Real-World Lessons from AI-Powered WordPress Plugin Development
Developing WordPress plugins with AI is quite different from developing other products. AI defaults to using React with Tailwind CSS for the frontend and third-party services like Supabase for the database. But for WordPress, which already has a mature admin management system, these default choices actually introduce the biggest variables.
Three Major Challenges of AI WordPress Development
1. AI Struggles to Understand WordPress Development Philosophy
WordPress has been evolving for over 20 years, with its own unique development logic and heavy reliance on conventions. Technical documentation has evolved across versions, with old and new approaches coexisting — AI doesn’t always grasp the latest and most correct development methods. This is most apparent when developing Blocks.
2. Plugin Architecture and PHP Practices Affect Maintainability
Real-world pitfalls concentrate on three levels: unreasonable overall plugin architecture design, PHP practices that violate WordPress coding standards, and confused data structure and responsibility separation. These issues are invisible during initial feature development but explode in time cost during testing and extension phases. Even when repeatedly emphasized to follow standards, AI still tends to produce files exceeding a thousand lines.
3. AI Can Barely Detect Plugin Conflicts
In the WordPress world, your functionality might conflict with other plugins, themes, or even Composer packages. We encountered Guzzle HTTP version conflicts between different plugins — asking AI to fix and check dozens of times, burning through several days of tokens, only to eventually find a workaround using an external service.
Our AI Development Principles
Choose Tools Based on the Project
For personal utility tools, use Cursor or Antigravity for intuitive development — don’t worry about code details, as long as it works. For products or client projects, use PhpStorm paired with Claude Code — PhpStorm is a complete development environment with built-in auto-formatting, refactoring, and quality checks, with excellent WordPress support that lets you click a Hook name to jump to its definition. Claude Code uses the MAX plan, with multiple terminal tabs running tasks simultaneously.
Backend First: Start from Data Structure
The core principle is to design the data structure first. Discuss the feature flow in ChatGPT or Gemini, break down the required fields from that flow, then implement in sequence:
- Design a database version upgrade strategy
- Build single-responsibility CRUD classes for each table (plan first, confirm, then implement)
- Build API or Ajax-specific classes that must use the CRUD classes
- Execute and verify data operation correctness
Frontend Development Strategy
For the frontend, use mock data to first ensure the operation flow and display are correct, then integrate the backend API. For Block development, study the official WordPress Block documentation first and prepare Skills for AI reference. Most importantly — always plan before implementing, and never let AI freestyle.
This methodology has been battle-tested over a full year, allowing us to maintain code quality and maintainability amid the wave of AI-assisted development.