How Will LLMs Transform Us? AI as a Tool in the Future of Development AI is a tool. Revolutionary. Generational. But a tool nonetheless. And a tool is only as effective as a human is at using it. We’ve been learning to use AI as a tool for a while now, and we’re even.....

We're wrapping up our five-part AI series with a look into the future.

What's the future of AI? The future of AI-assisted development? The future of our humanity, in a world where AI is everywhere?

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How to Expertly Use LLMs in Development Workflows Imagine: You’re about to board a commercial flight. Directly ahead of you in line, you learn, is the person who engineered this very model of plane. It’s equipped with state-of-the-art technology!, th...

Most advice about using AI in your dev workflows comes down to specific tools. Which agent? Do you wiggum?

Let's slow down a bit, and talk about the difference between vibe coding and agentic coding, and what a healthy integration of AI looks like.

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Why Developers Should – and Shouldn’t – Use LLMs in Our Development “Why should I use AI?” Ask our AI pundits this question, and you’ll get the same answer (with drastically...

We all know some folks who only consider reasons *not* to use AI, and others who can't consider any reasons *to* use AI.

In the third post in our AI series, we talk about reasons devs *should* and *shouldn't* add AI as a part of their dev workflows.

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What Even Is “AI”? Defining Key Terms in Plain Language You might be wondering, “How are we three years into the hype and still asking something as basic as ‘What even is AI?’” Well, as we established in the...

We talk about "AI" casually, assuming it means the same thing to everyone. But it doesn't.

Did you know "Artificial Intelligence" was originally just a marketing term?

In the second post in our AI series, we talk about definition of common AI terms.

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A Pragmatic Look at AI and LLMs in Software Development Workflows By now, every dev (and business leader) feels some type of way about AI. How could we not? Every time you open the news, listen to a podcast, or visit your favorite social media site, you're hearing....

Have you ever stopped to think what we mean when we say "AI", how to use it *well* in development workflows, or what motivates us to use them or not use them?

We paused for a moment, stepped back, examined, and wrote up some thoughts you might enjoy.

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Under the Hood: How Blaze Speeds Up Blade Templates If you attended Laracon US this year, or if you're big into Livewire, you might already have heard about Blaze. Blaze is a new drop-in package...

You may have heard of Blaze, the new tool from the Laravel Livewire team that speeds up Blade.

But did you know how it works? From folding to function compilation, we break down its optimization strategies, and even build a mini version to understand it.

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Chat with Your Documents: A Practical Guide to RAG Using the New Laravel AI SDK Have you ever wished you could just ask your documents a question and get an answer? That's exactly what RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) lets you do. It's the technique behind those AI chatbots.....

Want to use AI to chat with your own documents? At scale, it’s harder than it sounds.

Join @nicodevs.bsky.social to build a chatbot using the new Laravel AI SDK, Postgres, and Livewire 4 🤖

Learn RAG and semantic search from scratch 👇

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Introduction to Delegated Types What if you could build richer hierarchies, add shared behavior across models, and make your data immutable while retaining historical data—all without Event Sourcing or graph databases? Delegated Typ...

Polymorphic relations are great, but complexity grows with each shared behavior. Delegated types flip this on its head, building a first-class entity for shared behavior!

Fewer entry points, less repetition, cleaner design.

@tonysm.com wrote about it here: tighten.com/insights/del...

New in Parental v1.5.0: Becoming, Integers, and Eager-Loading Parental v1.5.0 introduces three new features for Single Table Inheritance in Laravel: types can now transition to other types with the become() method, you can use integer columns instead of strings,...

Parental, our Single-Table-Inheritance package, has a new release: v1.5.0! 👇
• Models can now transition from one child type to another, with become()
• You can store child type as integers instead of strings
• Eager loading children is even easier than ever

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Build an AI-Powered Drawing Guessing Game with Laravel, Prism, and HTML Canvas AI is everywhere. It can create songs, build entire apps, and even drive our cars. But... can it play Pictionary? We're about to find out. Today, we're building an AI-powered drawing guessing game. I...

Is AI good at Pictionary?

In our latest post, we build a Laravel app to test—using Prism by @tjmiller.bsky.social to connect with our AI provider in a snap.

And it supports images, too! We'll capture an image using HTML canvas and then send it off to the AI.

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Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel Imagine your team wants to bring AI into their workflow to automate routine tasks, extract insights from data, assist with content creation, or improve customer support. Smart move! You can integrate...

Do you need AI in your app but can’t share private data with AI providers?

You can self host and run models on your own servers thanks to Ollama 🦙

Join @nicodevs.bsky.social set it up & integrate it with your Laravel app, building a chat for super spies (TOP SECRET!) 👇

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Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel Imagine your team wants to bring AI into their workflow to automate routine tasks, extract insights from data, assist with content creation, or improve customer support. Smart move! You can integrate...

tighten.com/insights/bui...

17 New(ish) Vanilla JavaScript Features You Might Have Missed JavaScript: the language many love to hate. Yeah, we've all seen the memes about its quirks and limitations. Maybe that's why we slap a whole typing system on top of it. And add one, two, or... ten th...

Every year, JavaScript brings new features that save us from relying on heavy libraries. From formatting dates to cloning objects, discover some of these handy additions in today's article.👇

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Let AI Interact with Your App via MCP Do you remember your first interaction with a computer? Perhaps it was through a command-line interface, where typing commands allowed the machine to perform the desired actions. A few years later, gr...

If you want AI agents to be able to interact with your Laravel app, but you're not sure where to start, check out @mateusjunges.com’ post around the magic and efficiency of adding an MCP to your Laravel app today. 👇

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Submissions are open only to in-person attendees of Laracon, and all submissions are due by Tuesday night, 11:59 MDT.

Voting opens to *everyone* noon MDT on Tuesday, and closes 4pm MDT on Wednesday.

Tighten Laracon 2025 Game Jam Vibe code your way to the high score!

🎮 Get your game on, Laracon US attendees!

Play the @tighten.com Laracon 2025 Game Jam
game.tighten.com

Vibe code your way to the high score, and 🏆 win a Nintendo Switch 2! 🏆

Introducing Rich Text Laravel - Part 2: User Mentions With Content Attachments In our previous Rich Text post, we implemented file attachments using the Rich Text Laravel package, but we've only touched...

Today on the blog, @tonysm.com continues the Rich Text Laravel series and demonstrates how flexible Content Attachments are! We can embed pretty much anything to our rich text documents!

Click the link below:👇
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10 Efficient (and Fun) Ways to Seed Your Database Seeders allow us to quickly fill our database with records to test our application. Let's say that you need a couple of users to test your authentication system—you could create them manually using yo...

There's not just one way to seed your Laravel apps.

Check out our latest article to learn:

✅ How to import thousands of records from CSV
✅ How to use AI to seed realistic data
✅ How to create interactive seeders

...and more!

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Five Practical Tips to Improve Search in Laravel Apps With Typesense Typesense is making waves in the search landscape. Since its inclusion as an officially supported driver for Laravel Scout,...

In today's article, discover 5 tips to build better full-text searches:

✅ Sort records
✅ Use filters effectively
✅ Tweak typo tolerance
✅ Access the raw Typesense response
✅ Use facets for better filtering

Click the link below 👇

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Introducing Rich Text Laravel: A package to integrate Trix into Laravel applications When we build forms for an application, it's common to need a field where a plain textarea isn't enough. So how do we proceed? We could process it on the backend and treat the input as Markdown, but t...

Tired of fighting your WYSIWYG editor?

Today on the blog, @tonysm.com shows you how to integrate the Trix editor into your new and existing Laravel applications.

Learn about the basics, how to customize it, how to migrate, and how to attach files.

tighten.com/insights/ric...

Filament Crash-Course: Create a Customizable Admin Panel in Minutes In most applications, administrators need a way to manage data. Whether it's a blog's articles and comments, a store's products and orders, or a theater's events and tickets, admins need a place to li...

🚀 Filament helps you create a customizable admin panel in minutes.

Join @nicodevs.bsky.social to learn how to:

✨ Install Filament in Laravel
⚡ Generate admin panels from Models
💅 Use rich text editors, tag inputs, & uploaders
🔍 Add filters & actions

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New: Install Takeout with Docker Takeout is a convenient layer on top of Docker that lets you quickly spin up services without looking up the images and how to run them. Need a Redis service locally?...

For a few years, Takeout has been the best way to spin up local development services--MySQL, ClickHouse, Minio, and more--for PHP developers.

With today's release, you no longer need PHP to use Takeout!

Take a look at the our writeup to learn more:

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Getting Started with Twill, an Open Source Laravel-Based CMS Learn how companies like OpenAI, The New York Times, Pentagram, and the Art Institute of Chicago manage their brand identity when publishing content online.

Ready to level up your content game? 🚀

Discover the magic of Twill, the open-source Laravel CMS behind top brands like OpenAI, The New York Times, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Our latest article explores how easy and fun managing your site’s content can be!

tighten.com/insights/get...

Matt Stauffer - What to do after `laravel new` - Laracon AU 2024 YouTube video by Laracon AU

For those who didn't catch it live, my talk, "What to do after `laravel new`" from @LaraconAU, is now live on YouTube!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4Q...

In it, I walk through the steps you should take on every Laravel app; as the king of "it depends", it takes a lot for me to say that!

Hey friends! We're happy to be here (a little late, but that way we missed weird early-days stuff like Sexy Alf, phew)! 👋

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New @tighten.com ad?