How I Built an AI Alt Text Generator for WordPress — and What I Learned

Short summary

The author built an AI alt text generator plugin for WordPress that uses a vision model to draft descriptions for images, with bulk processing and human review before saving. The stack includes WordPress/PHP, Node.js backend on Render, Supabase for accounts, Stripe for billing, and PostHog for analytics. Key lessons include designing explicit event semantics to avoid metric confusion, making analytics events retry-safe with stable insert IDs, and introducing correlation IDs to trace actions across the full plugin-to-webhook pipeline.

• •AI vision service generates alt text drafts for WordPress images with bulk processing and human review
• •Stack: WordPress plugin, Node.js API on Render, Supabase, Stripe billing, PostHog analytics
• •Key lessons on event semantics, retry-safe analytics, and cross-service correlation IDs for debugging

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