Articles, notes and updates on the agent, the tools, and the craft of building software with AI.
Benchmarking Askr against FrankenPHP, PHP-FPM, and RoadRunner — the confound that nearly fooled me, and the one metric that rewrote the roadmap.
How Askr — a Rust application server that embeds PHP in-process — became the most efficient way I know to run Laravel: no FPM, no nginx, no Redis, no certbot. Just one binary.
Askr 0.3.0 — a response cache with a kill switch, a Reverb you didn't install, workers that breed under load, and a test runner that boots once. A builder's tour.
Why I embedded PHP inside a Rust web server, how it works, and what I learned making Laravel boot once and serve forever.
Why we built a full database workbench into the editor, and how it feels to use it. Staged edits, environment-aware safety rails, and a slow query turned into a migration in three clicks.
e 0.6.7 ships a real step debugger — breakpoints, a live call stack, and inspectable variables — built to feel like it was always part of the editor.
Grove 0.2.9 turns Xdebug step-debugging into a single toggle — trigger mode, no php.ini edits, editor listening on port 9003. Plus an honest account of why fully-static PHP can't be debugged, and what to do about it.
How e 0.6.5 closed the last gaps with Laravel Idea — and why reading your live database lets a from-scratch editor quietly step past it.
On the quiet gaps in a modern Laravel app — between PHP and JavaScript, between a class and its template, between "it worked in dev" and "why is this slow" — and how this release fills them.
There are three sources of truth in a Laravel app — your code, your migrations, and the live database — and they drift apart silently. e 0.6.3 is about seeing all three at once: an Eloquent relationship graph that flags missing foreign keys, a security lens on your routes, and a Pest test written straight from a replay.