How a slow dependency becomes an outage, and how deadlines, concurrency limits, retry budgets, and jitter protect useful work. A practical deep dive with PHP examples and a controlled overload test design. Read more
Ryan Chandler makes a strong case for keeping PR descriptions human-written, even when agents handle most of the implementation. The piece focuses on ownership, review context, and why a concise explanation from the person driving the change is more useful than a long AI-generated summary. Read more
A clear overview of PHP 8.6's readonly property defaults RFC, why the old restriction existed, and why interface properties made it worth revisiting. It also covers the practical edge cases, so you know where the new syntax helps and where it still does not. Read more
A clear walkthrough of Laravel's Context feature and how it lets execution-scoped information travel through your app. It also explains why that matters for logging, queued jobs, and keeping trace data available without threading it through every method call. Read more
A practical engineering write-up on moving Pinkary from Laravel Forge to Laravel Cloud. It walks through the real migration issues they hit, including SQLite to MySQL differences, query rewrites, and storage assumptions in the codebase. Read more
I've been writing about There There a lot lately. It's a helpdesk we're building at Spatie, born from two decades of running our own customer support for our open source work and SaaS apps. After all that time being the customer of other helpdesks, we finally started on the one we actually wanted to use. Our take on AI here is to aim it at the support agent, not the customer. The human owns the conversation. The model makes the reply a little cleaner and a little faster. There There is in…
Over the past few weeks I've posted a couple of times about There There, the helpdesk we're building at Spatie. After two decades of running our own customer support, we decided to stop compromising on tools and build the one we actually want to use. A lot of the fun is on the AI side. We're not using it to replace support agents, we're using it to make them faster. The human reads the ticket, thinks, and clicks a button. The model pulls up relevant history, drafts a reply, tags the ticket,…
At Spatie we build SaaS apps with Laravel on the backend and Inertia with React on the frontend. That split means two type systems have to agree about every payload that crosses between them. Laravel data going out, TypeScript picking it up. There There, the helpdesk we're building, is built exactly like that. Tickets, messages, members, custom sidebar sections, all of it crosses the bridge. We'd go insane maintaining those types by hand. So we don't. There There is in private beta right now,…
There There, the helpdesk we're building at Spatie, is a project of learned habits. Twenty-some years of writing Laravel apps has taught us which patterns pay off and which ones quietly rot. One that keeps earning its keep is a custom exception class for every domain error. This is a small pattern, but it's one of those things that makes a codebase nicer to live in. There There is in private beta right now, and you can apply for early access at there-there.app. Exceptions that explain…
A couple of posts back I walked through the agent and tools we built on top of the Laravel AI SDK for There There, the helpdesk we're putting together at Spatie. I ended that post on a small cliffhanger. We hand the agent off to a streaming service that turns the SDK's response stream into events the frontend can consume. That's this post. A quick reminder on our angle. After two decades of running our own customer support, we wanted a helpdesk where AI makes support agents faster, not one that…
A practical post on hardening Laravel projects against destructive AI agent behavior. It walks through the PocketOS incident and shows concrete safeguards like deny rules, credential isolation, and production guardrails. Read more
A video by the Syntax team on why they're using GPUI across more and more of their work. It offers a practical look at what makes GPUI appealing for modern tooling.
A short video by Justin Jackson on ambition, motivation, and the question of how much you really want something. It looks like a thoughtful prompt for anyone building or creating over the long term.
A look back at Packagist's first 15 years, from the first Composer experiments to more than 200 billion package installs. It also covers the team's recent supply chain security work and what they're building next. Read more
Recently I wrote about how we use Jev in There There to detect spam, bounces, and automatic replies. Jev reads an incoming email and answers questions we define up front. We keep the probabilities and decide in our own code what counts as a match. The cheap checks on mail headers still run first. That post ended with a promise that we'd find more uses for Jev. Here are two we have since added to There There: smart conditions for workflows, and automatic assignment to a team or person.…