SnipVault 1.3.0: Introducing the Snippet Engineer and Project Workspaces

SnipVault 1.3.0 is our biggest release to date. It ships two features that fundamentally change how developers build and organise WordPress customizations: an autonomous AI coding agent and a project workspace system.

Meet the Snippet Engineer

The Snippet Engineer is an AI-powered coding agent built directly into SnipVault. If you've used Cursor, the mental model is the same — but instead of editing files in an IDE, you're writing, testing, and deploying WordPress snippets from inside the admin panel.

Describe what you want in plain English: 'Add a WooCommerce discount that gives 15% off orders over $100 for logged-in users.' The agent takes over. It creates the snippet, writes PHP, CSS, and JavaScript as needed, runs the code in a sandboxed probe request to catch fatals before anything goes live, performs a security audit with risk scoring, and then asks for your approval before publishing.

This isn't a chatbot that pastes code. It's a multi-step autonomous agent that plans, writes, validates, self-corrects, and deploys — with you in control at every decision point.

Four modes, one panel

The Snippet Engineer lives in a unified side panel accessible from anywhere in SnipVault. Four modes cover different workflows:

**Agent** — autonomous multi-step builds. Give the agent a task and it handles everything through to deployment approval.

**Chat** — conversational help with your snippets. Ask questions, request refactors, get explanations. The agent can read and modify snippets directly in the conversation.

**Ask** — read-only questions about your codebase. What hooks does this snippet use? How does it interact with other code? No changes, just answers.

**Plan** — review a proposed approach before execution. The agent lays out exactly what it plans to do and waits for your go-ahead.

Parallel subagents for multi-file projects

For larger requests, the agent fans out across parallel subagents. Need a custom admin page with a PHP handler, a CSS stylesheet, and a JavaScript module? The orchestrator dispatches 2–4 focused code-generation jobs that run simultaneously. Each one saves its output as a separate snippet the moment it finishes.

A live activity card shows each subagent's status, language, and a code preview as it works, with per-file 'Saved' confirmation once persisted.

Security at every step

Every deploy goes through server-enforced gates. The sandbox must pass against the current code, and the security audit risk score must fall within your configured ceiling. These checks aren't optional — the agent cannot publish code that fails either gate.

Deploy approval is always human-in-the-loop by default, with an optional autopilot mode for lower-risk work. Signed deploy tokens and a full audit log track every write, deploy, rollback, and filesystem action.

Project Workspaces

As snippet libraries grow, folders alone aren't enough. Projects are a new organisational layer that groups related snippets and folders into self-contained workspaces.

A global project switcher in the top toolbar lets you move between projects instantly. Each project gets its own folder tree, its own snippet list, and its own URL namespace. On upgrade, your existing snippets and folders are automatically migrated into a Default project — nothing breaks, nothing moves unexpectedly.

The Snippet Engineer is fully project-aware. Ask it to 'set up a WooCommerce customisation project with separate snippets for pricing, cart, and email templates' and it'll scaffold the entire workspace structure.

What else is in 1.3.0

Beyond the headline features, 1.3.0 ships image attachments in agent chat, incremental snippet edits via apply_snippet_edits (only changed hunks, not full rewrites), batch deploy support, live code streaming with token-by-token output, task checklists for complex multi-step work, and several security hardening improvements to the agent's filesystem access and deploy pipeline.

SnipVault 1.3.0 is available now. All existing customers receive the update automatically — no reinstall required.