This week’s AI contributor meeting focused on maintaining progress during a period of reduced contributor availability, resolving several blocking decisions for WordPress 7.0, and confirming next steps for MCP, connectors, and PHP client work.
Announcements
- Several leads and contributors will have limited availability over the next month due to high-priority initiatives elsewhere.
- The team agreed to continue making reversible decisions (and documenting them) rather than pausing work entirely while key leads and contributors are unavailable.
- @jason_the_adams and @isotropic are planning a vision alignment meeting with Matt to define the next phase of the WordPress AI team.
- The AI Experiments plugin 0.8.0 release was targeted for Thursday April 23rd, with releases expected roughly every two weeks leading up to WordPress 7.0.
AI plugin
- Continuing work preparing for the 0.8.0 release this week.
- Ongoing efforts to wrap up Content Resizing, Guidelines, and Request Logging (pending sufficient updates and testing)
PHP / WP AI Client
- Discussion about shipping Google Provider v1.0.4 to resolve reported issues.
- Ongoing work to implement thought signatures across provider plugins.
- Continued discussion around adding embeddings support, with outreach planned to additional contributors to help advance PR work.
MCP
- No direct code updates reported this week.
- Significant architectural decisions were made (see below).
Key Decisions
Several decisions were made to prevent blockers ahead of the WordPress 7.0 release and with a ~month delay for some key A8c leads and contributors.
MCP Adapter Distribution
- The MCP adapter will be released as a standalone WordPress.org plugin (prior analysis on options).
- This enables dependency installation workflows and improves adoption flexibility.
- Composer distribution remains an option but will not be the primary delivery method.
Connector Page and Branding
- Connector page branding will be aligned with existing AI plugin design assets.
- Minor UI adjustments are expected to continue as long as they do not introduce regressions.
- Larger design overhauls are deferred until after the 7.0 release cycle.
Content Provenance Work
- Work related to WordPress.org acting as a signing entity is paused.
- This decision depends on leadership availability and will be revisited once availability improves.
Experiment Elevation Process
- Stable experiments may be elevated to features using GitHub issues.
- During leadership absence, decision authority is delegated to active plugin maintainers (@dkotter @jeffpaul) to maintain forward progress.
Embeddings within PHP/WP AI Clients
- AI plugin experiment work blocked by this not being available
- @jason_the_adams to reach out to colleague (Christopher) to potentially help advance or guide work on this front
Working Through Limited Availability
- The team agreed to prioritize forward movement through reversible decisions.
- Large or irreversible decisions should still be deferred until full leadership availability returns.
- Documentation of decisions and rationale will remain critical to maintain alignment.
Improving the WordPress 7.0 User Flow
- Continued discussion around improving the user journey from installation to successful AI usage.
- Focus remains on reducing friction and minimizing failure states in early adoption flows.
Open Questions
- Which additional experiments should be elevated to features before WordPress 7.0?
- How should embeddings be integrated into the PHP and WordPress AI clients?
- Who can assist with ongoing connector UX testing during reduced contributor availability?
Next Steps
- Vision alignment meeting: @jason_the_adams to meet with Matt and James and share outcomes with the team.
- MCP Adapter submission: @justlevine to initiate the WordPress.org plugin process. @jeffpaul to assist with WPORG submission coordination.
- Connector flow improvements: Review and iterate on connector user flow and visual consistency.
- Embeddings support: Continue evaluating existing PR work and recruit additional reviewers.
- Design alignment: Create supporting tickets to unify branding across plugin surfaces.
Upcoming meetings
Folks are welcome to join on Wednesday’s at 1700 UTC via Google Meet with in-meeting notes captured in a Slack Canvas and then paired with Gemini meeting notes to help generate this meeting summary post. All team meetings are published to https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/#ai.
- The next bi-weekly AI Team Office Hours Slack discussion is scheduled for 30 April 2026.
- The next weekly AI Contributor weekly Google Meet video call is scheduled for 29 April 2026.
Props to @karmatosed for pre-publish review.