CloudFest Hackathon 2025 ran from 15 to 17 March at Europa-Park in Germany, and I spent it on WP-CLI as an MCP Host, a project led by Pascal Birchler — WP-CLI maintainer and a software engineer at Google.
I joined it for a fairly selfish reason. The Model Context Protocol is only a few months old, and I wanted to understand it by building something with it rather than by reading about it. Three days on a team that includes the WP-CLI maintainer is a good way to do that.
The gap we went after
WordPress development has an awkward hole where AI is concerned. If your site is live, the REST API gives an assistant a way in. If you are working on a local install — which is where most development actually happens — you have almost nothing: no public endpoint, and no straightforward way to let a model see or change the site you are building.
The idea was to close that by making WordPress itself an MCP server and WP-CLI an MCP host, so an assistant can talk to a local installation directly over the command line, with no live site and no exposed API.
What we shipped in three days
- A server exposing REST API routes and WP-CLI commands as function-calling capabilities — which is the interesting part, because the CLI surface is enormous and already well understood
- An MCP client able to connect to several servers at once, not only WordPress ones
- Provider-agnostic LLM integration, so the natural-language layer is not tied to one vendor
- Image editing through a Gemini API that had been released days before the hackathon started — the kind of thing you only attempt when you have three days and nothing to lose
All of it against a protocol that kept moving under us. Working this close to the edge in a hackathon is mostly an exercise in deciding what not to chase.
Why this format works
What makes the CloudFest Hackathon worth the flight is not the three days of building — it is that everyone arrives ready to give the work away. People turn up from different companies, often competing ones, form a team around a problem none of them could justify funding alone, and put the result out in the open at the end of it.
Joining an existing project is the best part of that. You work on something outside your own bubble, you learn a technology properly because you have to make it actually run rather than describe it, and you get to see how another maintainer reasons through the decisions. I have come away knowing MCP in a way the specification alone would never have taught me — and that came from the people on the team, not from the protocol.
What happens next
The code is on GitHub as swissspidy/ai-command, and the team picked up the hackathon’s Social Media Master Award for generating the most engagement of any project this year. The genuinely open question is where this belongs: an MCP server could live in WordPress core, or it could ship as a plugin. Either way, the interesting work starts now that the three days are over.
Pitch and links
- Project page on the CloudFest Hackathon site
- GitHub repository (swissspidy/ai-command)
- Pitch video on YouTube