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 betwe