Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent • Hacker News Board

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#101

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #54

ceejayoz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#102

Post by chinathrow » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

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

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#103

Post by chinathrow » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

aculver wrote: post #95

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 h…

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#104

Post by kioleanu » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

aculver wrote: post #95

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 h…

Oooh it’s for the children!

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#105

Post by bojan » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

lexoj wrote: post #52

bakugo wrote: post #36

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?

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#106

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

ivraatiems wrote: post #53

boothby wrote: post #32

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'al…

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

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#107

Post by pc86 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

dgrin91 wrote: post #56

mgraczyk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ... Not all technology is bad

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…

> 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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#108

Post by nextaccountic » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

boothby wrote: post #32

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'al…

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

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#109

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

awongh wrote: post #85

Rapzid wrote: post #79

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#110

Post by embedding-shape » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

chinathrow wrote: post #103

aculver wrote: post #95

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 h…

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.