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Laracasts AI Field Guide

Learn to Build,Not Just Prompt

LLMs, agents, skills, MCP, workflows... this new AI landscape is vast. But we gotcha. Consider this your AI field guide.

Featured Series

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Here's a handful of our most recent series.

The Ralph Wiggum Technique

Join me as I perform a deep-dive into the agentic looping technique known as "Ralph Wiggum." In this series, we’re not just building a script, we’re building the surrounding system that makes an agent reliable enough to collaborate with. We’ll work through permissions, sandbox rules, hooks, and safer ways to run in more autonomous modes. By the end, we’ll have something much bigger than a typical demo: a working approach for spec-driven agent development that can run locally, in the background, or on a remote machine over SSH. Let's go!

Sabatino MasalaSabatino Masala·16 eps·1h 56m

So You Want to Build an Agent

You're likely using an AI agent every day at this point, but do you truly understand how it works under the hood? What separates an agent from a general chat? What's a tool? How do we provide the loop for executing these tools? In this series, we'll demystify some of these concepts by building a basic agent that is capable of interacting with your file system and triggering tools.

Jeffrey WayJeffrey Way·10 eps·2h 10m

The Batteries-Included AI Toolkit

The Laravel AI SDK is a first-party toolkit for adding AI features to your applications. Using a helpdesk app as our playground, you’ll learn structured output, chat with memory, streaming, tool use, retrieval, and everything else you need to build AI features that are reliable, testable, and ready for production. This is an incredibly powerful toolkit, and I can't wait to show you what you can build. Let's get going!

Jeremy McPeakJeremy McPeak·13 eps·3h 10m

Watch Me AI the UI

In this workshop, come along as I upgrade the visual design of our Laracasts team dashboard. As you'll see, design work can sometimes be a bit tricky to orchestrate. Can AI properly evaluate a screenshot and convert it to CSS? Well, yes...and no! But luckily, we have a variety of techniques we can use to increase our odds of success. Let's go!

Jeffrey WayJeffrey Way·5 eps·47m
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Field Guide Chapter

Foundations

Before you go deep, get the lay of the land. Understand how LLMs work, and then learn the prompting and context skills that you'll be reaching for every day going forward.

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Foundations Queue

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Field Guide Chapter

Guidelines

Guidelines are the bridge between how you want code written and what AI actually produces. This is a key component toward ensuring that the AI generates code that is consistent with your preferred style and approach.

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Field Guide Chapter

Skills

Skills are packaged instructions that teach AI coding tools how to handle specific tasks, from scaffolding components to running deployments. Write them once, share them across projects, and turn repetitive workflows into one-command operations.

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Skills Queue

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Field Guide Chapter

Workflow

AI agents go far beyond simple autocomplete. They can write plans, execute tasks, run tests, fix errors, and ore. Finding a comfortable workflow will be essential to your career going forward.

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Workflow Queue

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Field Guide Chapter

The Craft

AI can certainly amplify your output, but it doesn't replace the need to understand the building blocks of application development. Testing, debugging, performance tuning, deployment: these are essential skills.

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The Craft Queue

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Field Guide Chapter

Building with AI

Using AI as a development tool is one side of the coin. The other is building AI-powered features directly into your applications: chatbots, content generation, search, recommendations. Laravel's ecosystem makes this surprisingly approachable.

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Building with AI Queue

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