Laravel Boost v2 and the New Skills: On My List to Try
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Laravel Boost v2 and the New Skills: On My List to Try

402 words
Categories:
Backend
Tags:
#laravel #laravel-boost #ai #skills #artisan #productivity

A few days ago Laravel Boost v2.0 was launched, and as someone curious about everything surrounding the Laravel ecosystem, I couldn’t help spending quite a while reading about the new features. The truth is there’s one feature that has my special attention: the Skills system.

What is Laravel Boost?

For those who don’t know it, Laravel Boost is an AI tool that integrates with your Laravel projects to help you in daily development. With version 2.0 they’ve taken a major leap, introducing the Skills system that allows extending and customizing how AI works with your code.

The New Skills of Boost v2

What’s most interesting about this update is that now you can install Skills created by the community, and Laravel packages can also include their own Skills so AI understands how to work with them better.

Installing Skills with boost:add-skill

The new Artisan command is quite direct:

# Short format (owner/repo)
php artisan boost:add-skill vercel-labs/agent-skills

# Full GitHub URL
php artisan boost:add-skill https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills

# With a specific subfolder
php artisan boost:add-skill owner/repo/.ai/skills

The best part is that Boost automatically syncs these skills across all your agents.

Skills in Laravel Packages

But where I see the most potential is that Laravel packages can include their own Skills. Imagine you install a Laravel package, and automatically AI already knows how to use it correctly because the maintainer has included the guides and skills in the package.

As a package maintainer, you can add skills in:

resources/boost/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md

And Boost will load them automatically when the user runs boost:install after installing the package.

Updating to Boost v2

To update is as simple as:

composer update
php artisan boost:install

What I’d Like to Try

I have several ideas in mind for when I have some free time:

  • Install some community skill and see how it improves development assistance
  • Create a basic skill for a personal project
  • Try skill overrides to customize behaviors
  • See how it integrates with packages I already use regularly

In short, another tool in the modern Laravel developer’s arsenal. Boost v2 Skills seem an interesting step toward more contextual and useful AI for the Laravel ecosystem, and I’m curious to see how this feature evolves over time.

References

If you have experience with Boost or the new Skills, let me know in the comments!

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