NEW Stop Shipping Prompt Regressions: LLM Evals for the Laravel AI SDK with Pest 5 Stop Shipping Prompt Regressions: LLM Ev...

Engineering,
taught &
leadership, practised.

I'm Steven — CTO at Digitonic, a PHP engineer since 2010 and a keen golfer with a terrible handicap. This is where I write it all down.

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Order.php

// app/Domain/Trading
final class Order extends AggregateRoot
{
    public function place(Money $total)
    {
        $this->recordThat(new OrderPlaced(
            total: $total->amount(),
        ));

        return $this;
    }
}

● all tests passing PHPStan level 10 Laravel 13

Steven Richardson

CTO, Digitonic · Laravel Certified

HCP 18

The Irvine Golf Club

Shipped with —

…and a few friends I can't name.

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FEATURED laravel

Stop Shipping Prompt Regressions: LLM Evals for the Laravel AI SDK with Pest 5

Your faked-agent tests prove the wiring works and tell you nothing about whether the output is still any good. Pest 5's evals plugin closes that gap.

September 11th, 2026 · 15 min read

php

PHP 8.4 mb_trim and mb_ucfirst: The Multibyte Gaps Everyone Polyfilled

Two customer rows look identical, and the unique index accepted both. One of them ends in a no-break space that trim() cannot see. PHP 8.4 finally shipped the fix.

September 10th, 2026 · 10 min

laravel

The Job That Ran Before the Row Existed: Dispatching Inside Laravel Transactions

A queued job throws ModelNotFoundException for a row that plainly exists. It is not a bug in the job — it is a worker that got there before your transaction committed.

September 9th, 2026 · 9 min

/NOW

Currently shipping, reading, and thinking about.

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Building

A SaaS product on Laravel Cloud for Investor Relations teams.

Writing

A series of AI engineering articles.

Reading

"Life 3.0 - Being human in the age of artificial intellegence" by Max Tegmark.

Golfing

The Irvine Golf Club on Sundays, regardless of weather.

Engineering, taught & leadership, practised.