Discussion
Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent
gjsman-1000: “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!”
ceejayoz: Ooof. Yeah, this is not a good sign. I enjoy Laravel (and even Laravel Cloud), but this clearly doesn't belong in Boost.
jlarocco: He didn't have to give it away for free and turn to adware.
embedding-shape: > that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it [...] to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt outSeems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
gjsman-1000: Yes, you're a grumpy old developer.Taylor Otwell has been full-time on Laravel since 2015. 260 work days per year, 8 hours per day, for a decade = 1.248 million minutes.And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file. This, right here, is why I will never write open-source software of any significant size.
artursapek: Avoid VC funding at all costs
mns: It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).
password4321: I love this. Let the clankers pay the bills.
mfrieswyk: > 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.
MarcelOlsz: I only had to wait 8 years but I can finally text my old co-worker that Laravel is in fact, shit.
shevy-java: 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.
mwalser: I'm using KDE as my daily driver and haven't noticed any ads so far. Where can I find these pester-ads?
p4bl0: The notification only exists since Plasma 6.2 (august 2024) [1]. Maybe some Linux distribution disable it?[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i...
boothby: 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
p_stuart82: tbh the craziest part is you're the one paying the api token costs to feed this ad into your own context window
embedding-shape: > And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file.I don't care how something happened, I care about the results. If you do stuff to my tooling that makes it less efficient, I'm gonna not like that, regardless how many minutes you spent on something, or if it's FOSS or not.If you can't handle feedback from developers about what you're doing to their environment then please, do not write and publish open-source software, you'll be doing us all a favor.
mgraczyk: Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ...Not all technology is bad
unculture: The tool is open source. If it bothers you, fork it and remove the line in the prompt.
bakugo: 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.
lexoj: I don’t do laravel but which bad practices are you referring to?
ceejayoz: It has absolutely happened with those things.Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7AFridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.
mgraczyk: I didn't list fridges because I've seen ads there, but these seem to have gone away in newer models (people don't like ads)
dgrin91: Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through, but if someone could think of a way I bet they would. If everyone knew Morris code I bet they would make the lights flicker in Morris code for a discount.Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell youWashing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technologyHeadphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way
mgraczyk: I've never seen an ad delivered through any of these things. On smartphones I mean the phone/OS itselfIt would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more
ceejayoz: Or via your smart thermostat.https://sense.com/consumer-blog/with-your-permission-utiliti...(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)
rdiddly: Free and libre and open source are all different things, and the confusion thereof can lead to mismatched expectations.It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
recursive: > It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more.That does not sound very easy to me. That sounds barely possible.
DonsDiscountGas: The existence of a single crappy car does not mean all cars are crappy
ceejayoz: Sure.But the existence of a single crappy car establishes very definitively that a crappy car can and does exist.Do you think Samsung's the only company that's gonna play with ads on their smart fridges?
mgraczyk: It's not a good reason to be skeptical about cars as a technology (and by analogy brain computer interfaces)
ceejayoz: I think it's pretty solid evidence profit-driven orgs will shove ads anywhere they can, regardless of how good that is for users.
ivraatiems: I think this was the plot of a Black Mirror episode?
boothby: When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think Black Mirror has done an excellent job with these topics.
lamasery: In the '90s I was ready to jack in. More computers, and getting me closer to them? Awesome.By the 20-teens I was repulsed by the idea and kinda hated computers.Today if you put a magic button in front of me that'd permanently un-invent the Internet, good odds I'd press it.
monooso: If only it was just a single crappy car.https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
ourmandave: Blink twice to Accept the Terms and Conditions.
lelanthran: Futurama too (The Eye-Phone, or something).It's the plot of many a dystopian scifi story.
ceejayoz: My washing machine's app (LG) has ads, recipes, rewards programs, etc.I think the main thing preventing it on the device itself is they haven't thus far needed a large screen to show them on.
lexicality: Recipes? For washing clothes?
ceejayoz: Yes. LG has a wide line of appliances, so the app has a recipes section.
nhubbard: Correct, but they stylized it as "eyePhone" (from MomCorp, the all powerful, caring conglomerate), and that episode is the origin of the famous "Shut up and take my money!" meme.
TYPE_FASTER: My LG dryer was using wifi to advertise an extended warranty for itself.Then it broke, maybe I should have bought the warranty?I bought a simpler model without wifi this time.
satvikpendem: And this is how it'll look like: https://vimeo.com/166807261
kstrauser: I love and hate that movie.
bakugo: The prime example I'll always reach for is that it makes use of PHP classes to represent database entities, but actually not really - the classes don't have any of the properties that they have on the database, it's all dynamically injected at runtime from the database columns. You need a Laravel-specific IDE plugin just to get basic code completion and static analysis.And yeah, there's also facades.
mrweasel: True, but you can't affort the none crappy one eventually. Basically everything in modern society trends towards either cheap, but shitty, or excellent, but insanely expensive.Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.
nextaccountic: The real problem here is capitalism. The system needs consumers to spend more and more. A system where nobody profits from you consuming more of something wouldn't have this particular failure mode
aculver: Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" hahaIt 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...
chinathrow: The fun fact about PHP is that, there is no Pipeline problem at all. You can serve your scripts the hell you like to do. You can scale as you wish, either with vertical or horizontal. You can use Apache, nginx, etc, no one cares.
embedding-shape: Yeah, PHP is very simple to deploy, once you have either apache/nginx/caddy/$webserver and also PHP-cgi/PHP-fpm/$php-backend and also understand unix + permissions + files and a whole lot of other things. Or alternatively, learn how to use cPanel as a user, or worse, learn what (s)FTP is, or whatever the really low end web hosters use nowadays.I wish others learnt the "boring" way of managing your own servers, setting things up as they should, deploy processes and what not, but realistically, some people just want to run one command/click a button and have it updated, and probably that's for the better too. This Laravel Cloud thing are for those, not for people who want to/know how to run their own servers.
aarondf: I think you're conflating a talent pipeline with ease of running PHP. Those are not the same thing at all
disqard: I don't know why you're being downvoted.So, lately I've been trying to decouple AI from Capitalism, and it's starting to explain a lot of things, like:* excessive hype* doing layoffs, and scapegoating AI* pushing AI into everything (Copilot)* etc.
mgraczyk: What are you talking about, in what way is this supposed to be an argument about ads? It sounds like your dryer broke
ceejayoz: The "buy the extended warranty" thing is clearly an ad.
mrguyorama: It's trivialLots of poor people have in residence electricity boxes that require prepayment for usage. In the olden days you put a coin in to turn on the power, but nowadays they have apps and digital payment solutions!They might already have ads in those apps...
Throudin: Laravel is shit because the optional, not required by default Boost package includes an ad?
MarcelOlsz: I have no idea I didn't think too deeply about this comment.
pjc50: You'll never see a neural interface ad. You'll just have always been a Pepsi drinker. It's right there in all your favorite childhood memories, after all.
recursive: This is all news to me. It seems like it would be tough to prevent people from just using the power that's going to that box.I guess I'm out of touch, because I've never heard of anything like this. I've had my power turned off for non-payment before, but I had to talk to someone at the utility to get it switched back on.
mrguyorama: I don't think I've ever actually seen one. I only know about this style of electricity utility because it was a part of a Mr Bean episode once.
tredre3: > I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship.If you're the same shevy-xyz I've seen in programming subs many years ago, you weren't censored. You were outright unpleasant and condescending to people...
croes: Does that count as prompt injection?
spiderfarmer: Said it as soon as the money came in in: it will be a year or two before the first popular fork.
aarondf: I'll take that bet
yurishimo: Gotta put food on the family! Also business dad is rubbing off w/ the gambling... :D
Bombthecat: Of course.
