Building AI Features in Laravel with the Claude API

Why AI in SaaS?

Manual data entry kills productivity. At Smart Provider LLC, we had operators spending hours per day copy-pasting information between systems. The solution: automate it with an LLM.

The Setup

I used Laravel's HTTP client to call the Claude API directly — no SDK needed for basic use cases.

$response = Http::withHeaders([
    'x-api-key' => config('services.claude.key'),
    'anthropic-version' => '2023-06-01',
    'content-type' => 'application/json',
])->post('https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages', [
    'model' => 'claude-sonnet-4-6',
    'max_tokens' => 1024,
    'messages' => [
        ['role' => 'user', 'content' => $prompt],
    ],
]);

Lessons Learned

• Queue your AI calls — never call an LLM synchronously in a web request
• Cache aggressively — same input should hit the cache, not the API
• Validate LLM output — never trust the structure, always parse defensively

The result: ~60% reduction in manual work. Well worth it.