We built the same plugin six ways
As part of our WordCamp US 2026 talk we built out the same plugin with the latest Frontier Sol 5.6 and Fable 5 model at xHigh. We pitted it against our Starter pipeline and our full Principal WP Pipeline running Opus 4.8.
As with each plugin we started with the same prompt:
Build an invite-only WordPress plugin for video-game collectors. Registered users search IGDB to add games to their library. Games can have one of four statuses (playing / finished / backlog / wishlist). They can curate a front-end library at
/my-library/, follow each other, and see an activity feed.
This post is part of a series
We build the same plugin with Sol 5.6 xHigh, Fable 5 xHigh, our starter pipeline and our full pipeline. Here are the results.
Full pipeline
Starter pipeline
Frontier models
Sol 5.6 This page · Fable 5
This page shows the plugin as Sol 5.6 wrote it, at xHigh reasoning, from the one-line brief alone. There was no requirements gate, no stakeholder questions, no written spec, and no review pass. It is the raw single-model baseline.
Sol built a working plugin. Registration stays closed and reopens only for a valid invite. Each invitation is tied to an email address, stored as a SHA-256 hash, given an expiry, and marked used once accepted. IGDB search runs through a server-side Twitch OAuth proxy, so the credentials never reach the browser. Games carry the four required statuses. Activation creates the /my-library/ page, which hosts a small JavaScript app for the library, search, following, an activity feed, and a directory of other collectors.
The gaps are the things the brief did not spell out. Every member’s library is readable by every other member, with no private option. The feed is capped at fifty entries with no paging, REST access is gated only by “logged in” rather than by role, and there are no automated tests.
See it in action
Highlights
Try it yourself
Boots a fresh WordPress in your browser with the plugin activated and demo content loaded. The search runs against the real IGDB catalog. Nothing is saved, refresh to start over.
Boot takes about 20 seconds · runs in your browser