Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

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Agent responsibly

– vercel.com

Vercel shares their internal framework for shipping agent-generated code safely. The core argument: green CI is no longer proof of safety, because agents produce code that looks flawless while remaining blind to production realities. The post outlines how to build systems where agents can act with high autonomy because deployment is safe by default.

Read more [vercel.com]

Zen of AI Coding

– nonstructured.com

A thoughtful collection of principles for working with coding agents, inspired by the Zen of Python. Covers how cheap code changes prioritization, why refactoring and repaying tech debt got easier, and why your role shifts from typing code to framing problems.

Read more [nonstructured.com]

Scotty: a beautiful SSH task runner original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

We just released Scotty, a beautiful SSH task runner. It lets you define deploy scripts and other remote tasks, run them from your terminal, and watch every step as it happens. It supports both Laravel Envoy's Blade format and a new plain bash format. Why we built Scotty Even though services like…

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What's new in laravel-activitylog v5 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We just released v5 of laravel-activitylog, our package for logging user activity and model events in Laravel.

In Flare, Mailcoach, and Oh Dear we use it to build audit logs, so we can track what users are doing: who changed a setting, who deleted a project, who invited a team member. If you need something similar in your app, this package makes it easy.

This major release requires PHP 8.4+ and Laravel 12+, and brings a cleaner API, a better database schema, and customizable internals. Let me walk you through what the package can do and what's new in v5.

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Rethinking our frontend future at Spatie

– spatie.be

Nick wrote about how native browser features like the dialog element, the Popover API, and anchor positioning could eventually replace much of what we use shadcn and Radix for at Spatie today. A thoughtful look at where the web platform is heading and what it means for our frontend stack.

Read more [spatie.be]

Laravel Query Builder v7: a must-have package for building APIs in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We just released v7 of spatie/laravel-query-builder, our package that makes it easy to build flexible API endpoints. If you're building an API with Laravel, you'll almost certainly need to let consumers filter results, sort them, include relationships and select specific fields. Writing that logic by hand for every endpoint gets repetitive fast, and it's easy to accidentally expose columns or relationships you didn't intend to.

Our query builder takes care of all of that. It reads query parameters from the URL, translates them into the right Eloquent queries, and makes sure only the things you've explicitly allowed can be queried.

// GET /users?filter[name]=John&include=posts&sort=-created_at

$users = QueryBuilder::for(User::class)
    ->allowedFilters('name')
    ->allowedIncludes('posts')
    ->allowedSorts('created_at')
    ->get();

// select * from users where name = 'John' order by created_at desc

This major version requires PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or higher, and brings a cleaner API along with some features we've been wanting to add for a while.

Let me walk you through how the package works and what's new.

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Laravel Site Search v3 is here: crawl and search your entire site using just your database original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

We're proud to release v3 of laravel-site-search, a package that crawls and indexes your entire site. Think of it as your own private Google. Point it at a URL, let it crawl every page, and get full-text search results back.

Previous versions required Meilisearch as the search engine. That works well, but it means running a separate service.

With v3, your application's own database is all you need. It supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB out of the box, and it's the new default.

Let me walk you through it.

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