Pest 5 Released With Test Impact Analysis, Agent Verification, and Evals
Nuno Maduro announced Pest 5 at Laracon US 2026. The PHP testing framework adds test impact analysis, an agent plugin, evals, PHPStan, and Rector support.
Writing on software design, company building, and the aerospace industry.
All of my long-form thoughts on programming, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
Laravel AI SDK Adds Human-in-the-Loop Tool Approval
Announced at Laracon US 2026, the Laravel AI SDK's new human-in-the-loop API pauses an agent before it runs a sensitive tool so a person can approve, reject, or edit the tool call first.
CPX: The Composer Package Executor for PHP
cpx 2.0 is a full rewrite of the Composer package executor. It runs a command from any Composer package without adding it to your project, prefers the binaries your project already pins, and returns JSON when an AI agent is driving it.
Blade Formatting in Laravel Pint
Pint 1.30.0 adds a --blade flag that formats .blade.php files through Prettier, alongside fixes for --diff, --quiet, and a new in key for pint.json.
Queue-SQL: Run Mass Deletes and Updates Across Parallel Queue Jobs
Queue-SQL is a Laravel package that turns mass updates, deletes, and inserts into batches of parallel queued jobs.
Vocalizer: Local Text-to-Speech for PHP
Vocalizer is a native PHP extension for local speech synthesis, embedding sherpa-onnx and audio.cpp to run eight TTS model families — including Chatterbox voice cloning — behind one API.
Build a Laravel Scout Search Endpoint With the HTTP QUERY Method
Learn how to define a Laravel route that responds to the new HTTP QUERY method and use Laravel Scout's database driver to build a search API endpoint.
Enforce Per-Action Waiting Periods in Laravel with Cooldown
A Laravel package that enforces per-action, per-owner cooldown periods with a fluent API, an Eloquent trait, route middleware, atomic locking, and cache or database storage.
Laravel Legacy Bridge: Carry Authenticated Sessions from a Legacy App into Laravel
Laravel Legacy Bridge reads a legacy PHP session cookie, decodes the payload, and logs the matching user into Laravel, so users mid-migration don't hit a second login prompt.
First-Party Image Processing in Laravel 13.20
Laravel 13.20.0 introduces an Image facade for resizing, converting, and storing images, along with a WithoutMiddleware controller attribute, a separate Redis session prefix, and quiet bulk increment methods on Eloquent.