Everyone’s shouting about AI like it’s a cheat code. And sure, we use it – but not in the way most people do. We’re not spitting out lorem ipsum landing pages. And we’re definitely not letting AI decide the colour palette.
At Brandies, we’re building like it’s 2030 – with real strategy, smart tools, and guardrails that keep things fast without feeling soulless.
Our Stack (And Why We Love It)
Laravel powers our backend
We build SaaS platforms and functional web apps with Laravel because it’s mature, scalable, and plays well with the open-source ecosystem. We’ve got internal standards for how we set up projects, handle auth, manage permissions, and even how we write tests.
Need an API? Laravel’s the engine. Need background jobs, queues, complex business logic? Laravel. Need a weird product idea to launch in three weeks? Laravel again.
WordPress handles our marketing sites
But not the janky, 30-plugin page builder WordPress you’re used to.
We use WordPress the way it wants to be used – custom themes, custom design and bespoke functionality. No off-the-shelf templates. No visual builders. Just fast, beautiful, fully editable frontends that clients love to use (and Google loves to crawl).
If it needs to load fast, feel branded, and live forever? We’re putting it in WordPress.
So Where Does AI Come In?
We use AI like a smart, overly eager junior dev:
super fast, slightly chaotic, occasionally brilliant, and definitely not allowed to push to main. It’s incredibly helpful — when it stays in its lane.
Here’s what it does do for us:
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Scaffolds Laravel boilerplate
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Controllers, models, services, traits, frontend tooling
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User account management, post management and everything in between
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Scaffolds WordPress boilerplate
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Themes, functionality blocks and component architecture for our commonly used blocks. All of which have their own rulesets at the top.
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Generates test data and fixtures so we’re not manually seeding users called John Doe again
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Drafts feature specs from half-scribbled client notes (sometimes too literally… yes, I used an analogy about a pizza to descibe my spec and the output was pizza themed)
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Kickstarts documentation so we can hand back full documentation to clients
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Handles repetitive tasks before we even notice they’re annoying
But the second it starts hallucinating weird logic, installing a 20kb NPM package to do Math.floor(), or suggesting we write our UI in jQuery? It goes straight into the Rulebook. No questions asked. No exceptions. Into the vault. We treat AI like a tool, not a decision-maker. It can help us build, but it doesn’t get to steer the ship, pick the colour palette, or invent user flows that make no sense.
If it starts talking back? We unplug it.
Wait, What’s the Rulebook?
We’ve built a growing internal system of rules, conventions, and banned things.
We haven’t named it yet (naming it with AI felt wrong), but internally, it’s how we keep our builds tight, fast, and not full of weird decisions.
Some of what it covers:
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Project structure
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Package preferences
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Prompt formatting
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Commit style
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Folder layouts
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Component architecture
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API responses
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UI logic standards
Basically: everything that would drift in an AI-first project?
Locked down. Updated weekly. Kept clean.
Every time something breaks, feels stale, or smells wrong – the rulebook evolves.
The Human Bit
Here’s the truth: most AI-built products feel the same. We don’t want to be known as an AI agency. Same design language. Same UX patterns. Same clunky animations. It’s like a thousand different apps wearing the same skin.
Our job is to pull the soul back in – to make sure what gets built actually feels like your product. Not just a reskinned template with your logo slapped on.
We don’t outsource taste to AI. We don’t copy-paste the creativity. We don’t compromise on personality.
Why Clients Come to Us
Clients can come to us when their MVP is already alive – hacked together in a weekend, solving a real problem, but now groaning under the weight of what comes next.
We step in to:
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Rebuild the backend for scale
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Strip the frontend of generic junk
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Refine the UX until it makes sense
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Bring the brand to life properly
We’re not here to build version 0.1. We’re here to take your 0.4 and turn it into a real, scalable, world-class product. Haven’t got the MVP – that’s even more exciting – find out more here.
Let’s Build Something Worth Keeping
If you’ve got something live and you’re ready to level up – or you’re just tired of agencies that throw AI at the wall and hope for the best – let’s talk. We’ll bring the strategy, the stack, and the taste. You bring the idea.
Together? We’ll build something that doesn’t feel like it was made by a robot (unless that’s what you’re going for).
Who are we?
We’re a collective with over 30 years of development experience combined. We are real people, doing real things with in house design, marketing and development we own every part of the project pipeline.
