Hi everyone,
We've had a lot of submissions from our readers this week. We have a curated showcase of 69 PHP features (PHP 5.4 → 8.5) that make modern PHP genuinely great to write, and an article that urges you to stop Wasting 89% of Your AI Agent's Tokens on CLI Noise. Do check them out in our Reading section. We also have guides for Checking AI-Generated Images in PHP, How to make Laravel asynchronous, and A Deep Dive into Symfony TUI. Finally in Podcasts, we have new episodes from No Compromises, and they chat about When weird code needs to explain itself, The guys from Laravel News discuss, Laravel 13, Native PHP 3.1, and ingesting data, while PHP Architect cover AI tool challenges, PHP Foundation updates, Unicode adventures, and more.
We have all that and more, so we do hope you enjoy this week's newsletter. If you have an article, tutorial or podcast that you would like to be featured in our newsletter, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
All the best,
Adrian
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Articles
From Arrays to GPU — how the PHP ecosystem is moving toward real ML
Why PHP arrays are a poor fit for math, how Tensor and NDArray emerged, and why RubixML eventually moved toward GPU.
Your AI Agent Is Only as Smart as the Tools You Give It
I've been building with the Laravel AI SDK since it dropped, and one thing became clear fast: the agent itself is not the hard part. The tools are. Let me explain what I mean.
Exploring the Symfony Tui component
I had seen the Symfony Tui component announcement, but I just got the time to start to explore it.
Structuring a Laravel Project with Repositories and Services (Without Over-Engineering)
A while ago, I wrote about using repositories and services in Laravel. At the time, the goal was simple: keep controllers cleaner and move logic to dedicated layers. I still agree with that idea. But with more experience, I would structure that article differently today.
Laravel AI Middleware: Token Tracking & Rate Limiting
Integrating Claude or GPT-4o into a Laravel app is deceptively easy. One Http::post() and you feel like a genius. Then a single user loops your endpoint, or a bot scripts it, and your OpenAI bill climbs $300 before you wake up. The answer is a dedicated Laravel AI middleware layer, and most tutorials skip it entirely.
I Studied the etcd Codebase — and It Changed How I Write PHP
There’s a common piece of advice: “Want to write better code? Read good code.” Sounds obvious. Rarely practiced.
The audit that started everything: how Waaseyaa designed an invariant-driven architectural review
This is Part 1 of the Waaseyaa Governance series. It covers how Waaseyaa — a PHP framework monorepo of 52 packages — ran a formal invariant-driven architectural audit, what it found across five concern passes, and how Milestone 2 turned those findings into the eight-milestone remediation program covered in Part 2.
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Tutorials and Talks
Build an AI Chat Agent with Laravel 12, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, and Voyage AI
I had a problem last week. I was staring at the sample_airbnb dataset in my MongoDB Atlas cluster -over 5,500 listings across dozens of cities - and I wanted a way to search it that didn't feel like 2015. Not dropdowns. Not filter checkboxes. Not WHERE property_type = 'Apartment' AND bedrooms >= 2.
How to Take a Website Screenshot with PHP
PHP still powers a lot of real-world web applications, so screenshot generation fits naturally into CMS plugins, monitoring tools, and link preview workflows. This Dev.to version keeps the original examples intact while tightening the framing for developers who want a straightforward API-based approach.
Remember when server-side rendering was just rendering?
This post walks through how the rendering pipeline works: from request to HTML, with the entity renderer, field formatters, and theme chain loader that make it more than echo statements in a .php file.
Demystifying WordPress Plugin License Activation: A Step-by-Step Client-Server Guide
We'll explore how modern payment and license key generation platforms (like Lemon Squeezy or Easy Digital Downloads) integrate with custom license hubs.
Next-Gen CLI Apps in PHP: A Deep Dive into Symfony TUI
For over a decade, PHP developers have relied on the symfony/console component as the gold standard for building CLI applications. It gave us beautifully formatted output, robust input validation and progress bars. But fundamentally, the paradigm remained the same: Immediate Mode.
How to make Laravel asynchronous?
Let’s take a look at how many changes are needed to adapt the core packages, and how the entire framework could potentially be made asynchronous.
Longest common substring — DIY on PHP
Much have been written about this, and the optimal solution is presented as searching through a “suffix tree”. But setting up a suffix tree is daunting. And then I do not see how this is going to help with strings in the order of 100k characters.
How to Detect Data Leaks with AI in PHP
There’s a lot AI does poorly, and a lot AI does really well. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) falls in the latter category.
How to Check for AI-Generated Images in PHP
Think that picture might be AI? There’s a decent chance you’re right. There’s only one way to know for sure, however. |
News and Announcements
PhpStorm 2026.1 is Now Out
Welcome to PhpStorm 2026.1! This release brings new PhpStorm MCP tools, new third-party agents inside your IDE, support for Git worktrees, and lots of other productivity-enhancing features for PHP and Laravel developers.
JSON Alexander Gives Developers a Simpler, More Trustworthy Way to View JSON in the Browser
Wes Bos has released JSON Alexander, a lightweight browser extension designed to make browsing JSON files easier and more pleasant.
Matt Stauffer Joins the PHP Foundation Board — What It Means for Laravel
Matt Stauffer has a lot on his plate. He runs Tighten, he's an open source contributor, and he wrote Laravel Up and Running. Now he can add one more thing to that list: board member of the PHP Foundation.
UnitTest Attribute and More in Laravel 13.3.0
This release introduces a #[UnitTest] PHP attribute for skipping framework boot on individual test methods, variadic support for model attributes like #[Fillable] and #[Hidden], a new BatchStarted event in the job batching lifecycle, and more.
Symfony 8.0.8, 7.4.8 & 6.4.36 released
Read the Symfony upgrade guide to learn more about upgrading Symfony and use the SymfonyInsight upgrade reports to detect the code you will need to change in your project.
March 30 – April 5, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1005
This week, Symfony maintenance versions 6.4.36, 7.4.8, and 8.0.8 were released. Meanwhile, development activity focused on fixing misc. bugs in maintained versions. Lastly, we called for volunteers for the SymfonyLive Berlin 2026 conference.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
Laravel News: Laravel 13, Native PHP 3.1, and ingesting data
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.
The Stack Overflow: Seizing the means of messenger production
Ryan sits down with Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, to chat about calm computing and how humans can take back ownership of their data and digital world.
No Compromises Podcast: When weird code needs to explain itself
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss what happened when Aaron reviewed Joel's code and couldn't make sense of a pattern spread across multiple Livewire components.
Maintainable Podcast: Russ Olsen: The Hidden Cost of Forgetting Why the Code Looks Like That
In this episode of Maintainable, Robby Russell talks with Russ Olsen about trade-offs, legacy systems, and why maintainability depends on context more than dogma.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 714: Costa Alexoglou on Remote Pair Programming
Costa Alexoglou, co-founder of the open source Hopp pair-programming application, talks with host Brijesh Ammanath about remote pair programming.
Shoptalk Show: Slopforking a CMS, Apple Browser Feedback, and Custom Theme CSS
Dave's plan for when AI finally takes his job, going to the movies in 2026, Chris & Dave chat with Apple about the state of browsers, Dave has a way of setting a theme with a custom space property, and Cloudflare slopforks a CMS.
WP Builds: 462 – Debating AI’s impact with Jamie Marsland: content, creativity, slop and the future of WordPress
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley and Jamie Marsland debate the impacts of AI on WordPress and broader society – spoiler alert: Nathan wins!! ;-). Jamie shares insights on the new Claude WordPress.com integration, highlighting AI’s growing contextual awareness and its effect on website creation, content, and business strategy.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.04.02
In this special episode, Joe Ferguson and Sara Golemon step in as guest hosts while Eric recovers from illness and John is busy in Discord. They cover AI tool challenges, PHP Foundation updates, Unicode adventures, infrastructure work, and the eternal debate about when (and when not) to use AI.
Mostly Technical: 126: Scope Explosion
Ian and Aaron talk about why neither of them shipped this past week, how to surface features in an application, tweets going viral....oh, and they're starting a new podcast. Welcome to Token Town.
Syntax: It’s Been A Hell Of Week
Scott and Wes break down a chaotic week in dev news — the Claude Code source leak, a nasty Axios npm supply chain hack, and Railway's private cache exposure — plus how to keep these nightmare scenarios from hitting your own projects.
The Changelog: Astral has been acquired by OpenAI
Astral is joining OpenAI, which says a lot about where the center of gravity is moving for developer tools, LiteLLM got hit by a nasty supply-chain attack, and OpenCode blew up as the latest serious open source swing at the coding-agent stack.
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haphpiness - These are things in PHP which make me genuinely_happy
A curated showcase of 69 PHP features (PHP 5.4 → 8.5) that make modern PHP genuinely great to write — named arguments, enums, fibers, property hooks, pattern matching, and more. Each entry has code examples, significance notes, and ecosystem data.
Stop Wasting 89% of Your AI Agent's Tokens on CLI Noise
AI coding agents - Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf - run your CLI tools and feed the output back into the LLM context window. The problem: most CLI tools were built for humans staring at terminals, not for machines parsing results.
Calling OpenAI from a PHP framework the same way you query Redis or Memcache
Temma is a PHP MVC framework designed to be easy to pick up and use. It sits between micro-frameworks (too bare) and full-stack ones (too heavy), and tries to get out of your way as much as possible.
Why We Chose a Custom Laravel eCommerce Build Over Shopify (And What It Actually Cost Us)
We didn't start with Laravel. While the majority of teams launch using Shopify, it’s a fast way to get up and running with payment processing; we hit $100K in revenue very quickly with zero infrastructure headaches. For an early-stage store, that's genuinely the right call.
Clean Code in Laravel: Implementing the Service Pattern for Scalable SaaS
As full-stack developers building complex industrial platforms or scalable B2B applications at Smart Tech Devs, we inevitably face the problem of logic bloat. In a typical Laravel application, developers often start small, placing database interaction, validation logic, external API calls, and business logic directly inside the Controller's store() or update() methods.
Escaping the SaaS Trap: Regaining Digital Asset Ownership with Custom WordPress Architectures
We’ve all been there. You pitch an enterprise SaaS platform like Contentful atau Shopify Plus to a B2B client. The promise is enticing: speed to market, zero server maintenance, and an intuitive UI. It works beautifully, until the scale happens.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
theiconic/php-ga-measurement-protocol
Send data to Google Analytics from the server using PHP. This library fully implements GA measurement protocol.
nvms/zphp
The goal for zphp is to be a high-performance drop-in replacement for PHP, with additional language enhancements sprinkled on top (like built-in WebSocket support), while maintaining ongoing feature compat with the language over time.
php-code-archeology/php-code-archeology
Static analyzer for PHP project archeology. Calculates various metrics for your codebase.
laravel-lang/common
Easily connect the necessary language packs to the application.
easyrdf/easyrdf
EasyRdf is a PHP library designed to make it easy to consume and produce RDF.
prestashop/header-stamp
Rewrite your file headers to add the license or to make them up-to-date.
phpgt/propfunc
Property accessor and mutator functions.
friendsofsymfony/ckeditor-bundle
Provides a CKEditor integration for your Symfony project.
jfcherng/php-sequence-matcher
A longest sequence matcher. The logic is primarily based on the Python difflib package.
jbroadway/urlify
A fast PHP slug generator and transliteration library that converts non-ascii characters for use in URLs.
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Jobs
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