Using AI in the Laravel development workflow

AI-assisted development is making significant strides in 2026. We already saw huge progress in this area in 2025, and the innovation is only accelerating this year.

In this article, we’re focusing on AI development within the Laravel ecosystem. Laravel is a key component of Agiledrop’s technology stack which we’ve been using more and more regularly in our work with partners and clients.

As such, we’re keenly interested in how we can use AI responsibly to deliver continuously better Laravel solutions. This is why we want to take a closer look at a few recent developments in terms of building with AI in Laravel.

Opening opportunities with OpenClaw

Early this year, a new AI tool called OpenClaw started to make major traction. Originally released in late 2025 under a different name, OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent created by Peter Steinberger.

The main innovation of OpenClaw is that it works as a chatbot accessed through whichever messaging service the user is using. Moreover, while the OpenClaw bots integrate with external LLMs, they run locally and also store data locally rather than on external servers.

While its adoption started to rise immediately, security concerns came pretty much just as quickly, with one of the main ones being log poisoning, a security exploit akin to prompt injection. There are also risks related to too much autonomy, which can result in issues such as losing your entire inbox.

The tech giant NVIDIA was very quick in producing a solution. They released NemoClaw, an open source stack which improves the security and privacy of using OpenClaw without diminishing its efficiency.

Our friends at amazee.ai just launched their own managed OpenClaw hosting, called amazeeClaw, which is built on the amazee.io infrastructure and also prioritises security and privacy.

But why exactly does this matter in the context of AI development in Laravel?

Fully automated self-healing app

Those who attended the recent Laracon EU 2026 in Amsterdam most likely have a hunch where this is headed. Even those who didn’t attend probably saw an X post or two regarding this.

Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, is known for his exciting keynote speeches reminiscent of new Apple product releases. This time was no different.

During his live demo of what a Laravel SDLC looks like in 2026, Taylor received a phone call from his OpenClaw assistant asking whether it should merge a recent bug fix pull request from GitHub – to which he confidently replied “You can merge it.”

This was a showcase of what he called a “fully automated self-healing app”: Nightwatch alerting of a broken route, AI fixing the issue and creating a GitHub PR, Cloud creating a preview environment, and the pull request merged via voice through OpenClaw – all without touching any code.

Developer experience excellence

Laravel has always been famous for its emphasis on great developer experience. This continues to be the standard when it comes to developing with AI. Laravel recently released 3 new AI packages which embrace and facilitate the new role of AI in the modern software development workflow:

• Laravel AI SDK, which helps developers add AI features to Laravel apps
• Laravel Boost, which optimizes the ways in which AI agents write Laravel code
• Laravel MCP, which enables external AI tools to optimally interact with Laravel apps

These new packages serve to unify the previously scattered tooling and approaches of working with AI in the Laravel ecosystem. As Taylor Otwell points out, a first-party opinion on interacting with AI was needed in order to provide a streamlined workflow.

Neuron AI

In the spring of last year, Agiledrop hosted a webinar about adding AI features to a PHP application using Neuron AI, which is a framework-agnostic tool, i.e. it supports not only Laravel but also for vanilla PHP and other leading frameworks such as Symfony.

Neuron is a framework created by Inspector.dev, designed to solve the problem of integrating agentic AI components into an existing PHP codebase. It was initially intended as an internal project for the Inspector monitoring tool, but they decided to release it as open source due to its huge potential in filling the gaps of AI agent development in the PHP ecosystem.

Neuron enables developers to easily build AI agents without leaving the PHP ecosystem or switching to a different PHP framework. In this sense, it offers similar functionality to Laravel AI SDK highlighted above, but is able to also be used for websites and applications built with vanilla PHP or a PHP framework other than Laravel.

Thanks to the smooth integration with Inspector.dev, Neuron even offers built-in observability through monitoring agents, with the cherry on top of Inspector’s powerful AI Bug Fix feature, itself also built with Neuron.

Conclusion

Despite so many new developments in the field, the momentum of AI-assisted software development seems to only be increasing. Laravel has successfully tapped into this ongoing innovation, and it will be exciting to see how things continue to evolve going forward.

While the new AI tools and workflows are indeed powerful, development expertise based on real-life experience is still very much required for actual production-grade software. Responsible use of AI tools by experienced developers is an essential part of producing robust apps and websites while minimizing risks.