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Artisan Beer

A weekly podcast

Artisan Beer

A weekly conversation over a beer about building software.

A casual conversation over a drink between Ed Grosvenor, Peter van Dijck and other people doing interesting work in and around the Laravel community: what they are building, where the industry is heading, and plenty of AI along the way.

Ed Grosvenor
Ed Grosvenor
Peter van Dijck
Peter van Dijck

Episodes

Episode 4 67 min

We Survived the PHPocalypse

Ed and Peter survived the PHPocalypse. Peter took his sites down and waited for Laravel Cloud's patch; Ed trusted Cloudflare's mitigations and spent the day patching clients still on PHP 5.6. Their verdict: the PHP community, the PHP Foundation, Laravel and Cloudflare handled it well, Chainguard's early release of embargoed patches did not, and open source supply chain security only works when everyone acts like a good citizen. Then it's on to building: an overnight Solo crash, why Ed builds everything twice, an MCP-powered kill switch that swaps your PHP sites for a "back soon" page, analytics and Hone in Rust, Capstan, and Peter's big question about what a builder's life looks like a year from now. Along the way: a social network launched and pulled in one week, Railway's API key leak, vendor lock-in, data as a moat, Our CVEs, the three Scalpels Ed would install first, and why podcast transcripts are prime training data.

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Episode 3 61 min Video coming soon

Keeping the Wheels on the Bus

With Ed's October 31 Scalpels launch deadline looming, the big idea this week is keeping the wheels on the bus: one of Ed's clients has non-developers shipping vibe-coded changes straight to production, and running that work through Solo, with rounds of code-quality and security review out of sight, has kept things from breaking. Ed also cracks clay stop-motion explainer videos with Claude. Peter replaced Plausible overnight because its MCP got in his way, which leads into the first Scalpels marketplace app, SimpleStats, and Peter's case that Ed should be Apple: one curated catalog, whoever built the app. Along the way: Clank Overflow and Jev, boring products like Wake, a Rust ingest for Hone, self-healing fleets, whether marketing can be automated, opposition research on Sputnik Intelligence, cold email with lemlist, and Ed's very short return to Reddit.

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Episode 2 78 min

Just Make Everything Free

Ed has made Scalpels free for end users, and Peter wants to know why his solution to everything is to just make it free. Ed's bet: when anyone can one-shot an app, the tools themselves are cheap, but well-built, maintained, self-hostable ones are a great way for freelancers and agencies to win work. Peter shows how he uses a golden dataset and a human review panel to move classification tasks onto a cheaper model, and how he keeps a mental model of a system that changes every day by having Claude maintain a map of its concepts. Along the way: a Stack Overflow for agents (which Ed has since built as Clank Overflow), the Scalpels pass-through MCP, porting Campfire to Laravel the Laravel way, AI and native app telemetry, selling a data product to enterprises stuck with Copilot and Gemini, Peter's company brain, Alan Kay, and the great Zurich bubble tea hunt.

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Episode 1 60 min

SaaS is dying on its own

Ed and Peter finally record the conversation they have every week anyway. Ed lays out Scalpels — a fleet of small, open-source, agent-first apps you deploy to your own Laravel Cloud account — and Hone, the Nightwatch alternative that sends your telemetry to your own endpoint and hands the findings to an agent instead of a dashboard. Peter explains Sputnik Intelligence, why he put a Rust search engine on Laravel Cloud, and why he thinks data may still be a good business even if code is not. Along the way: scale-to-zero and the database session driver that quietly keeps your database awake, Campfire on Laravel Cloud's new Ruby runtime, the Scalpels Lab, Figma restricting which agent harnesses may use its MCP, whether AI is any use outside of work, and talking to your agents out loud.

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About the show

Ed Grosvenor

Runs Artisan Build and is building Scalpels, a fleet of small open-source apps that replace the SaaS tools you are tired of paying for.

Peter van Dijck

Is building Sputnik Intelligence, full transcripts and data on influential podcasts and newsletters, delivered by API, MCP or user interface.