Laravel 12.54, weekly updates and tip

Laravel 12.54

Some nice additions in this week's release of Laravel 12.54. Here are the highlights:

  • Add assertions for BinaryFileResponse in #59018
  • Add tsvector column type for PostgreSQL in #59004
  • Display oldest pending job for queue:monitor in #59073
  • Fix migrate:fresh error when database does not exist in #59113
  • Add interval() to InteractsWithData in #59114
  • Improved HTML test helpers in #59140
  • Add Model::withoutRelation() for selective relation unloading in #59137
  • Load custom markdown extensions for mail in #59051

You may review the full branch diff on GitHub for a complete list of changes.

Weekly Journal

Last week, I had a queue issue. It was a bit of a frog in a pot situation. Over the course of a few days I got one or two Horizon errors. Then an error related to a Mailcoach stats job. Then someone said they didn't receive their Docker token email. All seemed unrelated, and not unexpected from time to time.

After another user said they did not receive an email, I realized the underlying cause for all these was my internal queue worker was not running. Apparently it was a memory issue. While I have not changed the server or its configuration, Horizon suddenly needed a bit more memory to boot (no pun).

I ended last week with a Refactor Friday. I haven't done one in a while. Essentially I go through all open issues for Shift and fix (or close) as many as possible in the workday. With AI's help, I got quite a lot done. I wanted to do this before the Laravel 13 release as I'll need to focus on supporting it in the coming weeks.

Today I added a bit more automation to the Laravel 13.x Shift. Namely refactoring to the new #[Middleware] attribute. The pre-release has had a few runs and I'm looking forward to adding more automation as the Upgrade Guide takes shape.

With the rest of this week I'll make sure laravelshift.com is ready for release so all I need to do is set a few DB column values.

Weekly Tip

I've upped my AI game in 2026. I was really only using AI for one-off, mundane tasks last year. But I've incrementally ramped up to having it write a majority of my code.

A few weeks ago, I felt something. I couldn't quite articulate the feeling. Then this video appeared in my feed. It perfectly explained what I felt - AI has made me lazy.

I notice that I don't focus on a problem as well. I thought I was tired. I thought maybe I'm just getting older. But it was more than that. It's like my brain knew, AI can do that. So it didn't want to perform.

It happened again today. I spent 2 hours this morning on a final Refactor Friday change. It was deep in code. Took a lot of focus to diagnose. Eventually, I figured it out and had a plan to solve it. But I stopped, undid my progress, and just gave AI the failing test case I started with. It solved it in 5 minutes and 7 seconds. More or less the same way I planned, but in a faction of the time.

So, AI is awesome. It's definitely a multiplier. Or, at the least, an efficient tool. But, ironically, it's made me less efficient.

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