Freek.dev

Five Laravel iteration methods timed over 1,000,000 MySQL rows. And a PostgreSQL run where PHP reported 3.3 MB while the process peaked at 324.8 MB.

The AWS SDK for PHP ships a bunch of clients you may never use. This extra weight is often unnecessary, and can also cause problems with serverless deployment limits. Fortunately, Composer has a solution!

A privacy issue in a service my family uses reminded me that authorization and retention matter - but how you handle and communicate an incident matters just as much.

A Laravel agent that remembers conversations re-sends every tool result it ever stored, on every turn, capped at a hundred rows nobody documents. Ten measured turns: over a million tokens of history, most of it pages the model already read. Three fixes, with the before and after for each.

A deep dive into Eloquent performance, from detecting N+1 queries to choosing aggregates, indexes, query plans, pagination, chunking, and transaction boundaries for a growing team dashboard.

A single-source CLI tool to compile repository rules, skills, commands, and MCP configurations to the developer's local AI agents.

Laravel queues are great out of the box, until they bite. Over the years I’ve collected a few gotchas the hard way. Let me save you the headache.

Transformers.js lets you run AI models directly in the browser without a backend, API keys, or an internet connection after the model is cached. The article explores how it works, which models are available, and the trade-offs of client-side AI compared to traditional AI providers.

Fuzz brings the power of Fuzz testing to PestPHP. Allowing you to write coverage-guided fuzz tests in the Pest style you already know and love.

Split a task into reasoning and execution to get deterministic behaviour out of a non-deterministic model.

In this article, we’ll build an AI-powered Slack bot with the Laravel AI SDK. Unlike tools such as Claude Tag, it can switch AI providers, answer questions, execute tasks, and retrieve information from a knowledge base you control.

A schema viewer that had only ever read a live database connection was quietly relying on that connection being trustworthy. Letting people paste a mysqldump instead turned up three assumptions that broke silently: identifiers written straight into the diagram definition, unrecognised statements skipped without a word, and relationship inference presenting a guess as a fact. Plus a fourth bug that the regex-based tests could not see, because a regex has no concept of a tag still being open ten lines later.

A deep dive into modular monoliths, from module APIs and database ownership to cross-module communication, architecture tests, incremental migration, and the signals that justify microservices.

We just shipped Leaf 5 a lightweight PHP framework rebuilt around AI-assisted development, with errors that explain their own fix and docs designed to be cheap for agents to read.

Most AI slop is a context problem, not a model problem: the same model, given no rules file, no memory and no record of past decisions, invents something plausible instead of something consistent. This covers the four ways context fails, and three checks you can actually enforce: a line budget in CI, a drift check on your context files, and a small set of golden tasks you re-run.

A deep dive into immutability in PHP, from readonly properties and interior mutability to immutable value objects, collections, dates, cloning, boundaries, and testing.

July was LaraPlugins' busiest month yet: 3,734 human visitors, 4.5 million AI agent requests, a Reddit post that blew up, and a sneaky data drift bug I had to hunt down. Here’s a look behind the scenes at what we shipped, what broke, and why building for humans still matters most.

On August 14 auto mode becomes the default in Claude Code. Anthropic's own test found it catches 89% of dangerous commands versus 13.6% for human reviewers, and still calls it not risk-free. This is the practical playbook: the permission rules, the PreToolUse hook that blocks a push on red tests, and the review habits that keep it honest, with the actual config.

Every CMS tribe (WordPress, Drupal, Statamic, Sanity, pick your poison) has quietly cracked problems the others don't even know exist, but none of that wisdom leaks out because everyone's heads-down in their own bubble. AI just torched the cost of switching stacks, so staying fluent in only one CMS dialect isn't cozy anymore; it's a liability.