and want your site ready for the next generation of WordPress tooling, send my team a note. We have most likely seen your version of it.
Where have you landed on this: building on the current Core experiments, or staying on raw API endpoints until the dust settles?
