Blog

I am not the only one who has seen the way they work change drastically over the last 6 months. This post is about how I have seen AI change the ability to generate ideas and code in my field, UX, and how I experience it both in positive and negative ways.

The pipe operator was a great addition in PHP 8.5. It brings the ergonomics of wrapper objects with the composability of standalone functions. Unfortunately, the standard array & string manipulation functions in PHP aren't exactly known for their API consistency, which makes the pipe operator awkward to use. Piper is an attempt to wrap the standard library to make it compatible with the pipe operator.

How I use AI skills in a real client project to speed up repetitive Laravel development. From Saloon request classes and DTOs to Livewire components and custom registrations.

A short experiment with the Caveman skill, which makes AI coding assistants respond in short caveman-like sentences. It did save some tokens, but less than expected.

I spent the large part of two days reviewing a front-end that was built almost entirely by AI for a real product. Short verdict: locally great, globally drifting. Here's how I did it, how I used AI to help me out, and the ruleset I came back with.

Most posts about AI coding are about generating code. This one's about pointing Claude at an existing codebase to read it. The tools, the prompts, and where AI got it right and wrong.

Not every problem or package is equal. As serial package builder, how do we make the decision between relying on an external library versus making the robots dance to build us exactly what we need?

Our postcard page felt a bit neglected and hadn't been updated for a while, so we decided to create Kaartje (/ˈkaːr.tʲə/), a digital version of our wall, during a company-wide hackathon.

We built a way to all listen to a shared queue on the speakers in our office, to once and for all answer the question: 'What the hell is this and who put it on'?

We turned our guidelines into AI skills that work with any coding assistant.

Introducing ourray.app, a shared cloud-based Ray instance where everyone's debugging output streams live on one dashboard. Install spatie/our-ray, prepend our() before your ray() calls, and your dumps are visible to the world.

Manually running seeders on a production server is error-prone and can cause downtime if it goes wrong. Seed data from migrations to stay in the deployment pipeline without manual intervention.

Native HTML/CSS features like dialog, the Popover API, CSS Anchor Positioning, and customizable selects are catching up to what libraries like shadcn and Radix provide. Here's what changed, what's possible now, and how it might reshape how we build frontend components at Spatie.

With multiple large, long-running Inertia apps in production we know what we like, don't like, and what works. It’s time to formalize our thoughts and decisions as we’re starting new projects and onboarding a few developers this year.

Where possible, we try to stick with the popular choice for our tools. There's a lot of value in sticking to defaults. We only stray away from them when we have a really good reason. In the case of Laravel (and Inertia), the popular choice would be Vue, but we've landed on React. Why? Story time!

We've converted our PHP and Laravel coding guidelines into AI-friendly instructions so Claude Code and other AI agents can generate code that matches our established programming style.

Laravel's toArray collection method might not return what you might expect.

Need to handle image uploads in your Laravel app? In this post, we start with the basics and level up step-by-step—from a simple form upload to full-blown image handling with resizing, optimization, and a slick drag & drop UI. Whether you're building something quick or scaling up, there’s a Spatie package (or two) that can help you out.