Pest 5 Released With Test Impact Analysis, an Agent Plugin, and Evals

Pest 5 is here with a test impact analysis engine, an agent verification plugin, evals, and support for PHP 8.4 and PHPUnit 13.

Stop hand-rolling LIKE clauses with percent signs. These built-in query builder methods read cleaner and avoid dialect quirks.

Eager loading the parent relation still triggers a query per child model. chaperone() closes that gap for free.

Build a reliable outbound webhook system in Laravel with signed payloads, exponential backoff retries, and a delivery log.

Laravel's once() helper memoizes a closure's return value for the current request or process — here's when to reach for it.

Nightwatch's MCP server now hands AI coding assistants real route, query, and job timing data for performance issues, not just exceptions.

Laravel's Sleep facade replaces raw sleep() calls with a fluent, fully testable API — no more multi-second test suites.

Your config/database.php connections aren't fixed at boot. Here's how to pick, register, and reset connections at runtime.

Filament rolls out a beta with performance work spanning forms, tables, panels, and widgets. Here's what changed and how to try it.