Add AI Playground interface (prompt testing & debug tools)

[jeffpaul]

Description

Introduce an optional “AI Playground” section that lets advanced users test prompts, inspect responses, and experiment with model settings such as temperature and max tokens. This feature should be disabled by default and enabled via the plugin’s settings screen (or perhaps only via a filter so as not to distract or confuse less technical users).

Goals

• Create a new “AI Playground” admin screen under “AI Experiments.”
• Include: Text prompt input and response output interface.
• Include: Model configuration controls (temperature, max tokens, etc.).
• Include: Response inspection and debug info (raw response, token count, latency).
• Respect feature encapsulation, implemented as a self-contained module under /features/ai-playground/.
• Ensure the UI matches the block editor aesthetic and works responsively.
• Provide developer hooks for adding custom test tools or extending configuration options.

Acceptance Criteria

• Playground can be enabled/disabled via settings (or, again, potentially via a filter).
• Users can submit prompts and view AI responses within WordPress admin.
• Advanced configuration controls function correctly and persist across sessions.
• Debug info displays only when explicitly enabled.
• All code meets WordPress coding standards and feature encapsulation guidelines.

[felixarntz]

So basically, we want this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V64UmOK_iLU 😁

FWIW there's a lot of complexity going into building such a playground. It's a very technical UI, and it also requires plumbing (like REST endpoints) that we currently don't have yet.

For a general-purpose REST API endpoint, I'd be happy to implement that in the WP AI Client next week, as well as a REST API endpoint to list models, which would also be needed for this.

For the actual playground UI, I think we have two options:

• Reuse a ton of what I built - happy to contribute whatever is useful. This gives us quick velocity and we get a comprehensive feature set.
• Build from scratch. This is obviously going to be a whole lot more work. I think we would need to carefully limit the scope to be able to make it happen before the WP 6.9 release / SoTW.

[JasonTheAdams]

Yeah, exactly that, @felixarntz! 😁

Since you obviously know your own code better than us, is there any reason you'd recommend building it from scratch? Is there an upside?

[felixarntz]

No, I just haven't ever directly contributed something existing I had already built to a WordPress project, so I'm not sure to what extent it is desirable or what the process would be. Naturally I could copy all of it over with minimal supervision, but we probably need some more definition first. Let alone that, to port all of it over, we're talking several 1000 lines of code, so I would want to figure out the best way to do this.

Obviously you can trust my code is not doing something silly, but still it would be a substantial amount of reviewing to do.

The other question is which of the things that the AI Services Playground has would we want to have ported over? All of them? There's probably some nuance where there's consensus on many things but not all. I would recommend all of you who are stakeholders and/or interested in this effort give the AI Services Playground a try and share some notes afterwards what you would like to have ported here and/or what you would not like to have in here? I think that would be a great starting point.

To do so:

1. Install AI Services (https://github.com/felixarntz/ai-services, https://wordpress.org/plugins/ai-services/).
2. Configure credentials for at least one provider - or at least two providers if you want to also test provider switching in the Playground.
3. Go to Tools > AI Playground in WP Admin.