In this episode, I sit down with Roberto Gongora, a developer I've worked with since our Pfizer days, to explore how AI and no-code tools are reshaping our approach to development in 2024. We dive into a recent project where Roberto used n8N instead of traditional Laravel for building an API backend - a decision that not only saved time but made the entire system easier to maintain and debug.

What's fascinating is how Roberto's perspective on development is evolving. Rather than getting lost in complex code implementations, he's finding himself spending more time understanding business problems and letting AI handle the heavy lifting. We explore his experience with n8N's visual workflow system for API integration, how it simplified debugging compared to traditional logging systems, and why sometimes the "coder's instinct" to build everything from scratch might not be the best approach anymore.

As we look toward 2025, Roberto shares his prediction that while coding isn't going away, a developer's role is shifting more toward being an "orchestra conductor" - guiding AI tools and no-code solutions rather than writing every line of code by hand. It's a candid conversation about adapting to new tools while keeping focus on what really matters: delivering value to clients faster and more efficiently.
If you're a developer wondering how to stay relevant in an AI-powered future or just curious about practical ways to work smarter rather than harder, this episode offers real-world insights from the trenches of modern development.

00:00
Introduction to N8N and Project Retrospective
01:52
Transitioning from Laravel to N8N
06:01
Exploring N8N's Features and Challenges
12:00
Aha Moments and Insights from Using N8N
17:59
Comparing N8N with AI Coding Tools
26:03
Future of Development: Embracing AI and No-Code Solutions

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This podcast episode delves into a developer's 25-year journey, reflecting on how the rise of AI and low-code/no-code tools is reshaping software development. The discussion highlights a shift from traditional frameworks like Laravel to more flexible solutions incorporating tools like N8N, Bolt.new, and Cursor AI. The core idea is to prioritize efficiency and problem-solving over the act of coding itself.
Key points include:
● A move from Laravel-centric development: The developer acknowledges that while Laravel was a go-to in the past, it's no longer the only answer for web applications.
● Embracing low-code/no-code: The emergence of tools like N8N has enabled faster development and easier maintenance with less code.
● Focus on practical solutions: The emphasis is on building tools that effectively solve client problems, save time, and reduce costs.
●Specific project examples show how the developer is rethinking his approach:
○ Email Opt-Out System: Previously built with Laravel in two days, it can now be set up with N8N in 2–4 hours, using an LLM to parse emails and update databases and Google Sheets.
○Water Registration Project: This project, which involved a signup process, backend operations, and data extraction, can now have 50-80% of its backend moved to N8N. This reduces the need for custom code for processes like handling PDF reports, running them through OCR/LLM, and extracting structured data.
○RAG Chat System: Instead of a custom-built system, an off-the-shelf solution or a combination of Bolt.new, Cursor AI, and N8N can be used, potentially cutting development time from 2-4 weeks to a few days.
●AI as a "superpower": AI tools enable developers to tackle previously avoided projects with new confidence. For example, data conversions, browser extensions, and data scraping, which used to take considerable time and money can now be done quickly with the help of AI tools.
●Backend processes are being streamlined using tools like N8N, Bolt.new and Cursor to build user interfaces quickly.
●Future approach to SaaS: For new SaaS ideas, the developer plans to use Bolt.new or FlutterFlow with N8N as a backend for rapid development.
●A shift in mindset: The developer is re-evaluating his tech choices and embraces a "build a little, learn a lot" approach, adapting to the changing tech landscape. This involves a move away from the "artisan" approach to coding and more of a focus on practical solutions that make or save clients money.
●PHP is not the default: The author also notes that many new AI tools are better with Python and Javascript than PHP which is something to consider when choosing a tech stack.
The podcast episode is a reflection on how the developer is adapting to new technologies and a discussion about how these changes impact project builds, and what it means for software development going forward.

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Read more at https://sundance-solutions.mailcoach.app/php-and-llms

Lots of things going on that I want to share below.

This really is an automations chapter and a lot to learn about how to automate so many tasks.

https://bit.ly/php_llms

All the code is there too to run a Laravel Assistant for Marketing and anything else.

Next chapter is runing Standard Checking type Assistant some of the key use cases are

Ensure team coding standards are always in check! 💻

Dive into document pages and easily find related content. 🗂️

Smoothly compare RFPs to your solution database for quicker replies. 🔍

More coming soon with the app 100% working to do this!

You can listen to the episode here https://readorlisten.com/episodes/marketing-assistant-and-other-automations

One call later Eric Barnes saved hours of boring work! Now he just hits the api with the link, it scrapes the web and verifies the site is about technology and not spam!

https://x.com/ericlbarnes/status/1844376408866574746

Wnat to save time at your company reach out to me at https://dailyai.studio/

I will talk about that more later but the image is from https://ideogram.ai/t/explore

Great way to make images with text!

Wow this one continues to blow me away https://n8n.io/
Integrate any service! Seriouly amazing and powerful that plus https://bolt.new and a lot of non-coders are empowered to buidl amazing things

Alright now for the rest of the news that caught my attention!

Date: N/A
Watch Here: Embeddings in Depth - YouTube
Summary:
Learn about embeddings in this insightful video, part of the Ollama course, where you'll dive deep into how embeddings work and their practical applications.

Date: November 1, 2023
Watch Here: Build Advanced Voice AI Tools - YouTube
Summary:
This tutorial walks you through building powerful voice AI tools using Vapi and N8N. It covers how to integrate voice services with custom automation workflows to create advanced AI solutions.

Date: N/A
Learn More: Gmail Integrations - N8N
Summary:
Explore the integration of Gmail with N8N to streamline email workflows. This resource outlines various automations that can make managing your inbox and business communications much more efficient.

Date: October 14, 2024
Learn More: GroqCasters - GitHub
Summary:
GroqCasters is an open-source Python application that uses AI to generate podcasts, from script writing to audio production. Discover how to create your own AI-powered podcasts effortlessly with this tool.

Date: May 16, 2023
Learn More: Example Article
Summary:
A deep dive into structuring and formatting scraped HTML content into usable data. This example shows how scraped news articles can be organized efficiently for further analysis or display.

Feel free to modify or adjust the format according to your specific newsletter layout or audience! Let me know if you'd like further customization.

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Here are many of the links from this episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VkR9Sj_dOc
Plus a good Youtuber to watch imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRG_eZJ0CnQ
One thing that came after the interview was a conversation with Eric and we found more then one way to help automate some of his more tedious daily tasks.
For example he gets numerous URLs sent to him daily that he has to verify are not spam. With just a little LLM prompting we can do the following.

• Get the page from the url
• See if the page is a valid technology article related to Laravel, PHP etc
• If it is then mark the link as approved
• if not mark the link as spam!
  Of course it will take some prompt tweaking to get it right but in time as trust is built up he will no longer have to do this task.

https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-3-2-connect-2024-vision-edge-mobile-devices/

This has shown up in a few areas and it is starting to take off. Augmenting your RAG system with chunk context!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmiBae2goJM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI

This is an amazing tool and everyone who wants to see how LLMs can really help them do things like "study a collection of documents", "create FAQs" from a collection of documents, "

And even make a podcast! You can see here I release a few chapters and some PHP LLM news (coming soon)
https://readorlisten.com/episodes/why-llms-chapter-2-of-php-and-llms-the-book

https://github.com/jgravelle/GroqCasters?tab=readme-ov-file

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https://github.com/alnutile/cli_skel

How Can We Optimize AI for the Greatest Good, Instead of Profit?

PHPArchitect - June 2017

Laravel’s Dependency Injection Container in Depth

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Theme, microservice and machine learning

they did mention HashiCorp recently

I am always impressed when I have that experience on a site

Progressive Web Applications

Prototyping with InVision and Sketch

even as a non designer this stuff can be important to get an idea across

context aware API

enriches our understanding of the code quality by overlaying a developer's behavior with the structural analysis of the code

Sadly, many developers simply set up a CI server and falsely assume they are "doing CI" when in reality they miss out on all the benefits. Common failure modes include: running CI against a shared mainline but with infrequent commits, so integration isn't really continuous; running a build with poor test coverage; allowing the build to stay red for long periods; or running CI against feature branches which results in continuous isolation. The ensuing "CI theatre" might make people feel good, but would fail any credible CI certification test.

contract testing

not making code from these tools "Swagger/RAML" till the robots take over

is a tool to programmatically create, schedule and monitor data pipeline

more new and good tools coming out of MS but this time for .NET

man do I wish I had more time https://serverless.com/

Amazon Rekognition

Claudia

Claudia makes it easy to deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway. It automates all the error-prone deployment and configuration tasks, and sets everything up the way JavaScript developers expect out of the box

looks really interesting long term info about servers

Ansilbe role testing!!!!

could be interesting

NLP Processor

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

too much manual qa right now for me

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http://copiedapp.com/

Make sure to enable the keyboard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmA-6hnhljI&feature=youtu.be

https://github.com/alnutile/pickle

https://developer.github.com/v4/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/ibm-to-remote-workers-come-back-to-the-mothership-or-else/

Do not fear the Queue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_queue

The many levels it can benefit your workflow and how you solve problems

Parallel tasks

Connect two different languages with json

Split up services offload work - Microservice

Allows you to work locally on a part of your App that later you can move off to a microservice or worker

Prevent database sharing

Sending Mail

Importing Files

Database buffer

Long running jobs

Locally using Sync Driver

Laracast

https://laracasts.com/search?q=Queue

Beanstalk

SQS

Iron

Forge

FortRabbit with CloudAMQP https://help.fortrabbit.com/cloudamqp

Homestead

AWS SQS

S3 for large payloads

How to deploy

Laravel Daemon pretty simple

Database

--simple start

--local jobs vs remote

Retries

SNS Format

You gotta restart the queue

Interesting how Laravel does it with timestamp

Have wasted a day on this in the past

Logs can will up if queue is erroring out

Failed jobs

Queue has limit 256 k limit

Visibility timeout

Links

Beanstalk

https://laracasts.com/lessons/beanstalkd-queues-with-laravel

etc

https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/queues#supervisor-configuration

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Moom

https://manytricks.com/moom/

http://leafletjs.com/

https://martinfowler.com//bliki/PurposeOfEstimation.html

Just a reminder that quotes are not to lock you in but to help decide if the work is even worth taking on

https://github.com/PavelLoparev/design-patterns

Testing When Why and How

Kent Beck : “I get paid for code that works, not for tests”

How important is it that tests align with the business language and domain context?

Do tests ever get in the way of writing code?

http://stakeholderwhisperer.com/posts/2014/10/introducing-modelling-by-example

Being proud of 100% test coverage is like being proud of reading every word in the newspaper. Some are more important than others. - Kent Beck

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Adam Watham link to Martin Fowler

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html

https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html

Found in PHPArch

https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan

https://shippingdocker.com/

https://github.com/mlantz/DND-Alfred-Workflow

The 4th of 4 as we cover ThoughtWork's Technology Radar - Languages and Frameworks

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/languages-and-frameworks

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Al (tool/app)

https://smilesoftware.com/textexpander

http://lifehacker.com/5843903/the-best-text-expansion-app-for-mac

Even Alfred Plugin

Point is be more efficient including clipboard history into string etc and syncing

NK:

https://www.sitepoint.com/laravel-dusk-intuitive-and-easy-browser-testing-for-all/

Al:

http://johnfergusonsmart.com/five-stages-bdd-agile-adoption/

"define more objective metrics, preferably independent of the process you are following"

ReadOrListen version here http://www.readorlisten.com/15

NK:

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/single-action-controllers-in-laravel

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/platforms

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

https://assets.thoughtworks.com/assets/technology-radar-nov-2016-en.pdf

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Al

NK:

Al

NK: When Trump Tweets, This Bot Makes Money

Discussion pattern

TechRadar

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Tools (Section 2 of 4)

Adopt

babel

Trail

Asses

HOLD

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