Tagged: Tutorial

Running Sevantia, our AI chat product, I watched the same 2,800-token system prompt get re-billed on every single user message. Multiply that by thousands of conversations a day and you're paying Anthropic to re-read the same instructions into Claude's context over and over. Prompt caching fixes this. It took me longer than it should have to get the mental model right, and the docs skip over the parts that trip up most people. This is the guide I wish I'd had when I first enabled it.

Your queries work fine in development. Fifty rows, instant responses, no complaints. Then you deploy to production, real data piles up, and a page that loaded in 200ms takes four seconds. The problem usually isn't your Eloquent code. It's the indexes you forgot to add.

I've been deploying Laravel applications for over a decade. Started with custom bash scripts. Moved to Laravel Envoy. Then Laravel Envoyer, which worked great for a long time. Eventually moved away from it to Ploi.io so I could manage deployments and servers in one place. Each tool taught me something the previous one didn't. And the biggest lesson wasn't about tools at all. It was about the small practices around deployment that separate "mostly works" from "actually works every time." Zero-downtime deployment is widely available now. Most hosting panels and deployment services support it out of the box. But to get the most out of it, there are practices you need to get right. That's what this post covers.