Laravel 13 Highlights

Laravel 13 dropped last week. The biggest takeaway is that it’s a "zero breaking changes" release for most. It’s mostly about modernizing the syntax and embracing AI. 1. PHP 8.3 is the New Floor Laravel 13 officially requires PHP 8.3. Support for PHP 8.1 and 8.2 is gone. This lets the framework use typed constants and json_validate() internally. You get a small performance boost just by upgrading the runtime. 2. Attributes Everywhere The biggest visual change is moving away from class properties to PHP Attributes. It's optional, but it makes models and jobs look much cleaner. Old Way: class User extends Model { protected $table = 'users'; protected $fillable = ['name', 'email']; } New Way (Laravel 13): #[Table('users')] #[Fillable(['name', 'email'])] class User extends Model {} 3. The First-Party AI SDK Laravel now has a native AI SDK (laravel/ai). No more wrestling with multiple community packages to talk to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini. Features: Provider Agnostic: Swap between OpenA