Building a WordPress Development Combo with AI Tools
In an era where AI development tools are flourishing, how do you combine different tools into an efficient WordPress development workflow? This article shares our methodology distilled from real-world practice.
Rethinking the Development Process
Consider a typical WordPress development workflow: it starts with understanding client requirements, organizing key items, defining user stories and acceptance criteria, then breaking them down into development checklists. For a brand-new plugin, you also need to initialize the environment — creating folder structures, defining constants, setting up Composer autoloading, configuring testing and static analysis tools.
Then you begin from the backend logic: designing data fields, creating Custom Post Types or custom database tables, writing data operation classes (CRUD). After the data layer is complete, you develop settings pages — either global settings (stored in wp_options) or individual settings for multiple records. Then you design business logic — frontend AJAX interactions, external API integrations, form submission handling. Finally, you integrate the frontend and backend and run tests.
Modularizing AI Tools
Once the process is mapped out, you can design corresponding AI tools for each work item. Taking Claude Code as an example, it offers multiple tool levels:
- Skill: Encapsulated knowledge, triggered only when needed
- Command: Encapsulated prompts, executed with a single instruction
- Rule: Standards that AI must follow with every response
- Agent: Independent context environments for different task types
The key is deep integration — Commands serve as the user’s entry point for calling AI, executing a Command first invokes an Agent, and the Agent retrieves relevant Skills, allowing the AI to precisely know what needs to be done.
Development Principles Starting from Data Structure
Our core principle in practice is “design the data structure first.” We discuss the feature’s required flow in ChatGPT or Gemini, break down the needed fields from that flow, then implement in sequence:
- Determine whether database tables need to be created or modified, and design a database version upgrade strategy
- Build “single responsibility” CRUD classes for each table
- Build API or Ajax-specific classes that must use the CRUD classes from the previous step
- Execute and verify data operation correctness
Every step follows the pattern: plan first, confirm, then implement. This process ensures AI-generated code stays aligned with WordPress development standards and makes future maintenance and extension much easier.
Tool Selection Strategy
For small tools, use Cursor or Antigravity for intuitive development. For products or client projects, use PhpStorm paired with Claude Code — the former provides comprehensive development environment support (auto-formatting, refactoring, WordPress Hook navigation), while the latter offers powerful AI development capabilities. Through this combination, we have found the optimal balance between quality and efficiency.