Laravel just launched the Laravel Skills Directory — an open collection of reusable AI agent skills for Laravel and PHP.
If you’re an agentic engineer — someone who directs AI agents to build real software rather than writing every line yourself — this changes the workflow.
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What is the Skills Directory?
The Skills Directory is a community-powered marketplace of AI skills hosted at skills.laravel.cloud. Each skill is a structured set of instructions that teaches an AI agent how to behave in a specific context — following Laravel conventions, applying PHP best practices, running TDD workflows, structuring Eloquent queries, and more.
There are already 135 skills in the directory, covering everything from Eloquent optimisation to modern PHP patterns to API design practices.
You install a skill with a single command:
npx skills add <owner/repo>Skills work with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, and any other AI agent that reads markdown instruction files. The format is simple — a markdown file with frontmatter describing when to activate the skill and a body explaining what the agent should do.
Why skills matter
Every new AI session starts from scratch. The agent doesn’t know your stack. It doesn’t know that you prefer Pest over PHPUnit, or that your project uses Flux UI components, or that you follow Taylor Otwell’s conventions for relationship naming. You have to explain this every time — or accept generic answers.
Skills fix this. They’re persistent, reusable context that teaches your AI agent how to work within your specific environment.
This matters for everyone, but it matters most for people like me.
The agentic engineer advantage
I can’t write a single line of PHP. I don’t know how to assign a variable, write a for loop, or structure a controller. But I’ve shipped a full Laravel SaaS, handled security reports, fixed N+1 queries, and made hundreds of commits to a production codebase.
I work by directing AI agents — defining problems, reviewing solutions, making architecture decisions, and holding the quality bar. I don’t write the code, but I own everything around it.
The bottleneck has never been the code. It’s the context — getting the agent to understand what good Laravel code looks like, what conventions to follow, what patterns to prefer. Every session, I was re-teaching the same lessons.
That’s exactly what skills automate.
From a question to a skill
A few months ago, I started asking my AI agent a question that changed how I learn Laravel: What would Taylor Otwell do?
It started as a throwaway prompt. I was unsure whether to use a global scope or an explicit query constraint, so I asked what Taylor would do. The answer was better than what I’d been getting — idiomatically correct. Laravel-native. The kind of answer that follows the framework’s opinions rather than fighting them.
I kept asking. Over 49 sessions, the same five-word prompt consistently surfaced better answers — use Str::random() instead of a custom helper, prefer #[Validate] attributes in Livewire, keep relationship names plural, remove unused code instead of commenting it out.
Eventually I packaged it into a structured skill — a markdown file with core principles, a response format, anti-patterns to flag, and an investigation template. Now every AI session automatically runs Laravel questions through that lens. I don’t even have to ask anymore.
That’s one skill, built from one person’s experience. Now imagine 135 of them, built by the community, covering every corner of the Laravel ecosystem.
What this means for the ecosystem
The Skills Directory is infrastructure for a new way of building software.
The best skills aren’t generic linting instructions. They’re hard-won patterns from developers who’ve been building with Laravel for years. When you install a skill for Eloquent best practices, you’re getting someone’s real-world experience with query optimisation, relationship management, and common pitfalls — delivered as context your agent can act on immediately.
Skills also compound. One skill makes your agent a little better. Ten skills, layered together, make it dramatically better. A skill for Laravel conventions plus a skill for Pest testing plus a skill for Eloquent optimisation means your agent operates with a depth of knowledge that would take years to accumulate on your own.
When I wrote about not being able to write PHP, the key insight was that code is no longer the bottleneck — knowing what to build and why is what matters. Skills push this further. You don’t need to know every Laravel convention yourself. You install a skill that knows them, and your agent applies them automatically.
Getting started
If you’re building with Laravel and AI agents:
- Browse the directory at skills.laravel.cloud
- Install skills with
npx skills add <owner/repo> - Skills are stored as markdown files in your project — they’re version-controlled, readable, and editable
If you’ve built your own patterns or conventions, package them as a skill and add them to the directory. The whole point is that the community gets better together.
The Laravel ecosystem has always been good at this — giving developers tools that encode best practices so they can focus on building. Skills are the same philosophy applied to AI-assisted development. For those of us who direct AI agents rather than write code, this is what the ecosystem has been missing.