Nova Fields Agent Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Responsive admin UX scoping. The package's entire premise is a per-field flag for "hide this column on mobile." That's a real product decision for back-office tooling: which columns earn scarce phone-screen real estate. If your admins work from phones (field ops, on-call approvals, sales reps), this is a cheap, targeted lever.
• Build vs. buy. The strongest decision this informs is not to buy. The capability is a CSS media query wrapped in a Nova field class — roughly an afternoon of work. With 10 stars, 0 dependents, and no release since December 2019, adopting it means owning an abandoned dependency for a feature you can write and maintain yourself.
• Column prioritization as a roadmap item. It's a forcing function to ask "which five columns actually matter on a 390px viewport?" That conversation is more valuable than the package.
• Investment in mobile admin surfaces at all. Before adding this, confirm via analytics what share of Nova sessions are mobile. If it's under a few percent, this is a solution looking for a problem.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it (as a reference implementation, not a dependency) when:

• You already run Laravel Nova, and mobile admin usage is measurable and non-trivial.
• You want a declarative, per-field syntax (hideOnMobile()-style) rather than hand-maintaining a block of custom CSS in Nova::style().
• You're willing to fork and vendor it, since there is no maintainer activity to rely on.

Look elsewhere or build in-house when:

• You're on Nova 4 or 5. A 2019 release almost certainly targets Nova 2/3 APIs and PHP 7.x. Verify composer.json constraints before spending any time; expect incompatibility.
• You need a supported dependency. Zero dependents means zero community validation, no issue triage, and no security response. For anything touching an admin panel that exposes production data, that's a supply-chain cost that dwarfs the benefit.
• Nova's built-ins suffice. hideFromIndex(), onlyOnDetail(), or a few @media rules in Nova's custom CSS cover most cases with no third-party code.
• You don't pay for Nova. The addressable market here is Nova licensees only — a narrow, commercial-gated niche. That's why the scores are low and why the ecosystem around it is thin.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Summary: A small Nova field that hides resource-table columns on mobile screens. It solves a genuine but minor problem — cramped admin tables on phones — with a few lines of CSS.

Recommendation: adopt the pattern, not the package. The dependency is unmaintained (last release December 2019), has essentially no adoption (10 stars, 0 dependents), and is very likely incompatible with current Nova. The value it delivers is reproducible in-house in a few engineer-hours, and doing so keeps us on supported Nova versions and out of an unmaintained code path.

Cost and risk: Near-zero engineering cost to replicate; non-zero ongoing cost to carry an abandoned dependency through every Nova upgrade. Nova itself is a paid license, so this only matters if we're already committed to Nova — and it only pays off if our admin traffic is meaningfully mobile.

Decision requested: Approve a small spike to replicate the behavior in our own Nova tooling, gated on a quick check of admin sessions by device class. Do not add the package to composer.json.