Marcel Pociot

Marcel Pociot is a German developer and co-founder best known for building developer tools for the PHP and Laravel world through Beyond Code, the small company he runs with Sebastian Schlein. Tinkerwell, Expose and Laravel Herd all started as his ideas.

Pociot made his name in open source as the creator of BotMan, a PHP framework for building chatbots across messaging platforms, and as a Laravel package author and conference speaker. In 2017 he and Schlein founded Beyond Code, describing it as a company built to make web developers' lives easier. Their first products were video courses: Build A Chatbot and PHP Package Development.

Their breakout product was Tinkerwell, a desktop code runner that turns Laravel's php artisan tinker into an editor with instant results. Pociot built it in public on Twitter, moved it from Swift to Electron so it could run on every operating system, and sold licences through Paddle. In a 2020 post he reported more than 5,000 licences sold in the first 12 months. Expose, a tunnelling tool for sharing local sites, followed, along with other apps for PHP developers.

Beyond Code then built Laravel Herd, a fast, one-click local PHP and Laravel development environment for macOS and Windows that it develops with the Laravel team. It was released at Laracon US in July 2023, first for macOS only. Herd became one of the default ways to set up Laravel locally.

More recently Pociot's focus has shifted to AI coding: he is building Polyscope, an agent-first development environment that lets developers run several AI coding agents in parallel workspaces and review their work in the browser, sold with a free tier and paid Pro and Team plans. Beyond Code remains a small, bootstrapped team, and Pociot shares product numbers and lessons openly with the Laravel community.