I Tried NEW laravel-best-practices Official Skill on Two Projects

Hello guys, this week Taylor Otwell tweeted that they released a new skill Laravel best practices inside of Laravel boost. And in this video I will try it out in two cases. First I will try with totally fresh Laravel project for new prompt and then I will try to review a bit older codebase with the same skill. Does it violate any Laravel best practices? And we'll see what's inside of that skill in general. So first if you're doing Laravel new now you will get that skill by default if you install Laravel boost. So if you do want to have Laravel boost like this. So if you choose yes it will come with the skill Laravel best practices automatically. So there we go boost configuration as a part of Laravel install and we have fortify to check and we can choose those idees and here you can see in the skills list this one. So some of the skills come depending on your text stack. So for example, FlexUI and LiveWire come because I specifically chose Livewire Starter Kit, but Laravel best practices is probably universal for all Laravel projects. And we're ready to prompt. And I've launched Cloud Code and pasted one of the prompts from my testing demo projects and see what happens. It's just for creating a few cruds. It doesn't really matter what's inside that much. See the skills. So after roughly a minute of exploring the project structure with Laravel boost see the skill automatically loading Laravel best practices and then everything that comes afterwards would be consulted with that Laravel best practices skill and after this prompt is done I will actually ask cloud code which parts of that skill did it use meanwhile we can take a look what's inside of that skill. We can go to agent skills and we have Laravel best practices and the main skill MD looks like this. The interesting part when it is activated. So apply this skill whenever writing Laravel code basically probably with every prompt which may be a problem if you want to optimize on some context but that skill doesn't take much context in my experience and probably using best practice a skill is enough reason to have that in the context. So what are those best practices? The main skill MD is actually a reference to the rules files that are inside quite a lot of them. So there are rules about database performance, advanced queries, security, caching, eloquent validation and so on. In total 189 points and also a few guidelines at the end how the agent should apply those rules. Now let's see how our prompt is doing. So 3 minutes in almost 4 minutes is still generating migrations. It's quite a heavy prompt actually intentionally to generate pretty much all the crud structure for typical Laravel controllers touching on resources and models and relationships. So a lot of those things are kind of touching the best practices. So let's wait for it to finish and then we'll see what skills did it actually use. And it is done in 8 minutes. So that's why I told you it was pretty heavy prompt with a lot of files to generate. And now let's ask claude code this. So not sure if you're doing that but you can ask questions based on previous prompt. How did it go? What did it use? What skills? What MCPS and stuff like that in free human language. So what parts did you use from Laravel best practices skill? And cloud code will analyze the flow of the prompt and will answer. I hoped. It's so ironic to get that message in the middle of the video. Overloaded error. So cloud code has some down times pretty regularly these days. And look at that. It took only three times to refresh for 3 minutes and it actually worked. So cloud code is back. So what were actually used? What the rules and the skills? So in migrations it used these rules. So for example unique index and cascade on delete and one concerned per migration. So separate migrations. Then in routing it used route resource. It used form request. It used route model binding and so on. Also eager loading also convention and styles and testing patterns. So basically Laravel best practices skill gets through pretty much all the code base that you generate. But also as another example, you can use that skill not only in the new project but in the existing project. For example, I have this project for accountants and reservations of their services which I created or vibe coded rather in Laravel 12 then upgraded to Laravel 13. So this is the current version of this project but the code was generated by claude code fully intentionally I wanted to experiment with some AI stuff and let's use Laravel best practices on that project. Let's follow Taylor's advice in the original tweet. Composer update and boost install. Composer update will upgrade the Laravel boost to the version that contains that skill. So the upgrade is to version 2.4.1. I'm not sure if it works in Laravel 11 version, but it should work in Laravel 12 and in Laravel 13, obviously. So now we have the latest version of boost. And if we rerun boost install, leave the same configuration. You may choose some guidelines. This is my personal preference. And now, as you can see, we have Laravel best practices installed in that project. Which means in cloud code, let's actually restart cloud code. Exit and relaunch again. I have alias for clot with dangerously skip permissions. And now we should have Laravel best practices as a skill. So you can just hit tab and then enter your extra prompt with that skill which I will do with my whisperflow dictation. Analyze this project for any issues that are related to those Laravel best practices and provide the report. And that's it. Let's see what happens. So first it's exploring the code base not using the skill yet but cloud code is smartly dividing the jobs into sub agents to provide the context of 1 million tokens in my case for cloud max plan and in general sub agents are usually faster to deliver the results if they are separate by the tasks they are supposed to do. So one agent is exploring the structure and another is reading the best practices rules which is already done. And as you can see the context is only 3% used. Of course I'm on 1 million context but even on 200k context it would be like 15%. So it's not a lot. And now we have deeper analysis and again I'll run multiple analysis agents in parallel. This is according to the skill instructions. So here how to apply always use a sub agent to read rule files. So this is what we saw just a minute ago. But this is cloud code also doing that thing in parallel for speed and for better efficiency of context. And there we go. After 4 minutes of crunching, we have quite a deep report with how many? 32 points. And let's read a few of them. So notifications sent. This is of course my local demo. So I didn't really need the ceued jobs. No error handling on Stripe API calls. This is actually interesting. Cloud code is reviewing cloud code written code just a few months ago. So yeah, a lot of recommendations according to best practices. You can see no rate limiting, no N plus1 prevention and so on. And eight points are high severity. So yeah, you can use that Laravel best practices skills not only to write new code but also audit the existing code and also with that I want to present my version of Laravel audits which I thought to add to my new courses on Laravel daily. So now I'm going through updating the courses. So the first one was how to structure Laravel 13 projects. I added a few lessons, updated the old code bases and snippets. In this case, it's textbased course, not a video. And look at the new lesson. So, I'm thinking with my Laravel daily courses where it's appropriate, I will add a skill to review the codebase or add new features according to my recommendations from that specific course and something on top. So, meet the skill Laravel Daily Structure Audit. This is what's inside of the lesson with the link to the original skill file. So you launch Laravel daily structure audit and I will add more skills in the future like Laravel daily something and then you get the report something like this. So let's try it out on that exact project that I just used best practices skill. So let's clear the context and run. I have that skill already. Laravel daily structure audit on that codebase. So this is the skill the code I will show you just the header of that. It's pretty long a few hundred lines of markdown and when you run audit laral project structure it will give you the recommendations or advice on stuff like where to put the logic outside of controllers like traits like events and listeners like services and actions and validations for form request and stuff like that. Basically, I have put majority of those contents of the course inside of that skill because I think this is what will happen in 2026 and beyond. People will not watch full courses of 1 hour or a few hours. But at the same time, people do want to have those course recommendations implemented and applied to their code bases. Right? So, this is where the skills current trend on the market of AI comes handy. And let's see what that skill will return with. So this is again sub aents. In this case the project is with livewire and filament. That recommendation skill doesn't say anything about filament. It's about laravel structure. But we'll see the result. And there we go. In 3 minutes what's done well is also at the end. So enums and validation architecture. But let's see how much stuff is actually found. Let's start with severity or it's actually by category. Inline validation and controllers not found fat controllers not found. A few recommendations for potential enums from strings. Then duplicate logic. So this is the key of that skill. The recommendation of a float sum for example duplicated logic from controller to somewhere. It may be action class, it may be service class, it may be in this case eloquent scopes for example and so on. Then some other checks for ENV, for API resources, for route model binding, for policies potentially. But this is also a lot of those things are actually personal preference. Maybe you prefer to have that validation in controllers instead of using policies. That's totally fine. So this audit is more like recommendations and my personal take on things based on my experiments with a lot of projects over 10 years of Laravel. So yeah, this is my skill on Laravel structure of the project. Laravel daily structure audit which will be available as part of Laravel daily courses for now for this course but also in the future courses I will update very soon for Laravel 13 and I will talk about those later on this YouTube channel including the skills that I recommend. But yeah, getting back to the topic, what do you think about Laravel best practices skill? I think it's very very useful and awesome and perhaps it would lower the traffic to the official Laravel docs for better or for worse because AI agents will get better at producing Laravel code with best practices. But we can as usual discuss those best practices as usual in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other videos.