Laravel Rick

Durable AI workflows for Laravel.

Rick is a runtime for long-running, recoverable, cost-aware AI workflows. It wraps your Laravel AI agents and plain PHP steps in durable execution — with recovery, provider-attempt accounting, token and cost budgets, tenant isolation, human input gates, and a testing façade.

Why Rick?

A single Agent::prompt() call is easy. A business process is not:

• a crash after the provider charged you should not charge you again on retry;
• a human approval may arrive hours later, in a different process;
• every tenant must see only its own runs;
• token and cost budgets must hold even under queue redelivery.

Rick wraps the Laravel AI agents you already write in a persisted, recoverable workflow. The agent stays an agent; Rick owns the durable process around it.

Before Rick / With Rick

Core features

• Durable execution — runs survive process restarts; suspended runs stay readable across deploys.
• Recovery — immutable recovery lineage, and reuse of already-succeeded provider work.
• Provider-attempt accounting — every paid call is tracked; redelivery never double-charges.
• Token & cost budgets — enforced across recovery, with a known-pricing policy.
• Tenant isolation — runs, steps, and observations are tenant-scoped.
• Transactional outbox — events and jobs are delivered durably after commit (at least once; workers stay idempotent).
• Plain PHP steps — any invokable is a workflow step; write business logic, not engine primitives.
• Laravel AI agents — ->agent(MyAgent::class) adapts an agent into exactly one audited call.
• Human input gates — awaitHuman() with JSON-schema validation.
• Testing façade — Rick::fake() asserts against the real snapshot and timeline.

Design principles

• One engine. The public API compiles into the same execution engine — no second runtime.
• Explicit durability. At-least-once semantics are stated, never implied.
• Deterministic persistence. Versioned JSON codecs and encrypted payloads; no PHP serialization.
• A small public surface. A workflow reads like the business process, not the engine.
• Fail loud. Unsupported agent capabilities are rejected, not silently downgraded.

What a workflow looks like

<?php

namespace App\Workflows;

use App\Ai\Agents\ExtractClaimFacts;
use App\Ai\Agents\FlagRisk;
use App\WorkflowSteps\LoadClaim;
use App\WorkflowSteps\StoreDecision;
use Rick\Laravel\Workflow;
use Rick\Laravel\WorkflowBuilder;

final class ClaimDecisionWorkflow extends Workflow
{
    public function name(): string
    {
        return 'claim-decision';
    }

    public function version(): string
    {
        return '1.0.0';
    }

    public function build(WorkflowBuilder $workflow): WorkflowBuilder
    {
        return $workflow
            ->budget(maxCostUsd: '0.25')
            ->step(LoadClaim::class, as: 'load-claim', label: 'Loading claim')
            ->agent(ExtractClaimFacts::class, as: 'facts', label: 'Extracting claim facts')
            ->agent(FlagRisk::class, as: 'risk', label: 'Flagging risk')
            ->awaitHuman('approve', schema: ['approved' => ['required', 'boolean']])
            ->step(StoreDecision::class, as: 'store-decision', label: 'Storing decision')
            ->output('decision');
    }
}

An application step is an ordinary invokable class:

<?php

namespace App\WorkflowSteps;

use App\Models\Claim;
use Rick\Laravel\WorkflowState;

final class LoadClaim
{
    public function __invoke(WorkflowState $state): void
    {
        $claim = Claim::query()->findOrFail($state->input('claim_id'));

        $state->put('claim', [
            'id' => $claim->id,
            'body' => $claim->body,
        ]);
    }
}

An agent is an ordinary Laravel AI agent:

<?php

namespace App\Ai\Agents;

use Laravel\Ai\Contracts\Agent;
use Laravel\Ai\Promptable;

final class FlagRisk implements Agent
{
    use Promptable;

    public function instructions(): string
    {
        return 'Assess the legal risk of the supplied claim facts and return a short verdict.';
    }
}

Start it and drive it:

use Rick\Laravel\Rick;

$run = ClaimDecisionWorkflow::start([
    'claim_id' => $claim->id,
]);

$progress = $run->progress();

// awaitHuman is an input gate: read the pending key, then submit the payload.
if ($run->pendingInteraction()->exists()) {
    $rick = app(Rick::class);
    $pending = $rick->pendingInput($run->id());
    $rick->submitInput($run->id(), $pending->key, ['approved' => true]);
}

When a run fails, retry it without mutating history or re-paying for work that already succeeded:

$child = $failedRun->retry();

Installation

Laravel Rick requires PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 12 or 13.

composer require rickphp/laravel-rick:^0.4
php artisan migrate

Provider setup

For OpenRouter, add your key and model to .env:

OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your-key-here
RICK_LLM_PROVIDER=openrouter
RICK_LLM_MODEL=google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite

Publish the package configuration:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=rick-config

Then route the medium tier in config/rick.php:

'medium' => [
    'provider' => env('RICK_LLM_PROVIDER', 'openrouter'),
    'model' => env('RICK_LLM_MODEL'),
],

After changing .env or configuration, run php artisan config:clear.

Quick start

Generate a workflow and run a minimal durable prompt:

php artisan make:rick-workflow ContractReview

The lowest-friction start is still a raw prompt as a durable workflow:

use Rick\Laravel\Rick;

$rick = app(Rick::class);

$workflow = $rick->workflow('summary')
    ->rawPrompt('Summarize the latest customer feedback.')
    ->build();

$run = $rick->run($workflow);

echo $run->output();

Testing without provider calls

use Rick\Laravel\Rick;
use App\Workflows\ClaimDecisionWorkflow;

$fake = app(Rick::class)->fake();
$fake->agent('facts', 'The claimant was in a rear-end collision.');
$fake->agent('risk', 'Low risk.');

$run = ClaimDecisionWorkflow::start(['claim_id' => 42]);

$fake->assertStepRan($run, 'load-claim');
$fake->assertStepRan($run, 'risk');
$fake->assertAwaitingHuman($run);
$fake->assertProviderAttempts(2);

Documentation

• Installation and configuration
• Building workflows
• Application steps
• Laravel AI agents
• Workflow state
• Runs and progress
• Public API
• Testing without provider calls
• Queues and transactional outbox
• Recovery

Project

• See CHANGELOG.md for release history.
• Laravel Rick is released under the MIT License.