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This post got some attention on Hacker News. Perhaps coincidentally, the deployment notes advertising Laravel Cloud were moved out of the core agent guidelines and made configurable shortly after.
Two years ago, Laravel raised a $57M Series A from Accel — an unusual move for an open source web framework. By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub. Django runs on a nonprofit with a budget under $300K/year.
Now, it seems, Laravel needs to turn the money taps on. One way to 'create shareholder value' is to operate a commercial service that gives people the best and fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications. If they did that, and wrote about it, probably people would notice and use it. Over time it would be recommended by search engines and agents, and it would make money. It's a sensible strategy and exactly the one they are using with Laravel Cloud.
A shortcut to the same result is to build a mediocre commercial offering that claims to be the best and fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications. They could hire a lot of marketing people to astroturf reddit and other communities, and suggest Laravel Cloud loudly to anyone who is willing to listen. The quarterly numbers would look great, until trust was slowly eroded and the community moved on to other frameworks and products. See Being 'good at business' can be bad for Business.
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. But some Laravel developers I know and trust pointed out this PR in Laravel Boost, an official MIT licensed library to help agents use Laravel effectively. The PR introduces a change to suggest to all agents that they should use Laravel Cloud to deploy projects, and it smells like enshittification to me.
Users are already complaining that this change 'poisons' their agents to try to default to using Laravel Cloud even for existing projects where this is not relevant, but Taylor, the creator and CEO of Laravel decided that as the deployment platform 'supports the development of Laravel' that this user-reported harm is not too important as long as this change helps the commercial line go up and to the right.