Major updates from Laravel & GitHub

This week's must-know news for engineering leaders

Author

Ada
April 15, 2025

This week’s bytes:

  • Laravel’s new package and competitor

  • How much AI dev workflows have already changed

  • GitHub’s new security campaigns

Worth reading

🤖 From reactive prompts to proactive agents: changing dev workflows

3-minute read by Jenna Barron

AI tools aren’t just copilots anymore, they’re taking initiative. GitHub’s Emilio Salvador says that as agentic AI matures, teams must rethink workflows and control. Start small: proof-of-concepts and prototypes are ideal testing grounds for tools that can now make decisions without human oversight. The shift has already begun.

4-minute read by Loraine Lawson

Laravel Wayfinder eliminates frontend-backend glue code, while Hypervel emerges as a coroutine-powered alternative to Octane. If you're building high-concurrency apps or microservices, this drop could change how your team approaches PHP performance.

2-minute read by Samantha Kelly

io Products is building AI-native, screenless hardware meant to replace the phone—not enhance it. If OpenAI acquires them, it won’t just enter the hardware race, it could redefine the device category entirely, starting with your living room.

15-minute read by Apoorv Mittal and Rafal Gancarz

Shadow tables quietly replaced high-risk data migrations with near-zero-downtime extractions. Backed by Shopify, Uber, and GitHub, this strategy syncs every change in real time, eliminates rollout guesswork, and makes blue-green deployments look reckless by comparison.

2-minute read by Jenna Barron

Security debt rarely gets touched, but GitHub’s new campaigns aim to change that. By surfacing prioritized risks inside developer workflows and offering Copilot-powered fixes, GitHub is making remediation more actionable—and much harder to overlook.

Best quick bytes

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