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- Being “Just a Developer” Isn’t Enough Anymore, Blaze: An Optimized Blade Template Compiler for Laravel, 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing & more
Being “Just a Developer” Isn’t Enough Anymore, Blaze: An Optimized Blade Template Compiler for Laravel, 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing & more
Ahmad
March 01, 2026
Hey Makers 👋
AI is shaking the SaaS landscape.
Every week there’s a new model, a new tool, a new “this changes everything.”
Suddenly everyone feels behind.
But here’s the quiet truth:
Great products are still built the old-fashioned way.
With clarity. With focus. With steady execution.
This is an ode to you — the builders who ignore the hype cycles, focus on fundamentals, and push small improvements every week. While the world debates whether AI will replace SaaS, you’re refining onboarding flows, improving performance, fixing edge cases, and talking to customers.
That’s how real companies are built.
If you’d rather focus on your product instead of rebuilding auth, billing, teams, and dashboards from scratch (again), SaaSykit gives you a solid, production-ready foundation — so you can ship faster without cutting corners.
Get a SaaSykit license and start building your dream SaaS now!
Now, let’s see what’s new in the Laravel & SaaS world 👇
Laravel 12.52 & .53 Highlights
makeMany()for Factories (No DB Writes)
You can now generate multiple in-memory models without persisting them.
$posts = Post::factory()->makeMany(5);
// Same idea, more explicit
$posts = Post::factory()->count(5)->make();Skip Factory Callbacks on Demand
Temporarily disableafterMakingorafterCreatinghooks when they’re not relevant to your test.
$order = Order::factory()
->withoutAfterMaking()
->make();
$order = Order::factory()
->withoutAfterCreating()
->create();temporaryUploadUrl()Now Works Locally
emporary upload URLs are no longer cloud-only — the local disk supports them too.
$url = Storage::disk('local')->temporaryUploadUrl(
'avatars/user.png',
now()->addMinutes(20)
);Atomic Blade Cache Writes
The Blade compiler now writes compiled views atomically (temp file → move).
This eliminates rare race conditions where parallel processes could corrupt cached views.
Mailable::later()Delay Fix + Assertions
Delays on queued mailables now work correctly — and you can assert them in tests.
Mail::fake();
Mail::to($user)->later(
now()->addMinutes(15),
new InvoiceReady($invoice)
);
Mail::assertQueued(InvoiceReady::class, function ($mail) {
return $mail->delay->equalTo(now()->addMinutes(15));
});Cache::funnel()for Concurrency Limiting (Driver-Agnostic)
Concurrency limiting now works across all lock-capable cache drivers — not just Redis.
Cache::funnel('imports')
->limit(2)
->releaseAfter(30)
->then(
fn () => runImport(),
fn () => 'Too many imports running'
);Named Arguments in Event Dispatching
Events now support named arguments when dispatching.
SubscriptionCreated::dispatch(
user: $user,
plan: $plan,
source: 'api'
);From SaaSykit
For about a decade, being a developer was… cushy.
If you loved your job as a developer anytime in the last 10 years, you were living the dream.
Good salaries. Endless opportunities. You solved problems, shipped code, and got paid very well for it. No need to worry too much about why the business existed or how money was made. You were the builder. That was enough.
And like all good dreams, this one had an expiration date.
From the Community
It’s hard to believe that we’re already celebrating Filament’s fifth birthday in 2026! In some ways, it feels like just yesterday that Filament v1 released as a basic admin panel package, but in others, it seems practically like ancient history.
We wanted to take a little bit of time and walk down memory lane! For the folks who have been around since the beginning, enjoy the nostalgia with us. For everyone else who is newer to the Filament community, enjoy the glimpse into all of the iterations that led up to what Filament is today!
The Laravel ecosystem continues to lean into the agent-driven future with the launch of Laravel Skills, an open directory of reusable AI agent skills designed specifically for Laravel and PHP developers.
Blaze is a Blade template compiler from the Livewire team that reduces component rendering overhead as your application scales. It works as a drop-in replacement for the default Blade compiler and offers three levels of optimization — from an optimized compiler to compile-time folding that pre-renders components into static HTML.
Your Laravel app is serving garbage to AI agents right now. Not because your code is bad. Because AI agents don't read HTML the way browsers do.
When ChatGPT Search, Claude, or Perplexity visits your site, they get a wall of navigation menus, cookie banners, JavaScript bundles, and footer links mixed in with the actual content. They burn through context window tokens parsing <div class="flex items-center justify-between"> just to find your page title. And if your content is rendered client-side with Vue or React? They might get nothing at all.
My Oh Dear co-founder Mattias Geniar was a guest on the WP Legends podcast. They talked about how we built Oh Dear over the past eight years, common misconceptions about monitoring, and how AI is changing developer workflow
All about SaaS
Founders embark on a journey to change the world with their amazing new software/AI tool only to realize that their job is actually to build a distribution engine.
The best product doesn’t always win. Yes, the product needs to be good, but a great product is table stakes in 2026. It’s all about distribution.
It’s that time again: time for another entry in the “10 Charts” series.
I try to do these once a quarter, and we’re overdue: our last entry was back in October. This is our 11th (!) entry, and you know the drill: I’m a visual learner and charts help me process information. Charts also happen to be an efficient way to show how the world’s changing.
We're not there yet, but may be close to the moment where startups or existing competitors can agent-scrape their way through your production application and clone all of the accessible parts. Create a reasonable likeness of your hard work in not much time. That will gut development speed as a fundamental advantage. How will we support long-term value and long-term revenue in a flood of lookalikes?
Ask a founder about storytelling and they'll point you to their marketing team. That tells you everything.
If you can't clearly articulate your company's story, you probably don't have a clear strategy. Struggling to articulate your story reveals something deeper than communication issues. It reveals unclear strategy.
Engineering has escaped the codebase. The tools, mindset, and identity increasingly shape every function.
Spend enough time in startup circles and you’ll hear this engineeringification of everything…
Videos
Keep building, keep rocking! 🤘