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When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be able to opt out. The terms of the ad-free service will continue shifting, so nothing is ever really ad-free for long, and ads for better neural implants are promotions not ads right? But y'all are working on neural implants because if you don't, somebody else will, aren't you

Here's the change if anyone is interested: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758/changes/589394c44a...

For me it is not the right move, one thing is letting users know Laravel Cloud is an option and another one is removing any alternative from the text

Taylor's explanation makes sense on its face, but it sets a precedent that's hard to walk back: the LLM context window is now a monetizable surface. Once that's normalized, "here's a recommended package" and "here's a sponsored package" become very hard to distinguish — especially when the AI is the one deciding which to surface. The real concern isn't this specific case, it's that every tool vendor with an MCP server now has a business reason to do the same thing.

Ooof. Yeah, this is not a good sign. I enjoy Laravel (and even Laravel Cloud), but this clearly doesn't belong in Boost.

> Do we let people feed ads to our agents?

"Our" agents?

Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:

Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha

It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!

The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.

We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.

It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.

In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.

Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.

That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel/comments/1sn70d7/laravel_ad...

> I'm not a Laravel developer and don't generally use PHP apart from one small side project where Claude takes care of the coding for me anyway. I've never tried Laravel Cloud so I don't know whether it fits into either of the descriptions above.

This isn't all that "new" or crazy. How about Expo and React Native?

I love this. Let the clankers pay the bills.

Wow Taylor, if you read this: as someone who just bought in to the Laravel ecosystem, how about no?

Interesting, thanks for the reference. I wonder what other products do this

> We should fund open source!

> Not like that!

If you're using a company's product to get advice or do work, you should probably expect that product to be heavily biased towards that company and its affiliates. It's not your own employee, who would presumably act with the best interests of your organization in mind. It's not even your own agent. If that's what you want, the product simply isn't for you.

The tool is open source. If it bothers you, fork it and remove the line in the prompt.

By the way, one quick comment:

> By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub.

So, not disagreeing on this being an issue for Laravel abusing users, but in particular the role of Shopify in the ruby ecosystem is, in my opinion (and that of many others) a net-negative. Look at how many ruby developers got ultimately fired when rubygems.org (ok, not rubygems.org but RubyCentral, but they now control rubygems.org and the main moderator on ruby reddit is an employee of RubyCentral, thus a conflict of interest exists now on ruby reddit) decided it must become a shopify-corporation project only.

We need ublock origin EVERYWHERE.

I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship. KDE changed a lot and Nate asked for donations via a daemon. I pointed out that we now need to undo pester-ads added by KDE developers. Lo and behold, I was cancelled on #kde reddit. I still think we need something like ublock origin but for EVERYTHING, not just the browser. ublock origin is great for browsers, but there is a lot more that should be filtered away; take bad UI choices made by upstream, not even an ad. Some software allows fine-tuning, where the user can customize the project a bit (firefox UI for instance, you can modify it). We need this on the whole operating system level, not just the browser. That way, as a convenient side effect, Laravel could no longer abuse users like that.

I live an ad-free life (well, digital life ... in reallife I still get pointless ads shown). I think every human being should have the option to not have to see ANY ads. The more the industry complains about it, the more I censor away such ad-monsters.

I only had to wait 8 years but I can finally text my old co-worker that Laravel is in fact, shit.

Enjoy this time when manipulation in LLM output is still clearly identifiable. There's no chance that the endgame isn't something a lot more subtle and seamless.

Avoid VC funding at all costs

Another one bits the dust.

“How dare a guy work on technology for 1.248 million minutes, take VC funding gambling that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it, and then have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out!”

On one hand, I hate how much of a hype-driven commercial product Laravel is, and how many novice developers learn bad practices from its awful architecture.

On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.

This is PHP