After posting a screenshot, I often get questions about which editor, font or tools I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using.
We just released laravel-screenshot, a new package to take screenshots of web pages in Laravel apps.
It uses a driver-based architecture, so you can choose between Browsershot (which requires you to install Chromium) and Cloudflare Browser Rendering (which can be used on environments like Laravel Cloud).
Let me walk you through the package.
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Pete Koomen argues that most AI apps are "horseless carriages," bolting AI onto old paradigms instead of letting users shape the prompts that drive them. He makes the case that the best AI apps should be agent builders, not just agents.
Read more [koomen.dev]
– x.com - submitted by Aaron Francis
Aaron Francis shares how he used Claude to create an entire launch video for his new app, without using any traditional motion graphics software. No Remotion, no MCPs — just clever prompting and iteration.
Read more [x.com]
Laravel's built-in authorization is great when permissions are defined in code. With gates and policies, you can write logic like this:
// Defined in code, requires a deploy to change
Gate::define('edit-posts', function (User $user) {
return $user->is_admin;
});
But in some projects roles and permissions are dynamic: created by users, managed through an admin panel, or changed at runtime without deploying code. Our Laravel Permission package can help you dynamically create roles and permissions.
We just released v7 which doesn't bring any new features, but cleans up the internal code and modernizes it. Let me walk you through what the package can do.
Laravel Fuse is a circuit breaker package for Laravel queue jobs. When an external service like Stripe or Mailgun goes down, instead of letting thousands of jobs timeout (30s each), the circuit opens after a configurable failure threshold and jobs fail instantly. It supports three-state circuit breaking (closed/open/half-open), intelligent failure classification (429s and auth errors do not trip the circuit), peak hours config, and a built-in status page.
Read more [github.com]
Amit Merchant walks through practical use cases for the Laravel AI SDK: mining user data with Eloquent models as context, building a code review bot that comments on PRs, and creating adaptive quiz systems for EdTech apps. Nice examples of agents, structured output, and conversation memory beyond the typical chatbot demo.
Read more [www.amitmerchant.com]
A fascinating deep dive into the very first commit of Laravel, made by Taylor Otwell on June 9, 2011. The article explores the original directory structure, the early Eloquent ORM, the session system with its clever flash data prefixing, and the authentication basics that are still recognizable in today's framework.
Read more [laravelnepal.com]
A while ago, we released laravel-pdf, a package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps.
Under the hood, it used Browsershot (and therefore Puppeteer/Chrome) to convert HTML to PDF. That approach works great, but it does require Node.js and a headless Chrome binary on your server.
Last week, my buddy Dries shared on X how to generate PDFs using Cloudflare services. This way doesn’t require Node or any binaries. Very neat! This unlocks PDF generation for environments where Node or Chrome cannot be installed easily, like Laravel Cloud.
To support this way of rendering a PDF, we’ve released a new major release (v2) of Laravel PDF. The package now ships with three drivers: Browsershot, Cloudflare Browser Rendering, and DOMPDF. You can also create your own driver. On top of that, we've added queued PDF generation and the ability to set PDF metadata. And to let your AI understand our package, we've added a Laravel Boost skill.
Let me walk you through all of it.
Martin Fowler on the overuse of bold in technical writing — and how LLMs have picked up and spread this practice. The more you emphasize, the less power it has.
Read more [martinfowler.com]
Ray 3.0 is here! Completely rebuilt for better performance (60% less memory), a fresh new look, message archiving, and MCP support so AI agents can interact with Ray directly.
Read more [myray.app]
Christoph reflects on how personal AI assistants have changed his daily workflow — from calendar updates to searching the web less. An interesting take on where this technology is heading.
Read more [christoph-rumpel.com]
PHP 8.6 will introduce partial function application, allowing you to pre-fill some arguments while leaving others for later. Brent explains this new language feature with practical examples.
Read more [stitcher.io]
At Laracon India, I launched a major update of Ray. For that talk, I needed a little demo project to showcase Ray. I built a simple website about a then-fictional mobile app to play a Scrabble-like word game called WordStockt.
But then I got curious: how far could I push AI-assisted development? Could I actually just create the whole game? After about 10 days, WordStockt is a fully functional word game that's 98% vibe-coded. It's available for iOS and Android. In this post, I'd like to tell you more about it.
Brent continues his optimization journey processing 11 million database events. Starting from 50k events per second, he implements combined inserts, skips unnecessary deserialization, and reaches 400k events per second. A great deep dive into PHP performance optimization.
Read more [stitcher.io]
Martin Fowler on how technical terms lose their meaning as they spread. When a useful concept becomes popular, it passes through a "telephone game" of explanations until the original definition gets diluted or even inverted. Think of how "agile" or "DevOps" are used today versus their original intent.
Read more [martinfowler.com]
The final part of Oh Dear's series on SQL performance. Mattias introduces phpunit-query-count-assertions, a package that catches N+1 queries, duplicate queries, and missing indexes in your test suite. Since implementing this at Oh Dear, they've eliminated 15% of their SELECT queries.
Read more [ohdear.app]
If you're using AI tools like Claude Code to help write code, you've probably noticed they don't automatically know your team's coding conventions. The AI might write perfectly valid PHP, but it won't follow your specific style guide unless you tell it to. That's the problem Laravel Boost solves. It…
For years, my git history contains "wip" commit messages. I don't really often use git history myself, but my colleagues do. And when they're trying to understand a change I made six months ago, "wip" tells them absolutely nothing. Might as well not have commit messages at all.
I knew I should write better commit messages, but the friction was real. Stopping to think about how to summarize my changes felt like it broke my flow. So I kept typing "wip".
Now, I have a bash function in my dotfiles that uses Claude to generate commit messages for me.
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick
We released version v1.5.0 of Parental, our package that adds support for Single Table Inheritance (STI) in Laravel. This new version allows types to become other types and use numeric type columns instead of strings. It also adds new helper methods for eager-loading.
Read more [tighten.com]