Eric Karkovack (00:00) Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a clip from my in-depth interview with Jason Adams. Jason is a member of the WordPress AI team and filled us in on the team's mission, the challenges they faced, and what's in store for WordPress 7.0. Be sure to catch the entire discussion over on our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details. Eric Karkovack (00:29) I look at this and okay, I've read some of the posts and we'll put them in the show notes. So there's these different building blocks that you mentioned. We've got the PHP AI client SDK, right? The abilities API and the MCP adapter. how do these features work together? And I guess it's kind of a two part question. Actually, I'll save the second part to after because it's kind of complicated. how do these features work together ⁓ in implementing AI into WordPress core? Jason Adams (01:04) Great question. So. The end goal of what the core AI team is doing is trying to bring AI to, how do I say this, make AI something usable by people who do not deeply understand AI. AI of course is a deep, deep, deep, deep topic that goes far into how it actually works and so on and so forth, prompt and context engineering and all of this stuff. And so the goal is to bring into the WordPress in such a way, one, that it's optional, because I there's been concern about that, or people are like, are you forcing AI on me? Nope. And two, is consumable in a way that's easy to understand and use. So a couple examples of that. So the Abilities API is ⁓ AI adjacent. ⁓ Eric Karkovack (01:43) Yeah. Jason Adams (02:01) It is effectively a functional layer within WordPress, a way of defining functions or abilities. ⁓ When I actually first heard about the abilities API, what I got excited about actually had nothing to do with AI. ⁓ I come from a background of working with like TEC, GiveWP, LearnDash, those sorts of products. And ⁓ One thing that I've noticed, and I've also just been in WordPress for like 15 or 17 years now, is that everybody has a public API. Everybody has a way that they want their product to be integrated by other developers. This could be Gravity Forms, TC, whoever, right? There is no unified approach for how to do that. So every single product has their very own special snowflake way of having people integrate. Maybe it's functions, maybe it's classes. Eric Karkovack (02:42) Sure. Jason Adams (02:57) Maybe it's, know, fresh API, like there's no standard whatsoever. You don't really know how to integrate with something. You just hope they have good documentation and you just go for it. And so it is not because anybody's not trying, but because there's just no, there is no standard unified way of doing that in WordPress. And so the abilities API is that then once you've defined a function, then you can define the context that function. Eric Karkovack (03:08) That's a mess. Yes. Jason Adams (03:26) can apply to so that could be the rest API that could be an MCP. So that shows up as a tool to some MCP server, you know, and so on and so forth. So, so the abilities APIs is that very, very foundational piece. MCP adapter is called the MCP adapter because we don't know at this time is MCP going to be around in three years? Like we really don't know actually. ⁓ and so all it does is it takes abilities and turns that into an MCP server with tools, prompts, and resources. and just by within the ability saying, yes, I want this to be available via MCP. but if MCP were to go away, it's not like you've suddenly lost something. Eric Karkovack (04:15) Okay. Jason Adams (04:21) Or if a new protocol were to come in, we could add a new adapter for that. ⁓ And then once again, in your ability, you add like a line or two to your, you know, your meta to say, yep, I want it to work with this protocol. And, but you're doing very, very small changes and it's being able to be exposed to different, you know, protocols with an AI.