Freek Van der Herten's blog on Laravel, PHP and AI

How we use Inertia v3 optimistic updates in There There original

Apr 13th 2026 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

A few months ago we started building There There, a helpdesk we're making at Spatie. The premise is simple. After two decades of running customer support for our open source work and our SaaS apps, we wanted the tool we always wished existed.

One thing we care about in particular is using AI to help humans craft better responses, not to replace them. The agent stays in charge of the conversation. The model just helps them reply faster and a little sharper. There There is in private beta right now, and you can apply for early access at there-there.app.

We're building There There with Laravel and Inertia, and we lean heavily on the latest features Inertia v3 brings. In this post I'd like to give one example: optimistic updates.

Two Soups, Two Cookies

Apr 11th 2026 – liamhammett.com

A lovely analogy about software craft. Same ingredients, same features, but the invisible process behind the decisions is what separates "this works" from "this feels right."

Overcoming AI anxiety

Apr 10th 2026 – ryangjchandler.co.uk

Ryan Chandler shares his honest journey from unease to acceptance with AI coding tools. A thoughtful reflection on how your value as a software engineer is not in writing every line, but knowing which lines should exist at all.

Prove that you're human

Apr 9th 2026 – marketingfordevelopers.com

A good reminder that trust matters more than ever when every week brings another AI-made product. The post argues that real faces, founder stories, and a visible reputation help both people and LLMs trust what you build.

Quantization from the ground up

Apr 8th 2026 – ngrok.com

A thorough explainer on how quantization makes LLMs 4x smaller and 2x faster while losing only 5-10% accuracy. Covers floating point precision, compression techniques, and how to measure quality loss, with interactive examples throughout.

Designing with Claude Code

Apr 7th 2026

Steve Schoger shows how he uses Claude Code to design and build UIs, turning natural language prompts into polished interfaces.

My Take on Vibe Coding VS Agentic Engineering

Apr 6th 2026 – wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel

My thoughts on why Agentic Engineering is a better path than Vibe Coding, and the workflow I use to turn AI agents into a structured engineering process.

SlideWire: Build Presentations with Livewire and Blade

Apr 4th 2026 – laravel-news.com

SlideWire is a Laravel package for building browser-based presentation decks using Livewire components and Blade templates. It comes with built-in navigation, transitions, syntax highlighting, and Mermaid diagrams.

Under the Hood: How Blaze Speeds Up Blade Templates

Apr 3rd 2026 – tighten.com

A deep dive into how Blaze works internally. Matt Stauffer builds two toy versions from scratch to show how Blaze shifts Blade component rendering from runtime to compile time.

Context Anchoring

Apr 2nd 2026 – martinfowler.com

Martin Fowler explores why AI coding sessions degrade over time and how externalizing decisions into structured documents keeps context reliable across sessions.

Building Multi-Agent Workflows with the Laravel AI SDK

Apr 1st 2026 – laravel.com

The Laravel blog walks through how to implement the five multi-agent patterns from Anthropic's "Building Effective Agents" research using the Laravel AI SDK. Prompt chaining, parallelization, routing, orchestrator-workers, and evaluator-optimizer loops, all built with just the agent() helper.

Agent responsibly

Apr 1st 2026 – 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.

Zen of AI Coding

Mar 31st 2026 – 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.

Introduction to Delegated Types

Mar 30th 2026 – tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick

This post explores what Delegated Types are, highlights their benefits, compares them to alternatives like Single-Table Inheritance (STI), and examines practical use cases they enable.

Scotty: a beautiful SSH task runner original

Mar 30th 2026 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…

Generating OG images at the edge on Cloudflare

Mar 27th 2026 – mattrothenberg.com

Matt Rothenberg walks through how to generate dynamic Open Graph images on Cloudflare Workers. A practical guide covering the full setup from rendering to caching.

Speed up your Livewire tests

Mar 26th 2026 – dyrynda.com.au

Michael Dyrynda found that switching from fill() to set() in Livewire tests reduced his test suite from 22 seconds to 4 seconds. The difference: fill triggers a Livewire round-trip per field, while set batches them into one.

Liminal - A full Laravel playground in your browser

Mar 25th 2026 – liminal.aschmelyun.com - submitted by Andrew Schmelyun

A static, free, and open-source Laravel playground that runs entirely in the browser! Comes with a sqlite db, artisan commands, two-way file syncing, github imports, and more.

What's new in laravel-activitylog v5 original

Mar 25th 2026 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.

Rethinking our frontend future at Spatie

Mar 24th 2026 – 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.