WordPress Agent Skills

WordPress Agent Skills is the official Agent Skills pack from the WordPress project — 18 skills, 88 reference documents, and 7 detection scripts that teach AI coding assistants how modern WordPress is actually built: Gutenberg blocks, block themes, the Interactivity and Abilities APIs, plugin security, WP-CLI operations, and Plugin Directory compliance.

The problem it solves

AI assistants are fluent in WordPress from a decade ago. Left alone they produce pre-Gutenberg patterns and classic themes, skip nonce and capability checks in plugin code, omit block deprecations so the editor throws "Invalid block" errors on existing content, and ignore the tooling already sitting in your repo. This pack replaces recalled patterns with documented procedures.

The 18 skills

Routing and detection

• wordpress-router — classifies the repo (plugin, theme, block theme, core checkout, full site) and routes to the right workflow, with a bundled decision tree.
• wp-project-triage — detects project type, tooling (Composer, Node, @wordpress/scripts), tests (PHPUnit, Playwright, wp-env), and version hints via a 19 KB detection script and a JSON schema for its output.

Editor and front end

• wp-block-development — block.json, registration, attributes and serialization, dynamic rendering, inner blocks, supports and wrappers, deprecations, debugging, and tooling.
• wp-block-themes — theme.json, templates and parts, patterns, and style variations.
• wp-patterns — block pattern authoring with references on block markup, designing with theme tokens, pattern categories and registration, visual composition, and anti-patterns.
• wp-interactivity-api — data-wp-* directives, stores, and server-side rendering.
• wpds — the WordPress Design System.

PHP, APIs, and data

• wp-plugin-development — structure, lifecycle, hooks, the Settings API, data and cron, and security.
• wp-rest-api — routes and endpoints, schema, authentication, discovery and params, custom content types, and response shaping.
• wp-abilities-api, wp-abilities-audit, and wp-abilities-verify — the deepest area in the pack: registering capability-gated abilities, auditing a plugin's REST surface to propose registrations, and verifying registrations against their declared annotations with a runtime harness, schema lints, and permission round-trips.

Ops, quality, and release

• wp-wpcli-and-ops — WP-CLI automation, multisite targeting, safe search-replace, cron and cache, and operational safety rules.
• wp-performance — profiling with wp-cli profile and doctor, autoload option bloat, object cache, database and HTTP API costs, Server-Timing, and headless Query Monitor.
• wp-phpstan — static analysis configuration, baselines, WordPress-specific annotations, and handling third-party classes.
• wp-playground and blueprint — WordPress Playground CLI runs, browser previews, share URLs, and declarative Blueprint environment setup.
• wp-plugin-directory-guidelines — GPL compliance, naming and trademark rules, and a 25 KB guideline review checklist for anyone shipping to the plugin repository.

How it works

Every skill is a self-contained folder: a SKILL.md stating when to use it, the procedure, and how to verify the result; a references/ directory for deep dives loaded only when needed; and optional deterministic scripts/ for detection and validation rather than guesswork. The pack also ships an eval harness with 41 scenario files covering block migration, nonce and capability checks, autoload bloat, trademark review, pattern authoring, and multisite targeting.

AI authorship, disclosed

Unusually for a first-party pack, the project publishes exactly how it was made. The skills were generated with GPT-5.2 Codex (High Reasoning) from official Gutenberg trunk and WordPress developer documentation, then reviewed and edited by WordPress contributors and tested against real tasks drawn from WP Bench. The project states plainly that the skills have not yet been run through a formal evaluation system, because none exists, and labels this v1.

Who it is for

WordPress plugin and theme developers, agencies, and Core contributors using Claude Code, Copilot, Codex, Cursor, or Antigravity who want generated WordPress code that passes review rather than code that looks plausible.

Why it matters

WordPress carries two decades of accumulated patterns, and the wrong one still runs — it just fails security review, breaks the editor on old content, or quietly loads a megabyte of autoloaded options on every request. This pack is maintained in the WordPress organisation itself, targets WordPress 7.0+ on PHP 7.4.0+, and points the agent at the current documented procedure for each task.

Option 1 — skills CLI (fastest)

npx skills add WordPress/agent-skills --skill wp-plugin-development

List everything available:

npx skills add WordPress/agent-skills --list

Install several at once, or globally:

npx skills add WordPress/agent-skills --skill wp-plugin-development wp-abilities-api wp-playground
npx skills add WordPress/agent-skills --skill wp-plugin-development --global

npx skills add defaults to project scope, so the skills can be committed and shared with your team. Add -g / --global for user-wide install.

Option 2 — Build and install the skillpack

Clone, build, then install for every editor you use:

git clone https://github.com/WordPress/agent-skills.git
cd agent-skills
node shared/scripts/skillpack-build.mjs --clean

Globally, for Claude Code:

node shared/scripts/skillpack-install.mjs --global
node shared/scripts/skillpack-install.mjs --global --skills=wp-playground,wp-block-development

Into a project, for several editors at once:

node shared/scripts/skillpack-install.mjs --dest=../your-wp-project --targets=codex,vscode,claude,cursor

That writes to .codex/skills/, .github/skills/, .claude/skills/, and .cursor/skills/. Cursor global is --targets=cursor-global; Antigravity is opt-in and must be named at both build and install time.

Preview first with --dry-run, or list with --list.

Option 3 — Copy a folder

Copy any directory from skills/ into your assistant's instructions directory.

Scope notes

Global installs live in your home directory and apply to every project; project installs live in the repo and can be committed. When a skill exists in both, the project copy wins.

Use it

Start with the router, which triages the repo before anything else runs:

Add a settings page to this plugin, with proper nonce and capability checks.

The router classifies the codebase, wp-project-triage detects the tooling and versions, and the relevant domain skill supplies the procedure and the verification step.