How to Build Laravel Dashboards Without Writing SQL

If you've ever built a dashboard in Laravel, you know the drill. First, you need routes. Then controllers. Then you write the queries — and if you're dealing with complex aggregations, those queries can get ugly fast. After that comes the chart library integration, the frontend components, and inevitably, the back-and-forth when someone asks for "just one more metric."

The Traditional Approach

The typical Laravel dashboard involves a familiar stack of work:

• Create routes for each dashboard view
• Build controllers to fetch and aggregate data
• Write raw SQL or complex Eloquent queries
• Integrate a charting library (Chart.js, ApexCharts, etc.)
• Build frontend components to display the data
• Handle filtering, date ranges, and drill-downs

For a single dashboard, this might take a few days. But requirements always grow. "Can we add revenue by region?" "What about user signups over time?" Each new request means more queries, more routes, more frontend work.

What Developers Actually Want

When a stakeholder asks "How many users signed up last month?", what developers really want is to just... answer that question. Not spin up a new controller. Not write a GROUP BY query. Not configure another chart component.

The ideal workflow would be:

• Type the question
• Get the answer
• Save it if it's useful
• Move on with your day

The Drop-in Solution Approach

What if there was a package that worked like Laravel Nova, Horizon, or Telescope? Something you could install with a single command and immediately start using?

That's the philosophy behind Lucid. Instead of building dashboards from scratch, you ask questions in plain English. The package understands your database schema, generates the right queries, picks appropriate visualizations, and renders everything — all from a single question.

Introducing Lucid

Lucid is a Laravel package that brings natural language queries to your database. Ask "Show me revenue by month for the last year" and get a chart. Ask "Which products have the highest return rate?" and get a table.

It connects to an LLM that understands your Eloquent models, relationships, and database structure. You don't need to explain your schema — it figures it out automatically.