Laravel 13.16, weekly updates and tip

Laravel 13.16

Several new features, with a fast patch release brings us to Laravel 13.16.1. Here are the highlights:

  • Add artisan dev command in #60412
  • Add array maintenance mode driver for parallel testing in #60489
  • Allow RouteParameter to use the attributed parameter name in #60465
  • Support Queue attributes on traits in #60519
  • Add anyOf support to JSON schema in #60509
  • Add whenFilledEnum method to InteractsWithData in #60486
  • Add withCookies method to ResponseTrait in #60503

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

Weekly Journal

Last week I completed a quick Human Shift upgrading a Laravel 11 application to Laravel 13. This gave the chance to dogfood and tweak the Shift AI skills. Again, as always, using my own services gives me so much insight (more below).

Outside of that, I officially launched retrajectory. This blends two of my passions: coding and investing. retrajectory provides an AI-backed assessment of your retirement portfolio to help you understand whether you're on track to meet your retirement goals. You can watch me launch and demo in last week's livestream, or read the full story on X.

This week I'm returning my focus to Shift. Specifically increasing its AI integration to automate even more of the process. After doing the Human Shift, I realized Shift + AI is the way to upgrade. So I'm want to explore some kind of add-on.

Weekly Tip

I mentioned assimilating packages before as a tip. Just today, I had Claude replace my client wrapper packages with direct API calls.

On the surface, this might sound a bit nuts. But it greatly reduces my dependency footprint. Fewer packages means less maintenance, fewer version conflicts, and a smaller security surface area.

Client wrappers can often be generic too. They cover the common cases, but nuanced options often get left out. With direct API calls, I have full control.

In the end, this is a super easy and highly deterministic task for AI. APIs are well documented, so Claude can read the docs and write the calls confidently. And in this case, I also guided it to use the Laravel's HTTP Client, making it even easier to test.

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