Running Clock - Laravel's AI Initiative with Ashley Hindle

Today I've got Ashley Hindel, the creator of Laravel Boost. This should be a lot of fun. Ashley, the clock starts now. [music] [cheering] What's the biggest misconception developers have when they first try AI in their workflow? Probably the biggest misconception is thinking that AI is skillless and you just type in the box and get what you want. But but that's not true. This is a skill that you develop that we need to embrace and practice and learn just like we did Git and new frameworks and TDD. I I think that's the correct answer. That makes sense. Do you think AI will ever replace code reviews or is this something sacred? Yes and yes, but not all code reviews. So code reviews are sacred and they're critically important, but AI will still replace many code reviews at some point. And OpenAI has just announced that their codeex tool is reviewing the vast majority of their PRs as a first pass. And so human intuition and taste will always be better here than AI, but often AI is good enough. So I think it will, but code reviews are still critically important and sacred and we shouldn't let it take over so easily. Uh, what's a task that you still prefer doing without AI? Probably new project setup. So I was starting lots of different projects and I don't trust AI to set up packages and composer and CI or test suites or libraries. [music] So I like to manually make sure it's the foundation is what I want and allow AI to work from there. I have only bad experiences letting AI do that initial setup. Good tip. Uh what's one thing that you have learned about Laravel by using boost? Yeah, probably the biggest thing recently is how to use the HTTP client effectively. And then randomly I'll learn about a new method in the collection or string or array helpers class that I didn't know was there cuz there's like a hundred of them that do things you don't know that you need. Um, so that's always cool when it's like did you know this exists and I didn't. And so yeah, probably those This thrilling episode of Running Clock is proudly brought to you by Lariccast. Yes, sir. [music] Yes, ma'am. It's the Rutinest Tutinis Laravel screencast this side of the information highway. And back to the show. All right, we're halfway through the time. Uh, what is an underrated way AI makes you faster? For me personally, probably decision making. I sometimes I get into decision paralysis of like there are so many ways to do things. What the hell do I do? And so it's nice for AI to present all the options to me and then I can just say okay let's do option three and move on pretty quickly. And so and because I know AI can do refactoring if it turns out I don't like that and I don't have to go through the pain of refactoring is much easier to just decide and move forward. So probably that nice. Uh what is one Laravel specific task AI still struggles with? In my experience, testing or Laravel specific testing patterns like feature versus unit, uh, refresh database, Q fake, carbon freeze, it just seems to ignore all of the nicities we have when I try to build tests. Um, but maybe that's a skill problem. Maybe I just need to be better. Um, what is your personal stance on Vibe coding? Vibe, don't do it. [laughter] Um, proper vibe coding, not looking at the code, just pushing it. 99.5% of the time it's wrong. For some of my side hacky projects, I will do it if it's never going to go anywhere and I'm only going to use it two or three [music] times. Um, but yeah, don't do it. Don't do it. We have 45 seconds left. What is your preferred large language model if any? Claude Sonic 4 right now for the vast majority of things and GPT5 when I'm working on the front end. Oo, nice tip. What does the future of Laravel boost look like? That's a tough one. More guidelines, broader ecosystem support. um more powerful MCP tools, better documentation search. There's more that I want to do, but I can't share those things just yet. And that's all the time we got. Uh thank you so much. You have done amazing. Thank you. Even if I'm talking, you should just stop it at 5 minutes. Like if I'm in the middle of an answer, it'd be great. Just black screen. Yeah.