Laracon EU 2026 wrapped up on March 3rd in Amsterdam. Two days, 20+ talks, and a handful of announcements that matter if you’re building a product with Laravel. Here’s what happened, filtered through the lens of someone who ships code but doesn’t write it from memory.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
- Laravel 13 — March 17, no breaking changes
- Passkeys in starter kits
- Teams are back
- The AI SDK goes stable
- Laravel Cloud API, CLI, and free trial
- Taylor’s live demo — fixing a bug with voice
- NativePHP is now free
- Inertia.js v3 beta
- Polyscope — run multiple AI agents at once
- Laravel Community App
- Everything else
- What I’m watching
Laravel 13 — March 17, no breaking changes
The headline: Laravel 13 drops on March 17th, and there are no breaking changes. If you’re on Laravel 12, the upgrade should be painless.
The main technical addition is ~15 new places where you can use PHP attributes — a cleaner way to configure things like queue retries, model properties, and controller middleware. These are optional. Your existing code keeps working.
What matters for non-developers: you don’t need to do anything dramatic. When your AI agent upgrades you from 12 to 13, it should be a small, low-risk pull request.
Passkeys in starter kits
This is the one I’m most interested in. Laravel’s starter kits will include passkey authentication — passwordless sign-in using your device’s biometrics or security key. It’s being built into Laravel Fortify, which means it works across all the starter kit variants (Livewire, React, Vue, Svelte).
For anyone building a SaaS, this removes one of the most annoying parts of auth: passwords. No password reset flows, no “must contain one uppercase letter” rules, no credential stuffing attacks. Users sign in with their face or fingerprint.
If you’re using the Laravel starter kits today, passkeys will be available when you upgrade.
Teams are back
The old Jetstream starter kit had a Teams feature — multi-tenant team management built in. When Laravel replaced Jetstream with the new starter kits in Laravel 12, Teams was left behind. Taylor announced it’s coming back, reimplemented with a notable improvement: users can now work in multiple teams across separate browser tabs simultaneously. The old Jetstream implementation couldn’t do that.
If you’re building anything where users belong to organisations or workspaces, this saves you from building team management yourself.
The AI SDK goes stable
On the same day as Laravel 13 (March 17th), the Laravel AI SDK exits beta and becomes officially stable.
I migrated to the AI SDK two weeks ago from PrismPHP. It broke two agents silently and took real debugging to sort out. But the architecture — one agent class per AI task, declarative configuration via PHP attributes, built-in test faking — already felt more Laravel-like than what I had before.
Going stable means the API surface is locked in. If you’ve been waiting to adopt it, that’s the signal.
Laravel Cloud API, CLI, and free trial
Taylor announced that the Laravel Cloud API and CLI are now generally available. You can manage deployments, environments, and infrastructure from your terminal or programmatically. AI agents can deploy to Cloud too — Taylor’s demo proved that dramatically (more on that below).
The bigger news for non-developers: a free trial for Laravel Cloud is coming soon. If you’ve been curious about Cloud but didn’t want to commit to a paid plan to experiment, that barrier is about to drop.
Taylor’s live demo — fixing a bug with voice
The most memorable moment of the conference. Taylor introduced a bug into a live site, then showed the entire fix-and-deploy cycle happening autonomously:
- Nightwatch (Laravel’s monitoring tool) detected the error
- An AI agent automatically fixed the bug via Nightwatch’s MCP integration
- Laravel Cloud created a test instance
- The AI generated a pull request
- Taylor merged and deployed it — using a voice command
No code was written manually at any point. This wasn’t a polished promo video — it was a live demo on stage.
Is this how we’ll all work next week? No. But it showed what happens when monitoring, AI agents, and cloud infrastructure are all first-party Laravel tools that talk to each other. The pieces are connecting.
NativePHP is now free
NativePHP — the tool for building native desktop and mobile apps with PHP and Laravel — went fully free and open source (MIT licence) with version 3.
Simon Hamp and Shane Rosenthal demoed something remarkable on stage: fully native Android UI components rendered from PHP. No WebViews, no JavaScript frameworks. They showed latency dropping from 700 milliseconds to sub-milliseconds by moving away from web views entirely.
Shane open-sourced a demo app so you can test the architecture yourself. NativePHP v3 also introduced a plugin system — you install only the native features you need (camera, file access, push notifications), keeping apps small.
| Feature | Free (MIT) | Premium (one-time purchase) |
|---|---|---|
| Browser, Camera, Device, Dialog, File, Microphone, Network, Share, System | Yes | — |
| Biometrics, Geolocation, Push Notifications, Scanner, Secure Storage | — | Yes |
If you’ve built a Laravel web app and wondered about offering a mobile version, the cost barrier just disappeared.
Inertia.js v3 beta
Inertia.js v3 entered beta with some notable changes. Axios is gone — replaced by a built-in HTTP client, meaning fewer dependencies. There’s a new Vite plugin that handles page resolution and SSR setup automatically.
If you’re using Livewire, this doesn’t affect you directly. But if you chose the React, Vue, or Svelte starter kit, the Inertia upgrade should simplify your build setup.
Polyscope — run multiple AI agents at once
Marcel Pociot (CTO of BeyondCode) launched Polyscope on stage. It’s a free macOS app for running multiple AI agents in parallel — Claude Code, Codex, or any agent — each working on different tasks or repos simultaneously.
It uses copy-on-write cloning so agents don’t interfere with each other, and includes a built-in preview browser. If you’re already working with AI agents and want to run several at once across different parts of your project, this is worth looking at.
Laravel Community App
Laravel launched a mobile app for iOS and Android — a directory of Laravel events and a networking tool for connecting with other developers at conferences. Scan someone’s badge, stay connected after the event.
Everything else
A few other things worth noting:
- Nightwatch MCP — Nightwatch now has a Model Context Protocol server, so AI tools like Claude Code can read your production errors directly and help fix them
- Official Svelte starter kit — Svelte joins React, Vue, and Livewire as an officially supported frontend option
- Livewire v4.2.0 — adds Laravel 13 support and reactive props during boot hooks
What I’m watching
Three things I’ll be acting on:
- Passkeys — as soon as they land in the starter kits, I’m adding them. Passwordless auth is better for users and removes an entire category of security concerns.
- AI SDK going stable — I’ve already migrated. When it hits v1.0 on March 17th, I’ll update and stop worrying about API changes.
- Laravel Cloud free trial — I want to test Cloud against my current Forge setup and see if the auto-scaling and Nightwatch integration justify switching.
The overall direction is clear: Laravel is becoming a complete platform — framework, hosting, monitoring, AI, mobile — where every piece is built to work together. For non-developers building with AI agents, that integration is the real story. The fewer seams between tools, the more an AI agent can do autonomously.
All talks were livestreamed free on Laravel News. Recordings should appear on the Laracon EU YouTube channel soon.