Opus 5.5's test edge was repos, not the model: developer

The workflow behind these commits stayed the same as the models swapped. Bug reports arrive through the WordPress.org forum or email, get brought into a claude.ai chat to have the code read, and are written up as a handover document covering cause and fix. That document goes to Claude Code, which implements the change and produces the commit. In one September 15 example, a forum report that a reference card under a chat answer pointed to an unrelated page was traced to vector search results not being flagged, producing a 1.19.5 commit co-authored with Opus 4.8 the same afternoon.

The handover document itself followed a fixed shape: symptom, the file and line where the cause sits, what to fix and what not to fix, verification items, and a draft changelog line. The developer suggests this uniform input may be why the commit format looked so consistent — 60 of 80 commits updated readme.txt in the same commit, and 50 of 80 subjects began with a version number — while noting this is a guess that was never compared against not using a handover document.

What the record cannot show is where human judgement ended and the AI's began. The co-author line only signals AI involvement. On September 30, PDF Image Creator shipped eight releases in one day around image regeneration work, and how the team decided to split that into eight is not captured. Pricing and deadline calls, plus real-server checks such as hitting the Stripe API through PowerShell or inspecting ImageMagick on a rental server, happened outside the commits and left no trace in the repositories.