In the the past week there has been a explosion of visible AI progress in the WordPress project:
- A proposal to bring the ability to query LLMs to core – this is one of the big headlines to me. When this ends up in WordPress, it will be well positioned for the future of the agentic web. This is the last of the AI building blocks.
- A mature and impressive MCP implementation for WordPress. Build agents easily.
- We use this at Automattic to create our official Claude connection in partnership with Anthropic
- Abilities API in WordPress 6.9 and frontend abilities in Gutenberg 24.0. Some progress on Workflows API too.
- The first WordPress-focused micro-credential, designed to help students build practical AI skills. It’s called “AI Leaders”.
- A benchmarking system for Frontier Labs and hobbyists alike to understand how models perform on WordPress specific tasks and also use as an RL environment to improve and fine tune existing base ones (announcement post)
- An absolutely absurd amount of AI experiments, some of my favorite:
- Content guidelines in Gutenberg – Not AI specific, but something that allows websites to define their editorial terms and why they exist, to steer agents both inside of WordPress, but in the future site delegates as well.
- MD rendering – Agents can now request markdown versions of pages using a multitude of methods
- Request logging for AI – Especially helpful as the WP AI client gets closer to core
- A lot of cool editor improvements in Gutenberg using LLMs, my favorite is typeahead
- An exploration into a Service Account in WordPress to allow agents to have their own user type
- This AI experiments plugin is rapidly approaching 1000 commits in its short lifespan. The excitement around it is tangible.
- AI Guidelines (v0) for WordPress, which offer our thousands of contributors a black and white guide on how to use AI to improve the project.
- Agent Skills for WordPress, a repository of skills that can be used in Claude, Cursor, Coedx, etc, to make them more effective at interacting with WordPress on the code level.
Even three years ago I would have never imagined this rate of progress in this project. And so much of this is what I was wishing for when running the startup. Let’s keep pushing.