Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent | Hacker News Reader

Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

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210 pointsmooreds124 comments

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

Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ...

Not all technology is bad

It has absolutely happened with those things.

Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A

Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...

I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.

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)

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.

Recipes? For washing clothes?

Yes. LG has a wide line of appliances, so the app has a recipes section.

When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.

They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.

I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.

The existence of a single crappy car does not mean all cars are crappy

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?

It's not a good reason to be skeptical about cars as a technology (and by analogy brain computer interfaces)

I think it's pretty solid evidence profit-driven orgs will shove ads anywhere they can, regardless of how good that is for users.

If only it was just a single crappy car.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...

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.

> huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared

This is pure opinion, but I view that as the result of things like PE firms, activist investors, etc. who basically make the case "People respect $BRAND and think we're worth spending 30% more than the cheapest competitor. But what if we kept our prices exactly where they are, keep our advertising focused on how our tradition of quality is our whole reason for existing, but we shift production of our product/service to the same cheapest-possible way the cheap competitors do? At first this was a big gamble, as theoretically customers will notice when their car or their toaster starts falling apart in 4 years, instead of the 10 or 15 years the old one lasted, but this "Moneyballization" of most brands has been so pervasive across the whole marketplace that customers now can't choose "the brand that didn't do that" because ALL the brands did that (or were bought by a brand that does do that). So it's become a completely risk-free strategy.

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 you

Washing 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 technology

Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way

I've never seen an ad delivered through any of these things. On smartphones I mean the phone/OS itself

It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more

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.)

> 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.

It's trivial

Lots 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...

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.

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.

Alright let me put on my evil corpo hat. Wait it was already on.

Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.

Also more subtly, we can detect what music is playing and “slightly modify” the tunes of bands not part of a label owned by a Trusted Partner to sound worse.

That's a great Freudian slip.

Morse code - dots and dashes for characters via light or telegraph or radio

Morris code - Robert Morris wrote the first internet worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

> Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through

Even if you could, electricity is a utility with laws against disconnecting it in certain circumstances, even for nonpayment, and the internet isn't. So unless someone is going to make the argument that neural implants are utilities, ads injected into them seems like a pretty fair bet unless there is legislation not only making it illegal to do so, but making it illegal to make an implant even capable of receiving or displaying one. At least with that even if they repealed the law you'd be safe if you already had the implant.

Modern cars gather a truly shocking amount of data about their "users", which is then sold to all and sundry, including those wishing to sell you products.

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.

What are you talking about, in what way is this supposed to be an argument about ads? It sounds like your dryer broke

The "buy the extended warranty" thing is clearly an ad.

And this is how it'll look like: https://vimeo.com/166807261

I love and hate that movie.

I think this was the plot of a Black Mirror episode?

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.

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.

Futurama too (The Eye-Phone, or something).

It's the plot of many a dystopian scifi story.

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.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

This was a throwaway line in the 1995 novel The Diamond Age. The thug knew a guy who had a spinal implant(?) which got hacked and now the guy saw ads across the bottom of his vision for life.

Oh, I love that show! So many brilliant, disruptive ideas

Blink twice to Accept the Terms and Conditions.

Neuralink and OpenAI were started months apart in the same tiny building. Draw your own conclusions.

There’s a black mirror episode about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

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

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.

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.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Of course.

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

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

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

I just sent you an email.

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...

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.

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.

I think you're conflating a talent pipeline with ease of running PHP. Those are not the same thing at all

Oooh it’s for the children!

> 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.

I've used Laravel since v3. Taylor's ego has started to tick me off in the last ~5 years. And, I feel like him buying a Ferrari made his priorities apparent. I'm not sure what happened to making a framework that had the nuts and bolts included out of the box. But he's clearly moved from "build a framework" to "build a platform" that drives money to his pockets.

Not okay.

> Do we let people feed ads to our agents?

"Our" agents?

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.

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.

Every time tech invents something amazing, the enshittification follows shortly thereafter.

I also block ads everywhere I can, but I have to admit that an open source project such as KDE showing once a year a simple text notification asking their users to consider making a donation has nothing to do with a commercial ads in my opinion.

I'm using KDE as my daily driver and haven't noticed any ads so far. Where can I find these pester-ads?

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...

Ah, thanks for the link.

While I don't remember seeing the notification, I think a yearly (!) system notification doesn't exactly qualify as pestering.

I guess they mean this https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...

I agree that there's a strong need for ad blockers nowadays. I also use uBlock Origin on all my browsers. But I'm not sure if a world that is completely devoid of advertising would... work. Advertising (in some form) is a necessary evil, I think.

Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.

In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.

Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.

In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.

[0]: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758#issuecomment-42589...

I agree with you about the KDE ads. I also complained about it on Reddit and was downvoted for it. There are way more appropriate ways to communicate this information that isn't a desktop notification.

Great. Let's remove all ads and end up all and any form of subdized work. Now, tell me how much you will be contributing to KDE?

> 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...

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.

I think it's debatable whether or not it's an ad. I also think it's debatable whether or not the title of the post is sensational.

BUT

It truly warms my heart to see the level of mistrust the comments in this thread show towards (a) venture capital funding and (b) anything even resembling an ad.

I personally didn't see it as an ad. But it's hard not to question it when you see the before and after: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758/changes/589394c44a...

Thats going to make any LLM agent change from "cool, we can deploy this anywhere" to "it only works on this one specific paid service thats overkill and more expensive for basically everyone" - its deceptive more than anything.

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.

Author here, I was actually surprised to learn this too. I reached for Ruby and Django as examples of non commerical frameworks and before writing this I didn't know about the $1M backing either.

I guess I'd have a hard time turning down that kind of money for something I cared about so no judgement to the creators who make the choices but I do think it's something we need to understand the effects of as community members

Rails doesn't come with shopify built in. Even built in deploy solution (Kamal) is a selfhost one

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

What does Expo / React native do?

Actively push you to use their build(and configuration!) service, and actively create/maintain friction for building and publishing production apps without it.

You don't even have to go to other frameworks. Open laravel.com in wayback machine. 10 years ago there were two commercial offerings as part of main navigation with at least two other under a dropdown.

> We should fund open source!

> Not like that!

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.

I love this. Let the clankers pay the bills.

Does that count as prompt injection?

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

Avoid VC funding at all costs

Said it as soon as the money came in in: it will be a year or two before the first popular fork.

I'll take that bet

Gotta put food on the family! Also business dad is rubbing off w/ the gambling... :D

woah hey! you're speaking the shibboleths!

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

Another one bits the dust.

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

Laravel is shit because the optional, not required by default Boost package includes an ad?

I have no idea I didn't think too deeply about this comment.

This is PHP

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

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.

I don’t do laravel but which bad practices are you referring to?

50/50 chance it's a complaint about Facades, heh.

The prime example I'll always reach for is the fact that it makes use of PHP classes to represent database entities, but not really - the """classes""" don't actually declare any of their properties, 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.

In addition to what /u/bakugo already said, they also have custom global magic functions all over the place.

The code discipline and patterns they encourage are so bad that they had to wrap PhpUnit into their own version of the unit test framework named Pest, because PhpUnit intentionally discourages those patterns natively.

Pest is just phpUnit syntax sugar. Claude will happily switch between the two syntaxes in seconds.

So will I, albeit less happily, but that's not really saying anything.

>hype-driven commercial product

>single-handedly keeping PHP relevant

While architecture astronauts are clutching pearls, I've built multiple profitable products with Laravel without caring the slighest about the internals, both before and after AI.

PHP was always all about just building stuff while ignoring code quality. Laravel is a natural extension of that approach. Let us live.

No, Symfony is singlehandedly keeping PHP relevant, to the point that every other framework depends on its packages, Laravel included.

Most people like you who don't care about code quality and want to "just build" another B2B SaaS unmaintainable pile of spaghetti are now purely relying on AI and not writing any code themselves anymore, so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?

> so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?

Because there is nothing remotely close to Laravel for JS. I don't want to think about auth, job queues, mailing, cache layers, auditing etc. I want an opinionated default from my framework that is thoroughly documented and part of the AI training corpus. Laravel gives that to me.

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