Use Your Tools Together

I spent my free time this week upgrading a couple of old Laravel 10 applications. PHP versions, Laravel 10 to 12, Tailwind, Livewire, Nova to Filament. The full stack.

If you've done a big Laravel upgrade before, you know the drill. Run Shift, review the comments, fix the handful of things it can't figure out, track down packages that dropped support, and manually test the rest.

I used to do all of that by hand. This time, I paired Laravel Shift with Claude Code. Shift handled the opinionated upgrades and structural changes. Claude picked up everything Shift flagged in the comments, investigated each one, and filled in the gaps. What used to take a full day (or more) of tedious manual work took maybe an hour of actual attention from me.

The takeaway goes beyond upgrades, though. I used Claude in Chrome this week for something completely different: grocery shopping. My wife and I are trying to cut spending, so we signed back up for Thrive Market. I loaded up a cart, then pointed Claude in Chrome at our local grocery store's website and asked it to compare prices item by item. It went through the whole cart, flagged what was cheaper locally, and told me what to keep on Thrive. That research would have taken me an hour. It took minutes.

Two very different tasks. Same principle: pair complementary tools together and let each one do what it's good at. You might be surprised how well they work in combination, even for things that seem simple enough to do yourself.

This Week on Slightly Caffeinated

Laravel Shift, Claude Shopping, and Prism Forever

We talked through the Laravel Shift + Claude Code upgrade workflow, using Claude in Chrome for real-world price comparison research, and TJ's wild experiment giving Iris shell access and sub-agent delegation. TJ also addressed the future of Prism alongside the new Laravel AI SDK. Spoiler: Prism isn't going anywhere.

New episode drops tomorrow (Saturday) at 8:30am Eastern.

What I'm Working On

The upgrade projects are moving along. The bigger app had a Nova admin, Cashier with Stripe, Livewire, and a bunch of packages. I used Claude Code's plan mode first to map out the full upgrade path: which steps to buy Shifts for, which ones needed manual work, and the order to tackle them. That plan alone saved me from backtracking.

The other takeaway from these upgrades: long-running projects accumulate dependencies that quietly become liabilities. Packages that stop getting maintained, version constraints that conflict, tools that just disappear. Every upgrade surfaces a few of these. It makes me want to rip out dependencies and build small, focused replacements when the scope is small enough.

I'm wrapping up these client apps as part of closing down my old side business. Getting them upgraded, moved to Laravel Cloud, and handed off.

Dev Tool of the Week

Raycast Snippets

I was paying for Text Expander for snippet expansion. Turns out Raycast has the same feature built in. You set a key combination, type the trigger, and it expands automatically. No searching through a menu.

Raycast also supports templates and dynamic content like the current date. I moved all my snippets over in about 15 minutes and canceled the Text Expander subscription.

Worth exploring the tools you already use before paying for something new. I found this just by poking around Raycast's settings.

That's it for this week. Hit reply if you've paired Shift with AI tools for upgrades. I'm curious how others are handling it.

-Chris