Tag: PHP

If you've used Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI coding assistant recently, you've probably noticed they're getting better at doing things, not just generating text. The bridge that makes this possible is MCP: the Model Context Protocol. I've built two MCP servers that I use daily. One manages the blog you're reading right now. The other is a personal knowledge base called Acervo. Both are Laravel apps, and both let me manage content directly from Claude Code without ever opening a browser.

Claude Code is already fast. Point it at a Laravel project and it can read files, run tests, execute commands. But it's working blind. It doesn't know your routes, your database schema, or what's in your logs until it goes digging through files. That's where Laravel Boost comes in. Boost exposes your Laravel application's internals as MCP tools. Routes, models, schema, logs, tinker, all available to Claude Code without it having to parse files or guess. The difference is immediate: instead of Claude Code grep-ing through your route files, it just knows your routes. If you haven't read it yet, my post on What is Laravel Boost and Why Every Laravel Dev Needs It covers what Boost does and why it matters. This post focuses on the hands-on setup with Claude Code.

Every Laravel app has opinions. Naming conventions, custom casts, query scopes, validation patterns, how you structure form requests. All of it adds up to a codebase that works a certain way. Ask an AI to generate code for your app without that context and you get textbook Laravel that compiles but doesn't belong. The generated controller uses $request->all() instead of your form request classes. The migration uses string where you always use an enum cast. The query builds raw joins instead of using your custom scopes. It's technically correct and practically useless.

Your AI assistant knows Laravel. It doesn't know your Laravel app. That's the gap Laravel Boost fills.

Laravel 13 dropped on March 17, 2026. If you read my What's New in Laravel 13 post, you already know the full changelog. This post isn't about that. This post is about the signal Laravel 13 sends: Laravel is now an AI-first framework, and it's not even subtle about it.

Laravel 13 dropped with zero breaking changes and a heavy focus on AI tooling. The upgrade from 12 is smooth, but the new features are worth paying attention to, especially if you're building anything that touches AI, APIs, or search.

Handling null values in PHP can be a pain. We've all seen (or written) code that’s riddled with if checks just to deal with null. But what if I told you there’s a cleaner way? Enter the Null Object Pattern, a simple yet effective solution for avoiding unnecessary checks while keeping your code easy to read and maintain. Let me show you how it works.

Let’s rewind to 2020. PHP 8.0 lands, and developers get their hands on something they’d been craving for years: attributes. Think of them as PHP’s version of annotations—a way to embed metadata directly into your code. No more juggling bulky docblocks or fragile YAML files. Now you can keep things simple and readable.

Traits are a powerful feature in PHP, introduced in PHP 5.4, that allows developers to reuse code across different classes independently of class hierarchies. They serve as a mechanism for horizontal code reuse, helping to avoid issues related to multiple inheritance and allowing for a more modular and maintainable codebase. This blog article will explore the ideal scenarios for using traits, provide examples, and offer best practices, including how to organize traits within a project.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives AI agents a structured way to call tools, read resources, and take actions in external systems. If you have a Laravel app, you can build an MCP server that lets agents interact with your application (creating content, querying data, triggering workflows) through a well-defined interface you control. This isn't theoretical. I've built MCP servers for production Laravel apps. Here's what I've learned.

Laravel's AI SDK (the prism package from EchoLabs) gives you a clean, framework-native way to work with LLMs, embeddings, and vector stores. No raw HTTP calls, no third-party wrapper chaos. Here's how the pieces fit together.

Laravel's AI SDK (formerly Prism) gives you a single interface to work with multiple LLM providers. You write your code once, swap providers through config, and add fallbacks for when things go wrong. Here's how it works in practice and where each provider shines.

Laravel AI SDK (formerly Prism) ships with a first-class agent abstraction. An agent is an LLM-powered loop: it receives a prompt, decides which tools to call, processes the results, and repeats until it has a final answer. Unlike a single generate() call, agents maintain context across multiple steps and can take actions autonomously. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Laravel shipped its first-party AI SDK in February 2026. After months of community packages filling the gap, laravel/ai landed as the official way to work with LLMs, speech synthesis, and structured outputs, all with the ergonomics you'd expect from a Laravel package. It matured alongside Laravel 13 and is now stable. Here's what you need to know to start using it.