Debug Information

Processing Details

• VTT File: 11c22fee.vtt
• Processing Time: September 11, 2025 at 01:29 PM
• Total Chunks: 1
• Transcript Length: 61,814 characters
• Caption Count: 511 captions

Prompts Used

Prompt 1: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 1 of 1 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
[00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:04.880] Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder podcast.
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:20.640] Today, I'm talking to Taylor Otwall, the creator of the Laravel framework for PHP, and an outstanding entrepreneur who figured out how to turn open source software into Lamborghinis.
[00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:33.280] Seriously, Taylor's approach to building not just the framework, but a whole ecosystem of businesses on top of that framework is one of the most impressive open source monetization stories I've ever seen.
[00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:40.160] It's quite fitting that Laravel has, therefore, also embraced the sponsor of this episode, Paddle.com.
[00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:54.800] Paddle is a merchant of record payment provider, and they are deeply integrated into both the open source library cashier, which is free, and the for pay payment portal, Laravel Spark, one of the many ways that Taylor is monetizing his work.
[00:00:54.800 --> 00:00:56.800] So it's open source and for pay.
[00:00:56.800 --> 00:00:58.240] It's a very interesting story.
[00:00:58.240 --> 00:01:07.520] So, if you want to monetize your own software work without having to deal with stuff like sales tax and expired credit cards, give Paddle a shot at paddle.com.
[00:01:07.520 --> 00:01:13.840] They're supremely good at making your founder life easier so you can build your business on solid foundations.
[00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:16.160] So, let's talk about foundational frameworks.
[00:01:16.160 --> 00:01:19.760] Here's Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel.
[00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:25.040] Congrats, Taylor, on half a million deployments on Laravel Cloud.
[00:01:25.040 --> 00:01:26.080] That is amazing.
[00:01:26.320 --> 00:01:31.280] How does it feel to see people building on your own platform at that scale already?
[00:01:31.280 --> 00:01:33.280] A couple months after you release the thing?
[00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:34.160] Yeah, wow.
[00:01:34.800 --> 00:01:36.320] It's pretty surreal.
[00:01:36.320 --> 00:01:45.680] And it's especially surreal thinking back to how it all started, which is basically like a casual conversation in Amsterdam by a few of us at Laravel.
[00:01:45.680 --> 00:01:47.760] There were not many of us at Laravel at the time.
[00:01:47.760 --> 00:01:50.880] There were probably only nine or 10 of us.
[00:01:50.880 --> 00:01:53.040] And now there's like 70.
[00:01:53.040 --> 00:02:00.120] So just thinking back to that conversation where Laravel Cloud was just an idea and we hoped we could build it.
[00:01:59.680 --> 00:02:06.600] You know, we hoped we could figure it out and crack it to now where it's live and thousands of people are using it.
[00:02:06.920 --> 00:02:10.840] And there's, you know, so many people deploying on it is really, it's pretty mind-blowing.
[00:02:10.840 --> 00:02:13.400] But I'm super happy with where we're at.
[00:02:13.400 --> 00:02:15.800] And honestly, I think we're just kind of getting started with it.
[00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:18.760] So I'm even more excited about where we're heading with it.
[00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:19.400] Yeah, I bet.
[00:02:19.720 --> 00:02:21.240] That is such an accomplishment.
[00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:27.320] I think like just seeing you develop both the idea and then teasing it a little bit at the Laricons and all of that.
[00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:32.680] It felt like it was a concerted effort, but it also felt very natural in the way that it was built.
[00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:33.720] That's really cool.
[00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:48.040] And looking at the Laravel ecosystem in particular, like the products that existed prior to cloud, I can't help but feel like you worked your way, you iterated your way to cloud, to Forge and Voya, where hosting and deployment.
[00:02:48.360 --> 00:02:52.280] Did this make it easier to actually build a full cloud system?
[00:02:53.400 --> 00:02:55.000] Yeah, that is kind of interesting.
[00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:03.560] Like Laravel Cloud and fully managed Laravel deployment and hosting is something I've danced around for like the last 10 years, it feels like.
[00:03:03.560 --> 00:03:12.760] And when I first built Forge in 2014, I really would have built it more like cloud as like a fully managed platform if I was able to.
[00:03:12.760 --> 00:03:16.040] It was just me, you know, like hacking on this idea in my free time.
[00:03:16.040 --> 00:03:21.480] And I didn't want the risk of managing all of this infrastructure as like a solo bootstrapped founder.
[00:03:21.480 --> 00:03:25.400] So I built Laravel Forge where people could bring their own cloud account.
[00:03:25.400 --> 00:03:31.960] Hey, if there's something happens with the servers that they're running the apps on, that's sort of like DigitalOcean's problem, you know what I mean?
[00:03:31.960 --> 00:03:34.200] It's not, or AWS's problem.
[00:03:34.200 --> 00:03:42.600] But yeah, we have been kind of working our way towards this with things like Forge and Envoy and Vapor for a long time.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:50.480] And, you know, building something like cloud just takes a much bigger team and much bigger risk, honestly.
[00:03:50.640 --> 00:03:55.840] You know, you're just taking on, you're biting off a lot more when you take on a problem like this.
[00:03:55.840 --> 00:03:59.920] So we finally got here, you know, in 2025, all these years later.
[00:03:59.920 --> 00:04:01.680] And, you know, it's an exciting time.
[00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:05.760] It sounds like you unlocked something inside your founder brain for this, right?
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:06.640] Like, how did that happen?
[00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:07.440] Like, what did you do?
[00:04:07.440 --> 00:04:11.520] Because honestly, I would be so scared to lead a team of 70 people, let alone seven people.
[00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:14.960] Like, how did you massage that into your mind?
[00:04:14.960 --> 00:04:22.880] I mean, as you may know, I bootstrapped Laravel from 2011 until 2024.
[00:04:23.200 --> 00:04:39.840] And in that time, I launched, you know, five commercial products: Forge, Envoy, or Vapor, Nova Spark, and something like 27 or 28 open source packages, in addition to the framework itself, which is like the core of the whole thing.
[00:04:40.160 --> 00:04:54.640] And in 2024, or really, I guess, 2023, I felt like I was sort of like at this crossroads with Laravel of like, man, I've really built almost everything I wanted to build, every idea I had.
[00:04:54.640 --> 00:04:59.760] The whole idea for Laravel was only to create a tool to help me build startups faster.
[00:04:59.760 --> 00:05:04.560] And then that became like the meta business that ended up becoming my career.
[00:05:04.560 --> 00:05:10.880] And so it was almost like I can either coast and be like, okay, that was a solid run, you know, like an open source.
[00:05:10.880 --> 00:05:16.000] Few people are able to enjoy that level of open source success.
[00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:29.760] Or there's like sort of a next level that we could go to, which is building something much more ambitious, also much more risky, but maybe a much higher reward with things like Laravel Cloud and Laravel Nightwatch, which is coming out soon as well.
[00:05:29.880 --> 00:05:49.480] And, you know, that was just kind of what I wrestled with for a long time and obviously decided to sort of swing for the fences with Laravel Cloud and try building a business with investment money, you know, to build these much bigger, more ambitious things that I couldn't build on my own without great personal risk and liability.
[00:05:49.800 --> 00:05:52.280] So, and I basically felt like I owed it to the community.
[00:05:52.280 --> 00:05:59.960] Is what it boiled down to, I felt like if I just sort of coasted, it was like, okay, guys, that's sort of the peak.
[00:05:59.960 --> 00:06:03.880] You know, that's that's where it sort of tops out.
[00:06:03.880 --> 00:06:11.400] I felt like that would be just such a bummer for like the tens or hundreds of thousands of Laravel developers in the world that have been along for the whole thing.
[00:06:11.400 --> 00:06:14.760] And so that's ultimately what led to deciding to pursue cloud.
[00:06:14.760 --> 00:06:15.240] Interesting.
[00:06:15.240 --> 00:06:19.240] Yeah, there's this concept of the benevolent dictator for life, right?
[00:06:19.240 --> 00:06:21.480] That always exists in the open source world.
[00:06:21.480 --> 00:06:23.880] And that can go either way, right?
[00:06:23.880 --> 00:06:29.960] Either you can just do whatever you want as a dictator, or you can try to be the benevolent part and serve your community.
[00:06:29.960 --> 00:06:30.840] That's an interesting one.
[00:06:30.840 --> 00:06:32.840] I do wonder, like, how do you balance this?
[00:06:32.840 --> 00:06:40.360] Because, particularly with cloud being a very much for-profit enterprise and having investment, having funding.
[00:06:40.360 --> 00:06:50.440] And on the other side, you have this open source community of people who often have the expectation that things should be free and things should be, you know, like designed by open source contributor committee.
[00:06:50.440 --> 00:06:53.960] How do you balance expectations between these kind of groups of people?
[00:06:53.960 --> 00:06:57.800] We really just try to let, I think, our behavior do the talking.
[00:06:57.800 --> 00:06:59.800] You know, I think that's really the best way to do it.
[00:06:59.800 --> 00:07:10.600] So, like, we have full-time staff working on open source, and we release open source every week and honestly at greater frequency than we did before, just because we have more resources behind it.
[00:07:10.600 --> 00:07:18.000] I think Laravel is also in this really unique position with cloud and Forge to where we almost have like both sides of the coin.
[00:07:18.160 --> 00:07:25.440] You know, like we have this fully managed platform for people that just want to kind of deploy and they never want to think about servers.
[00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:29.120] And if they pay a little bit of a premium for that at the end of the day, that's fine.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:40.240] And then we also have Forge, which is like this kind of semi-managed server management platform, which we're rebuilding entirely for Laricon this summer, which is going to be cool.
[00:07:40.240 --> 00:07:51.120] And people can bring their own cloud provider or whatever they want and, you know, throw 50 sites on a single server and really like get a lot of juice out of that server for the amount of spend they're putting into it.
[00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:53.520] And, you know, I think Laravel is unique to like offer both.
[00:07:53.520 --> 00:08:01.520] Like whatever's better for you, we're just trying to help you deploy your application and enjoy using this framework and you can kind of take either path.
[00:08:01.520 --> 00:08:12.320] So open source, like we know, and I know, and I think the company knows, if we don't have Laravel and we're not committed to open source in the community, like no one's going to be using this stuff.
[00:08:12.320 --> 00:08:16.640] So we have to be more committed to that than ever, basically.
[00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:20.320] Yeah, I've always admired the strategy that you have just laid out, right?
[00:08:20.320 --> 00:08:25.680] You build products that help people use the tool that you also build, and then you use the tool to build the products.
[00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:28.800] Like there's a lot of synergistic effects between these.
[00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:29.520] That makes sense.
[00:08:29.520 --> 00:08:33.360] And that to me is something that is, well, not completely unique.
[00:08:33.360 --> 00:08:39.840] Like other open source communities try to emulate this, but it is very efficient in the Laravel world.
[00:08:39.840 --> 00:08:41.760] Like you just mentioned five products.
[00:08:41.760 --> 00:08:44.880] I use four out of these for my software stack.
[00:08:44.880 --> 00:08:46.800] So you said you built five products.
[00:08:46.800 --> 00:08:49.600] You had like a five for five success with these products.
[00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:53.520] Like, were there any along the way that you kind of tried to build and they didn't work?
[00:08:53.520 --> 00:08:57.840] Or is it all like Vapor, Forge, and Voyer, and you know, like the other things?
[00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:00.440] Like, did that all work like from the beginning?
[00:08:59.440 --> 00:09:06.360] Like, that is such a, such a rare thing in the serial founder world for that to actually happen.
[00:09:06.360 --> 00:09:08.120] Yeah, it is pretty crazy.
[00:09:08.120 --> 00:09:12.680] Um, there was one product that I built all the way through that I never actually launched.
[00:09:12.680 --> 00:09:14.760] So I don't know if it would have succeeded or failed.
[00:09:14.760 --> 00:09:26.120] And it was actually called Laravel Cloud at the time, but it was more like a Laravel Forge reimagining that helped you deploy like load-balanced VPSs and you had like a YAML config file.
[00:09:26.120 --> 00:09:30.600] It was just a little bit different, but I got it all the way to completion.
[00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:36.280] It had a UI built by Steve Shoger, I believe, from Tailwind, because he worked for Laravel at the time.
[00:09:36.280 --> 00:09:42.040] And at the end of the day, I was like, this just isn't different enough from Forge to actually be compelling.
[00:09:42.040 --> 00:09:44.200] It's actually like sort of confusing.
[00:09:44.200 --> 00:09:48.520] There's no clear difference between the two products besides a few like minor things.
[00:09:48.520 --> 00:09:50.200] And I just like didn't even launch it.
[00:09:50.440 --> 00:09:54.920] I just tabled it, which is crazy because the whole thing was built, the back end, the front end, everything.
[00:09:54.920 --> 00:09:57.320] But, you know, I just think it would have kind of confused things.
[00:09:57.320 --> 00:10:00.360] So other than that, you know, everything kind of worked.
[00:10:00.360 --> 00:10:02.840] But the whole way, though, I was just solving my own problems.
[00:10:02.840 --> 00:10:07.000] I wasn't really trying to like, in many ways, I wasn't even trying to build products.
[00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:33.600] I was just like, especially with something like Vapor, I was just personally interested in AWS Lambda and could I get Laravel running on it and could I like build a deployment platform on it and I just I went down that road for like six months or whatever and I was like well I guess I'll ship this thing and you know it just kind of worked out so a lot of kind of happy accidents some pre-planning and masterful thinking but a lot of happy accidents as well yeah that that's that sounds like coding to me.
[00:10:33.600 --> 00:10:36.400] Yeah, that's for sure and and software entrepreneurship for that matter, right?
[00:10:36.400 --> 00:10:38.240] Like trying to figure things out as you go.
[00:10:38.280 --> 00:10:53.120] I do wonder now that you have cloud, now that you have these massive numbers of deployments, and probably also other kinds of products that people are trying to deploy than you may have seen before on Forge or whatever, how does that impact the actual framework?
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:58.320] Like, how does your experience with this at scale impact your plans for the framework in the future?
[00:10:58.320 --> 00:11:00.000] Yeah, there's been a few things.
[00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:09.040] I wouldn't say they're major things, but like when we start thinking about the scaling systems in cloud, we need maybe more insights into what's happening in the queue.
[00:11:09.040 --> 00:11:12.000] For example, like how long are jobs sitting on the queue?
[00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:13.200] How long are they running on the queue?
[00:11:13.200 --> 00:11:14.400] What's the oldest job on the queue?
[00:11:14.400 --> 00:11:19.520] Like that kind of info that we haven't exposed before, maybe unless you're using something like Laravel Horizon.
[00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:25.040] But for all queue drivers, we need that information to like intelligently auto-scale.
[00:11:25.280 --> 00:11:31.280] There were a few other minor things we added to the framework to make like, you know, file storage easier with cloud or something like that.
[00:11:31.280 --> 00:11:35.440] But honestly, we didn't change any major pieces of the framework.
[00:11:35.440 --> 00:11:52.080] I think what's interesting for me on cloud, though, that I didn't expect in terms of like the types of applications we're seeing or maybe customers is when we first built cloud, I kind of wondered like, or at least one of the fears I had was everyone's already kind of deployed their Laravel apps on Forge.
[00:11:52.640 --> 00:11:54.960] So why come to cloud?
[00:11:54.960 --> 00:12:16.960] But I think what we're discovering is there actually was this like contingent of a little bit larger applications that maybe were rolling their own Kubernetes at some company and they're having headaches with it all the time because it's complicated and they would love to run something fully managed, but they felt like Forge was not quite enough for them and cloud kind of hits that sweet spot.
[00:12:16.960 --> 00:12:24.720] So we are seeing customers like that that I didn't expect, which is really cool to hear their stories and to talk to them and to try to get them on cloud and help them be successful.
[00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:28.800] Yeah, that sounds like you're getting into a new segment of customers here.
[00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:29.440] Yeah, right.
[00:12:29.440 --> 00:12:30.000] A little bit.
[00:12:30.200 --> 00:12:34.680] That's really fun and probably like highly promising for the success of the platform.
[00:12:34.680 --> 00:12:36.200] Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about it.
[00:12:36.200 --> 00:12:36.840] It's fun.
[00:12:36.840 --> 00:12:43.160] Has people using Laravel on the cloud surfaced something about Laravel that you didn't expect to see?
[00:12:43.160 --> 00:12:45.160] Like, is there any surprise in there?
[00:12:45.160 --> 00:12:46.040] Or has there been?
[00:12:46.040 --> 00:12:46.600] Oh, gosh.
[00:12:46.600 --> 00:12:49.320] You know, we see all sorts of things both on cloud and forge.
[00:12:49.320 --> 00:12:51.000] You know, we see things.
[00:12:53.000 --> 00:13:02.840] We see things like the typical stuff you might expect with a web framework, like a web request that's firing off 500 database queries and the page is slow.
[00:13:02.840 --> 00:13:09.080] And depending on what database or cache setup they're using, that adds up to a lot of latency or whatever.
[00:13:09.080 --> 00:13:13.800] So we see things like that, maybe more so than we expected, honestly.
[00:13:13.800 --> 00:13:17.800] So, you know, there's a temptation to want to be like, okay, well, you should fix your application.
[00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:18.920] That's not our problem.
[00:13:18.920 --> 00:13:21.000] But that's going to continue to happen.
[00:13:21.720 --> 00:13:25.480] We have to make it fast, even if the app is not ideal, you know?
[00:13:25.720 --> 00:13:34.280] So that's one thing we're focusing on right now is like, how do we make it as fast as possible, even if the app's running 400, 500 database queries in a single request?
[00:13:34.680 --> 00:13:35.480] That's interesting.
[00:13:35.480 --> 00:13:40.520] Yeah, I guess that is also a problem that you will never be able to get rid of, right?
[00:13:40.520 --> 00:13:41.480] You always have beginners.
[00:13:41.480 --> 00:13:51.480] You always will have like AI written code that is super weird and pretty and non-performant that will be deployed probably automatically because there's some weird auto PR merger or whatever.
[00:13:51.480 --> 00:13:52.200] Interesting.
[00:13:52.200 --> 00:13:56.760] I guess that you have to solve on the hardware level or on the optimization level.
[00:13:56.760 --> 00:14:03.480] But I wonder, because now with Nightwatch in particular, you get more introspection into like how this works.
[00:14:03.480 --> 00:14:15.680] So, is this going to be something that you're going to try, I don't want to say to push, but to suggest heavily to users to kind of use by default just to see their performance and be able to optimize it.
[00:14:15.680 --> 00:14:17.200] Yeah, I think you should.
[00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:20.400] We've discovered so much, honestly, about our own apps.
[00:14:20.720 --> 00:14:31.520] We've been running Nightwatch on Forge, and to give context, Nightwatch is like a application observability tool for Larawall that shows you all your performance metrics for requests, queries, all that.
[00:14:31.520 --> 00:14:35.360] We've been running it on Forge, and we immediately saw things we didn't know about.
[00:14:35.600 --> 00:14:47.040] Whether it was like these outlier requests that are super long for certain customers, and many times those are your most important customers because they have the most servers and data and all of that, or pages that were doing more queries than we expected.
[00:14:47.040 --> 00:14:52.640] We actually had a situation the other day on cloud where we were having trouble debugging a problem, I believe.
[00:14:52.640 --> 00:15:01.360] And so we actually put them on Nightwatch early to help figure this out and were able to like immediately see what was going on, which was super cool.
[00:15:01.360 --> 00:15:04.160] Nightwatch should be coming out in early June.
[00:15:04.160 --> 00:15:12.080] It is going to have a free plan, actually, a totally free plan where you can kind of kick the tires and see the entire product without really any feature gating or anything.
[00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:16.560] So, everyone will be able to kind of get a taste of it and see like if it works for them or if it's helpful.
[00:15:16.560 --> 00:15:20.160] I think it's pretty crazy helpful in my opinion.
[00:15:20.160 --> 00:15:21.840] Um, so I'm excited to get it out there.
[00:15:21.840 --> 00:15:33.520] Yeah, like and some kind of observability tool, APM, whatever you want to call it, is for me at least something that I try to get in as soon as possible, just to avoid these kind of scale issues because it tends to be a scaling issue, right?
[00:15:33.520 --> 00:15:37.200] Like, things are slow, that's fine in the beginning, but they get slow and aggregate.
[00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:38.400] Well, that's a problem, right?
[00:15:38.400 --> 00:15:40.720] So, that's that's really cool to see.
[00:15:40.720 --> 00:15:48.240] Um, and also been something that I've been personally having trouble with in the past, like just even to get Accentury or whatever integrated into a PHP application.
[00:15:48.240 --> 00:15:49.600] Well, that's hard.
[00:15:49.600 --> 00:15:56.560] Like, there's a lot of work that needs to be done that has very little to do with the actual application and a lot to do with the server management side of things.
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:15:59.360] And that's what you guys probably do much better than I, right?
[00:15:59.440 --> 00:16:01.320] So, for that reason, I'm looking forward to it.
[00:16:01.480 --> 00:16:11.880] I can't wait to get my invite because I'm really looking forward to not having to deal with this and also knowing that the people who deal with this actually know what they're doing.
[00:16:11.880 --> 00:16:15.560] That to me is that's the great thing about the Laravel ecosystem to begin with.
[00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:17.160] Like you mentioned Spark earlier.
[00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:19.720] I process all my payments through Spark, right?
[00:16:19.720 --> 00:16:21.560] Through the billing system.
[00:16:21.560 --> 00:16:28.600] And Nova is also my backend that I use for administrative stuff because that is just the best way to integrate into a Laravel application.
[00:16:28.600 --> 00:16:38.920] I think you've been doing a really good job at finding the next thing that people use something else for right now because there isn't anything, but actually want something done by you.
[00:16:38.920 --> 00:16:45.800] Do you think this is going to change like with cloud in terms of that you're not going to have like standalone products anymore and it's all going to be part of cloud?
[00:16:45.800 --> 00:16:53.560] Because that's, I think, a fear that a lot of open source people might have that it's all going to be bundled into this and then not be able to extract it into a standalone deployment anymore.
[00:16:53.560 --> 00:16:56.280] Like, what's the strategy for you there for future products?
[00:16:56.280 --> 00:16:59.240] I mean, I don't think we would try to force anything like that.
[00:16:59.560 --> 00:17:04.680] I think we'll honestly have our hands full with just the core feature set of cloud for a long time.
[00:17:05.240 --> 00:17:11.160] So to be honest, we haven't thought a lot about like future products that might be standalone or built into cloud.
[00:17:11.160 --> 00:17:14.200] It's just sort of too far out there on the timeline.
[00:17:14.520 --> 00:17:30.360] But even Nightwatch is a good example of like, we could have sort of built the observability stuff into cloud and said, if you want all of this good observability stuff, you need to run on Laravel Cloud because that's most commercially advantageous to us.
[00:17:30.600 --> 00:17:31.560] But we didn't do that.
[00:17:31.560 --> 00:17:39.000] Obviously, it's a whole separate product that you can use, whether you're on Forge or Cloud or even just rolling your own AWS deployment.
[00:17:39.560 --> 00:17:44.120] You just run the Nightwatch agent wherever you are, and we start pulling in the data.
[00:17:44.120 --> 00:17:46.560] So, you know, I've already been conscious of that.
[00:17:46.560 --> 00:18:05.920] And it's something I want to avoid is sort of like, I think it's very obvious when companies like artificially force you into certain things that are only that way so that they can get the maximum amount of money from you instead of like what's actually good for the user or the most users or you know what's going to be good for us long term.
[00:18:05.920 --> 00:18:09.760] Yeah, I think we'll have our hands full with these two new products for a while anyway.
[00:18:10.080 --> 00:18:10.880] Oh, for sure.
[00:18:10.880 --> 00:18:18.400] And I think they are probably the most ambitious and most like nuanced products that you've built like ever since you started with all of this.
[00:18:18.560 --> 00:18:19.200] I love this.
[00:18:19.200 --> 00:18:31.920] Like when I when I heard that the Nightwatch announcement at Laricon, like I was watching it through the stream because, you know, you're busy at another conference, but I love just the idea of you finally tackling this because it always has been something, I want this.
[00:18:31.920 --> 00:18:32.880] I hope they're going to make it.
[00:18:32.880 --> 00:18:39.360] And then it's just going to naturally happen because you also have the other system that needs the observability to be performant.
[00:18:39.360 --> 00:18:39.600] Right.
[00:18:39.600 --> 00:18:40.320] Yeah, me too.
[00:18:40.320 --> 00:18:54.400] Like even just like one screen of Nightwatch, like for me, like the log screen of Nightwatch, anytime I'm starting up a new Lariba project, I would always just almost kick the can down the road of setting up proper logging because I knew it was just going to be a pain and I didn't want to mess with it.
[00:18:54.400 --> 00:18:58.080] But just even if I only had logs in Nightwatch, I'd be happy with that.
[00:18:58.080 --> 00:19:01.360] Like that's just so much better and a level up of the experience for me.
[00:19:01.360 --> 00:19:03.040] Yeah, you should see what I'm using.
[00:19:03.280 --> 00:19:10.080] I use like an SSH connection that has a tail on the Laribo logs file in the storage directory.
[00:19:10.080 --> 00:19:10.960] That's my logging.
[00:19:10.960 --> 00:19:11.920] Like that's running right here.
[00:19:11.920 --> 00:19:13.280] Like it's my terminal somewhere.
[00:19:13.520 --> 00:19:15.920] That's nicer looking than a lot of solutions I've seen.
[00:19:16.240 --> 00:19:18.400] Right, but that's not how it should be, right?
[00:19:18.600 --> 00:19:27.600] Like, there should be like from the start a way for you to opt into something that works for you, has data retention and searchability, that kind of stuff that matters a lot to me.
[00:19:27.920 --> 00:19:29.440] And I'm glad you're building this.
[00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:41.000] I do wonder, and this is probably something that is a very recent thing: how much AI in terms of like in all kinds of ways Laravel will have in the future.
[00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:54.040] Like right now, AI and Laravel to me is really just I ask my chat GPT and my clauds to build me Laravel stuff, and it is good enough to build this and understand like what Eloquent is, what the Laravel like directory structure, and what jobs are, queues are and that.
[00:19:54.040 --> 00:19:57.400] Like AI can build Laravel apps pretty well.
[00:19:57.400 --> 00:20:06.200] But I wonder what your perspective is on both using AI to code with and AI as a part of the larger Laravel ecosystem.
[00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:07.960] What are the thoughts there at the moment?
[00:20:07.960 --> 00:20:08.440] Yeah.
[00:20:08.760 --> 00:20:15.400] So I'll start with my view on AI coding in general, which I'm really bullish on.
[00:20:15.400 --> 00:20:20.360] I think that probably all programmers will use AI assistance in the future.
[00:20:20.360 --> 00:20:22.600] I think that's pretty inevitable at this point.
[00:20:22.600 --> 00:20:25.720] And it feels like we're almost already there, basically.
[00:20:26.040 --> 00:20:27.480] And I think it's great, honestly.
[00:20:27.480 --> 00:20:28.840] Like, I think it's awesome.
[00:20:28.840 --> 00:20:31.720] I wish I had those kind of tools when I was first learning to program.
[00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:39.000] I think it's awesome for writing the language you know, but I think it's also awesome for learning new languages and spiking out something in something you're not familiar with.
[00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:45.320] So very bullish on that and think that will continue to get better and more pervasive in the future.
[00:20:45.320 --> 00:20:49.160] As far as AI and Laravel, I mean, I think about it in a couple different ways.
[00:20:49.160 --> 00:21:01.080] One thing we're kind of kicking around now is I think you're right that like the current tools actually write Laravel pretty adequately and it's totally pretty much fine every time I use it.
[00:21:01.080 --> 00:21:02.840] This kind of stuff is changing every day.
[00:21:02.840 --> 00:21:06.920] Like, even just yesterday, I saw like the cloud code SDK and the new GitHub action stuff.
[00:21:06.920 --> 00:21:09.000] So it's just like a constantly changing thing.
[00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:19.200] I think I'm interested in like seeing how we can teach the AI sort of like that final level of polish that you might put on a Laravel app.
[00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:28.800] Laravel has been around a long time, which is great for the AI stuff because there's lots of stuff out there for it to be trained on and code and all of that and material.
[00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:32.480] But like, how can we get it to write Laravel?
[00:21:32.480 --> 00:21:40.160] How maybe we would write Laravel as a company or be a little bit more opinionated with the latest sort of like best practices and how we would write things cleanly.
[00:21:40.160 --> 00:21:41.760] So we're interested in that.
[00:21:41.760 --> 00:21:46.080] I'm also interested from like a tooling perspective.
[00:21:46.400 --> 00:21:54.880] I think it's going to be really important for Laravel to be the easiest full-stack framework to integrate AI with, whether that's like an AI SDK.
[00:21:55.040 --> 00:22:07.360] So in PHP, the most popular one right now is probably Prism PHP, which is like a back-end agnostic AI SDK, very similar to Vercel's AI SDK, where you can use OpenAI or Anthroopic or all these other providers.
[00:22:07.360 --> 00:22:14.880] So that another thing we're kind of working on right now is the fastest way to build MCP servers with Laravel.
[00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:18.160] So many people are writing those these days and we'll see if that continues.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:33.520] It's hard to say because things change so fast, but that's something we're actively working on right now, trying to get to 1.0 is basically an MCP server framework for Laravel that feels very easy to get started with and quick to spin up these ideas and deploy them as well.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:38.880] So I mean, overall, yeah, I think there's going to be more AI-related stuff in dev and Laravel.
[00:22:39.120 --> 00:22:41.280] I think it's overall a good thing.
[00:22:41.520 --> 00:22:43.680] I think it's really cool and really helpful.
[00:22:43.680 --> 00:22:49.120] And I want Laravel to be the best way and fastest way, most productive way to build AI-powered apps.
[00:22:49.120 --> 00:22:52.400] And I think Laravel's always been an opinionated full-stack framework.
[00:22:52.400 --> 00:22:57.840] And it makes sense for us to have an opinion and a clean way to integrate this stuff into your apps.
[00:22:57.920 --> 00:23:01.320] I think we'd be kind of like burying our head in the sand if we didn't do that.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:07.240] Yeah, it would be like missing just the point of conversation that is happening right now in the community.
[00:23:07.960 --> 00:23:09.560] Like everybody's trying to figure it out.
[00:23:09.560 --> 00:23:11.080] Like people have opinions, obviously.
[00:23:11.080 --> 00:23:14.440] They always have opinions and in all different kinds of ways.
[00:23:14.440 --> 00:23:20.200] But yeah, I like what you're saying because you're not saying we need AI in our product because so many people do.
[00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:23.880] You say we should facilitate people using AI to build products.
[00:23:23.880 --> 00:23:25.000] That is a very different thing.
[00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:25.560] And I love it.
[00:23:25.560 --> 00:23:33.560] I love the fact that it's not about hyping or using the hype train, but actually building reasonably useful things with a new technology.
[00:23:34.280 --> 00:23:35.720] That is most appreciated.
[00:23:35.720 --> 00:23:36.440] And I agree.
[00:23:37.480 --> 00:23:44.200] Making it easy to build things with AI and through AI, that should be the angle for a framework right now.
[00:23:44.440 --> 00:23:59.640] My big dream is that a framework and Laravel should could maybe the first ships, the Laravel installer ships with a really, really small language model that is purposely and intentionally trained just on writing extremely good Laravel code.
[00:23:59.640 --> 00:24:00.920] And you can run it locally.
[00:24:00.920 --> 00:24:02.040] It runs in the IDE.
[00:24:02.040 --> 00:24:07.320] I mean, I look at my PHP storm and they have some weird internal little code completion things now.
[00:24:07.320 --> 00:24:11.240] I don't know what it is, but I assume it's a really small language model.
[00:24:11.240 --> 00:24:21.000] If that would be something a framework can provide, and then all frameworks could provide something like this for their code bases, that would be so cool and so helpful.
[00:24:21.080 --> 00:24:23.480] I think we're like not far from that, honestly.
[00:24:23.480 --> 00:24:43.960] You know, with like this isn't local, but with things like the Cloud Code SDK that I was talking about that I saw yesterday, the ability to interact with it non-interactively, like they announced, and feed it prompts and context and things gets us close to having like these artisan commands or local things that I actually know how to write good Laravel code, which is, I think, super cool.
[00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:44.800] Me too.
[00:24:44.360 --> 00:24:49.520] Like, obviously, like, I yesterday was a moment for me too, where I used Juni.
[00:24:49.600 --> 00:24:54.480] I think that's the internal agent that PHP Storm offers now.
[00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:57.280] And I used it for the first time, and it was bizarre.
[00:24:57.280 --> 00:25:04.320] Like, I'm not much into agentic coding because I still want to do my own coding, which is probably a traditionalist perspective at this point.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:07.040] But I gave it a task, I wrote a spec.
[00:25:07.040 --> 00:25:08.960] I took 20 minutes to write the spec.
[00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:11.520] And then I just walked upstairs to get a coffee.
[00:25:11.520 --> 00:25:13.600] I came back down and the thing was implemented.
[00:25:13.600 --> 00:25:18.480] And I was like, this is crazy in the best and worst way at the same time.
[00:25:18.480 --> 00:25:20.400] Because now the thing is doing my job.
[00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:22.080] All I'm doing is instruct.
[00:25:22.080 --> 00:25:23.840] Interesting, to say the least.
[00:25:23.840 --> 00:25:28.320] Like, how much AI coding do you use for developer Gerald features at this point?
[00:25:28.320 --> 00:25:31.760] Like, how does that work for you and the team, I guess?
[00:25:31.760 --> 00:25:36.000] So, a lot of the work I do on Laravel is reviewing PRs.
[00:25:36.320 --> 00:25:42.880] And a lot of the changes I have to make are relatively minor and don't require assistance, but some of them end up being pretty big.
[00:25:42.880 --> 00:26:02.240] And what I'm really interested in, and what I thought about yesterday when I read about this new GitHub Actions integration with Claude and stuff, is like a lot of times if I get a PR that's sort of non-trivial and I have some feedback to give to the author, and then I just kind of have to sit around and wait for that to be implemented.
[00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:03.360] If it ever is, right?
[00:26:03.360 --> 00:26:15.200] Like if they come back, if we're able to unlock that and like PRs as an open source maintainer, if I could just at the agent, hey, this PR is 90% good.
[00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:17.600] Here's the things I don't like and kind of want to change about it.
[00:26:17.600 --> 00:26:18.480] Can you implement that?
[00:26:18.480 --> 00:26:21.920] And I can go downstairs and get a snack and come back and it's kind of done.
[00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:24.800] That's like insane, you know, unlock.
[00:26:25.440 --> 00:26:26.960] So, yeah, I'm curious to see.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:28.960] I'm curious to see how that develops.
[00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:35.240] Yeah, I see the same thing for security testing or even for just trying to do background improvements.
[00:26:35.400 --> 00:26:50.520] Like when you were just saying that the thing about how people on cloud build these weird apps that have 500 database queries, well, what if you could spin up a complete clone of the repo, like have an agent try to fix it and suggest it to them automatically because you're linked to their GitHub account anyway, right?
[00:26:50.520 --> 00:26:53.800] That to me is smart AI usage inside a product.
[00:26:53.800 --> 00:26:56.440] Yeah, and I think we're super interested in that for Nightwatch.
[00:26:56.440 --> 00:27:05.160] And so some of the ways we're using AI on Nightwatch right now are pretty basic, like summarizing exceptions or issues or things like that.
[00:27:05.160 --> 00:27:07.640] But you could imagine where we could do something like what you're saying.
[00:27:07.640 --> 00:27:12.840] We know pretty much exactly why the request was slow, either which middleware it was, which query it is.
[00:27:12.840 --> 00:27:15.720] We can see if there was an index on the query, all of that stuff.
[00:27:15.720 --> 00:27:21.240] If we're integrated with cloud, then we can just, we know what repo is, we can send you a PR, we can deploy it for you on cloud.
[00:27:21.240 --> 00:27:25.240] So it's kind of the whole story could be covered, which I'm very interested in exploring.
[00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:26.040] Yeah, for sure.
[00:27:26.040 --> 00:27:28.520] Yeah, that's going to be a really fun time.
[00:27:28.520 --> 00:27:29.400] It's already fun.
[00:27:29.560 --> 00:27:36.600] It's already fun to have these things do things for you, but to have that done in the background and have problems be fixed before you even notice them.
[00:27:37.640 --> 00:27:41.400] It's going to be a weird future for people who are traditionally trained software engineers.
[00:27:41.400 --> 00:27:42.280] That's how I feel.
[00:27:42.280 --> 00:27:45.480] Yeah, it's different, but I think it's exciting.
[00:27:45.720 --> 00:27:51.320] I don't feel threatened by it at all, you know, like some people seem to.
[00:27:51.320 --> 00:27:57.960] I think it's really an exciting unlock in productivity for developers and just gives you so much more power.
[00:27:57.960 --> 00:28:12.760] Honestly, as a single founder as well, like if you're bootstrapping a company and it's just you working on something, you can just be so much more productive, especially on maybe the boilerplate work that is pretty boring, that often is where a product kind of gets stuck.
[00:28:12.760 --> 00:28:19.920] You know, like if you've done a lot of side projects, you know, it's basically a joke at this point, how many unfinished side projects people, everyone has, right?
[00:28:20.240 --> 00:28:25.840] And they usually fizzle out because you lose excitement during the non-boring parts of the development cycle.
[00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:29.520] And being able to kind of push through that with AIs is pretty exciting.
[00:28:29.520 --> 00:28:38.240] Yeah, I heard a lot of people are now doing vibe coding on the side on their old projects just by throwing them into cursor or windsurf or whatever and like finish this.
[00:28:38.480 --> 00:28:39.680] That's really how that works.
[00:28:39.680 --> 00:28:40.400] And I love this.
[00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:43.760] I love that code gets like reactivated, resurrected even.
[00:28:43.760 --> 00:28:45.840] And then some agent takes, maybe takes care of it.
[00:28:45.840 --> 00:28:49.680] Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it goes to a point where people can actually deploy it.
[00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:52.160] And then something is built that wouldn't have been built before.
[00:28:52.160 --> 00:28:53.040] That's really cool.
[00:28:53.360 --> 00:28:56.880] Do you think you're ever going to hire like a full-time AI employee?
[00:28:56.880 --> 00:28:57.840] I can see that happening.
[00:28:58.480 --> 00:28:59.840] I wouldn't be surprised, honestly.
[00:28:59.840 --> 00:29:02.640] I'd almost be more surprised if we didn't eventually.
[00:29:02.640 --> 00:29:03.200] Yeah, right?
[00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:05.200] Like it's going to be a cyborg team at some point.
[00:29:05.200 --> 00:29:06.400] Yeah, pretty wild.
[00:29:06.560 --> 00:29:07.680] That's bizarre.
[00:29:07.680 --> 00:29:11.120] Well, I'm glad you have a very sensitive approach to AI.
[00:29:11.120 --> 00:29:19.520] One thing that when I think about like AI, existing AI systems, like platforms that help you build code, I want to mention one thing.
[00:29:19.520 --> 00:29:26.560] I asked my Twitter feed a question recently about what the number one thing is that stops them from using Laravel for the next indie business.
[00:29:26.560 --> 00:29:30.560] Because my audience is a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of software people at the intersection.
[00:29:30.560 --> 00:29:34.800] And I just wanted to see what's the vibe around Laravel and why do people not use it?
[00:29:34.800 --> 00:29:36.880] Because the people who do use it, there's a lot of them.
[00:29:37.120 --> 00:29:40.720] They are very happy with it and they understand that the ecosystem is really cool.
[00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:42.000] The integrations are easy.
[00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:45.760] If I want payment, I just do one composer require and I'm kind of done.
[00:29:45.760 --> 00:29:48.320] Like that kind of stuff is just extremely powerful.
[00:29:48.320 --> 00:29:49.760] So, I wanted to see the other side.
[00:29:49.760 --> 00:30:00.920] And besides all the people saying, well, PHP sucks, what you will find those people still like that are kind of left in the PHP 4.0 world of 2005 or whatever.
[00:30:01.240 --> 00:30:07.480] And people who still use JavaScript or they use JavaScript for everything because that's also like from the server to the front end to mobile.
[00:30:07.480 --> 00:30:09.000] You can use it on every platform.
[00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:09.720] Fine with them.
[00:30:09.720 --> 00:30:14.600] The interesting ones were, and I'm going to quote this verbatim because I want to see what you think about this.
[00:30:14.600 --> 00:30:20.680] I don't use Laravel because the fact that neither cursor nor replit ever suggests Laravel as an option.
[00:30:20.680 --> 00:30:21.720] I found that interesting.
[00:30:21.720 --> 00:30:22.840] Like, what are you going to do about that?
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:26.520] Like, how can you actually get your framework into these tools?
[00:30:26.520 --> 00:30:33.960] I mean, I think that's something we are working on that internally, even with the AI providers, you know, trying to improve this.
[00:30:33.960 --> 00:30:35.400] I think it's like a valid point, right?
[00:30:35.640 --> 00:30:40.920] And it goes for all new frameworks that will ever be created, right?
[00:30:40.920 --> 00:30:52.360] Like, it has created this weird situation where if I were to write Laravel today, it would like the AI would have no idea how to write it.
[00:30:52.840 --> 00:31:00.360] It feels like almost so much harder to launch an open source web framework today than it was 10 years ago because of this very problem.
[00:31:00.680 --> 00:31:42.400] And I'm very interested to like solve it because I think Laravel is uniquely suited to I think it's the most like expansive and cohesive full stack ecosystem you can write a web application in in the sense that there's a solution for pretty much every problem you're going to have more or less and so for AI just to be able to write all of that and you can deploy it and you don't have to go sign up for eight different SaaS services to sort of build your your full stack app is really cool um so yeah, we're aware of this and like very interested in trying to solve this as best we can um but because I think it's totally valid, like it's like the new, it's the new SEO, basically you know it really is.
[00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:45.040] AIO or something, right?
[00:31:45.040 --> 00:31:46.400] Like, that's that's where we are.
[00:31:46.400 --> 00:31:50.240] Yeah, I think Stripe has been doing something really interesting with their docs.
[00:31:50.240 --> 00:31:55.120] Like, it's almost like now native markdown, and a copy to markdown button is everywhere.
[00:31:55.120 --> 00:32:01.200] And even like, open this in ChatGPT is a button, like a button that's bigger than other buttons in their documentation.
[00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:12.320] I think they've understood that they need to feed these things into the systems, either by usage or by asking ChatGPT to crawl it so that it gets ingested into the next batch of training data for the model.
[00:32:12.320 --> 00:32:16.480] Like, that's the AI optimization stuff that we are still all just trying to figure out.
[00:32:16.480 --> 00:32:23.520] Like, LLMs.txt that describe a full website somewhere, and then all documentation with code examples to just ingest.
[00:32:23.760 --> 00:32:31.920] It's a bizarre world we're in because I didn't have this on my menu for 2025 that I have to export all my docs as a markdown file for some computer to eat, right?
[00:32:31.920 --> 00:32:32.720] No, I know.
[00:32:32.720 --> 00:32:33.600] It's crazy.
[00:32:33.600 --> 00:32:36.000] I never would have expected it, honestly.
[00:32:36.240 --> 00:32:47.120] It's been a wild couple of years, but I can already feel like personally how my software development experience is completely alien to what it would have been like two or three years ago.
[00:32:47.120 --> 00:32:49.040] And that's not even with agentic stuff.
[00:32:49.040 --> 00:32:57.200] Just even being able to take a piece of code, throwing it into some window and telling it, hey, fix this, and it does fix it, that is magical.
[00:32:57.200 --> 00:33:06.880] I laugh sometimes because over the years, you know, six or seven years ago, I would routinely ask like on Twitter, what should we build next for Laravel, you know, just to get feedback.
[00:33:06.880 --> 00:33:10.640] And there was always these like joking responses of like, can it build my app for me?
[00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:11.840] Can it like code for me?
[00:33:11.840 --> 00:33:16.000] And now that is like 100% reality, which is so mind-blowing.
[00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:19.440] And at the time, it just felt like a joke, you know, and that was not that long ago.
[00:33:19.440 --> 00:33:19.680] Yep.
[00:33:19.920 --> 00:33:24.400] I'm not surprised that people are afraid for their jobs or just even for stability.
[00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:27.680] I hear it from investors too, people who are investing in SaaS businesses.
[00:33:27.680 --> 00:33:29.680] They don't know, like, where is this going to go?
[00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:33.480] Are we investing in something that somebody could build in 20 minutes, like a couple years from now?
[00:33:33.480 --> 00:33:34.440] Or is there a mode?
[00:33:34.440 --> 00:33:35.240] What is the mode?
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:35.400] Right?
[00:33:35.480 --> 00:33:37.560] Like, that is problematic.
[00:33:37.960 --> 00:33:54.360] I think what you're doing in building the whole system, like from the framework to the tools used to deploy it, to the place where it's deployed, and the service, like the customer success teams that help you deploy this, I think that's the mode is to have control over the whole channel from start to finish.
[00:33:54.360 --> 00:33:57.480] But I can see how other people don't have that luxury, right?
[00:33:57.560 --> 00:33:59.800] Like, that's a real problem to them.
[00:33:59.800 --> 00:34:00.280] Yeah.
[00:34:00.280 --> 00:34:03.480] And for many people, the ideas were the hard part, in my opinion.
[00:34:03.480 --> 00:34:10.040] Like, you can build apps that have no product market fit faster than you could before.
[00:34:10.040 --> 00:34:11.160] You know what I mean?
[00:34:11.160 --> 00:34:12.520] Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:12.520 --> 00:34:15.240] That's the one thing that never changes, right?
[00:34:15.240 --> 00:34:19.080] Like, there's a lot of bad ideas that are now just executed faster.
[00:34:19.080 --> 00:34:20.040] That's, yeah, that's pretty much.
[00:34:20.200 --> 00:34:21.000] Yeah, which is fine.
[00:34:21.000 --> 00:34:29.240] Better to like fail fast, you know, than to waste a lot of time and fail after years of develop hand coding onto the next idea.
[00:34:29.240 --> 00:34:31.160] Yeah, I wonder where the balance is.
[00:34:31.320 --> 00:34:37.800] I do wonder where the balance is here because sometimes failing fast is like what two days of no customers and the idea is bad, right?
[00:34:37.800 --> 00:34:42.040] Like, should I take a month to see if I can actually do some marketing?
[00:34:42.440 --> 00:34:43.640] It might be too fast.
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:49.080] And a lot of people have like AI FOMO and they just feel like they need to add AI features and whatnot.
[00:34:49.080 --> 00:34:51.960] And they fail to see what the actual value is.
[00:34:51.960 --> 00:35:01.160] Yeah, maybe it's screwing up our entire business founder attention span of like, I didn't hit 100K a week in the first 24 hours.
[00:35:01.160 --> 00:35:01.720] This is done.
[00:35:02.120 --> 00:35:04.680] Honestly, if you look at Twitter, that's exactly what's happening.
[00:35:04.920 --> 00:35:13.640] Because the algorithms then also amplify these totally outlandish messages of people who had a kind of fluke success or just random chance.
[00:35:13.640 --> 00:35:15.040] Yeah, that's going to be a problem.
[00:35:14.600 --> 00:35:16.800] But I guess that's a problem for another day.
[00:35:17.520 --> 00:35:21.760] I think we talk about the stuff that's happening right now here, right?
[00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:23.840] And I think Laravel is happening right now.
[00:35:24.080 --> 00:35:32.480] To anybody who thinks PHP is outdated in 2025, what is your perspective as somebody who's built an empire on top of that language?
[00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:52.000] You know, I think PHP has such an interesting history from being created in a very similar way to how Laravel was, of just like a guy's personal collection of tools to build his own ideas faster, to powering Facebook.com and many other, you know, very notable startups.
[00:35:52.000 --> 00:36:03.680] I think PHP is like one of the few languages that was built specifically for the web and only for web programming in its original inception.
[00:36:03.680 --> 00:36:11.200] And it's honestly just still such a fast, productive, no-nonsense kind of language that anyone can learn.
[00:36:11.200 --> 00:36:16.800] It's very quick to learn, even in just like a week, you know, especially with AI assistance.
[00:36:16.800 --> 00:36:23.920] It's not a very complicated language, but yet it's fast and there's tons of documentation.
[00:36:23.920 --> 00:36:28.160] There's tons of educational material about PHP, about Laravel.
[00:36:28.160 --> 00:36:44.080] And I still think it's really like the most productive way to build a web app, especially paired with tools like LiveWire or Inertia, where you can pair like a modern React or View front end with your Laravel backend in a way that just doesn't make you want to pull your hair out.
[00:36:44.240 --> 00:36:46.640] I think it's a great way to build applications.
[00:36:46.640 --> 00:36:51.840] And so that's why I still like, if I was starting a new business today, it's, I'm not even thinking about anything else.
[00:36:51.840 --> 00:36:57.120] And obviously, I built Laravel, but I just think it's just the fastest, most productive way to build things.
[00:36:57.120 --> 00:37:09.720] And I hear so many times of like, I'll hear developers venture into other ecosystems, whether it's like full stack JavaScript or something else, and then come back and be like, oh my gosh, like.
[00:37:10.200 --> 00:37:13.240] I'm so much more productive on this stack.
[00:37:13.240 --> 00:37:27.400] My team is more productive because we're not, you know, it's nice just to have a structure and a set of opinions on how to build things and not have to like reinvent the wheel for every possible thing you need to build, which I think is one area that Laravel excels.
[00:37:27.400 --> 00:37:27.560] Yeah.
[00:37:27.560 --> 00:37:35.560] And I think our community, and I'm just saying our because I feel like I'm part of the Laravel community, is not as fragmented and doesn't have as much inflating, right?
[00:37:35.800 --> 00:37:38.520] There's not this kind of framework versus framework stuff.
[00:37:38.520 --> 00:37:42.440] Like you literally have Vue.js and React and whatever you want to put there.
[00:37:42.440 --> 00:37:43.480] So sure, why not?
[00:37:44.040 --> 00:37:48.040] You can find a way with Inertia to get all of these things working together.
[00:37:48.040 --> 00:37:54.120] I think Laravel is an integrated framework and not like an excluding kind of framework.
[00:37:54.120 --> 00:37:56.920] I think it's very integrated and very cohesive.
[00:37:56.920 --> 00:38:15.640] And I think what separates Laravel from maybe other, let's say, more traditional full-stack frameworks is we're also, I think, an open-minded community in terms of as developer taste and practices change, we adopt them in a way that is not like reactionary, but like considered.
[00:38:15.640 --> 00:38:25.160] And I think Inertia is like a great example of that of like, look, it's just unrealistic to expect people to write their front ends using PHP echo tags forever.
[00:38:25.160 --> 00:38:31.240] React in a large way is kind of one, let's say, front end mind share among developers.
[00:38:31.240 --> 00:38:33.000] And we would be silly to ignore that.
[00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:36.440] Similar, we would be silly to ignore AI and say, oh, that's for the kids.
[00:38:36.440 --> 00:38:37.400] That's stupid.
[00:38:37.400 --> 00:38:40.160] We only handwrite artisan code over here, you know.
[00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:47.040] So I've always been one to not reject where things are heading or not like blind myself to it.
[00:38:47.360 --> 00:38:57.840] And we've tried to just kind of embrace, you know, as the web development landscape evolves, we evolve with it as best we can and continue to try to build the most productive way to build apps.
[00:38:58.000 --> 00:38:58.800] I'm not surprised.
[00:38:58.800 --> 00:39:01.120] I think that's that's what PHP was too, right?
[00:39:01.120 --> 00:39:13.200] PHP was this collection of things, and then it got better and better with every version and integrated object-oriented stuff and it moved away from these weird, like arbitrarily named things to a better internal structure, right?
[00:39:13.200 --> 00:39:18.080] The first time I built PHP was 4.0 somewhere in 2002 and 2003.
[00:39:18.080 --> 00:39:24.720] Like it was, I was doing typo 3 backend extensions, and it was a horrible thing to do, but it worked.
[00:39:24.720 --> 00:39:29.120] And that's the last time I used PHP prior to getting into Laribo, like a couple of years ago.
[00:39:29.120 --> 00:39:38.560] So I had all this stuff still in my mind about how unusable it was, but I find myself not even using any of the functions that I used back in the day.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:40.240] That's how much the language has changed.
[00:39:40.240 --> 00:39:41.440] Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
[00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:46.640] And it's easy to like, I mean, you can download like a Reactor Viewer LiveWire starter kit and just kind of look at the code.
[00:39:46.640 --> 00:39:48.320] And it is pretty different.
[00:39:48.480 --> 00:39:51.040] It's very different than how PHP used to be written.
[00:39:51.040 --> 00:39:51.920] Yeah, for sure.
[00:39:51.920 --> 00:39:53.920] And I think that's the great part.
[00:39:53.920 --> 00:39:58.880] Like you, it's a thing that adapts to the reality in which it operates.
[00:39:58.880 --> 00:40:04.800] That is the opposite of having this kind of very agenda-driven framework development.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:05.760] I don't want to hate on anybody.
[00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:06.720] Like, do whatever you want.
[00:40:06.720 --> 00:40:16.080] I just love that this is the choice that I can now make and build my own monetized applications faster and more reliable than I ever could before.
[00:40:16.080 --> 00:40:19.680] So I really appreciate you spending like your whole life building this.
[00:40:19.680 --> 00:40:21.200] So thank you so much.
[00:40:21.200 --> 00:40:22.080] It's really cool.
[00:40:22.080 --> 00:40:29.760] And I also appreciate all the products you built along the way, because not only are they helpful to me as a developer, they are inspirational to me as a founder.
[00:40:29.960 --> 00:40:33.000] That's that is something, and to a lot of people out there, right?
[00:40:33.000 --> 00:40:40.040] Like the way you approach business and the way the decisions that you make along the way, what you've just voiced over the last half hour or so.
[00:40:40.040 --> 00:40:41.800] That is why this is successful.
[00:40:41.800 --> 00:40:45.880] So thanks so much for sharing all these very amazing insights.
[00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:48.760] I can't wait to see what the future holds for Laravel.
[00:40:48.760 --> 00:40:54.120] Where can people follow you and the businesses that you run and the journey that you're on if they want to see more?
[00:40:54.120 --> 00:40:58.440] Yeah, so they can follow me personally on xx.com slash taylorotwell.
[00:40:58.600 --> 00:41:03.720] You can follow Laravel at x.com slash laravelphp or just at laravel.com.
[00:41:03.720 --> 00:41:08.280] And cloud.laravel.com is where you can check out our latest cloud platform.
[00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:10.920] And nightwatch.laravel.com will be coming soon.
[00:41:10.920 --> 00:41:12.680] So you can get on the waiting list for that.
[00:41:12.680 --> 00:41:13.560] That is amazing.
[00:41:13.560 --> 00:41:15.560] Well, thanks so much, Taylor, for being on.
[00:41:15.800 --> 00:41:18.440] That was great insight into a framework that I love.
[00:41:18.440 --> 00:41:20.280] So thanks for everything, man.
[00:41:20.280 --> 00:41:21.800] Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:41:21.800 --> 00:41:23.000] And that's it for today.
[00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:25.240] Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:28.760] You can find me on Twitter at AvidKal, AIV-ID, K-A-H-L.
[00:41:28.760 --> 00:41:41.640] And if you want to support me in this show, please share podscan.fm, my SaaS business, with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, and names on podcasts out there.
[00:41:41.640 --> 00:41:46.120] PodScan is a near real-time podcast database with a stellar API.
[00:41:46.120 --> 00:41:49.240] We have 32 million podcast episodes in the back now.
[00:41:49.240 --> 00:41:51.160] The database is humongous.
[00:41:51.160 --> 00:41:55.480] Please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem.
[00:41:55.480 --> 00:41:56.840] Thank you so much for listening.
[00:41:56.840 --> 00:41:59.400] Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.
[00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:00.240] Mm-hmm.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:04.880] Hey, it's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder podcast.
[00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:20.640] Today, I'm talking to Taylor Otwall, the creator of the Laravel framework for PHP, and an outstanding entrepreneur who figured out how to turn open source software into Lamborghinis.
[00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:33.280] Seriously, Taylor's approach to building not just the framework, but a whole ecosystem of businesses on top of that framework is one of the most impressive open source monetization stories I've ever seen.
[00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:40.160] It's quite fitting that Laravel has, therefore, also embraced the sponsor of this episode, Paddle.com.
[00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:54.800] Paddle is a merchant of record payment provider, and they are deeply integrated into both the open source library cashier, which is free, and the for pay payment portal, Laravel Spark, one of the many ways that Taylor is monetizing his work.
[00:00:54.800 --> 00:00:56.800] So it's open source and for pay.
[00:00:56.800 --> 00:00:58.240] It's a very interesting story.
[00:00:58.240 --> 00:01:07.520] So, if you want to monetize your own software work without having to deal with stuff like sales tax and expired credit cards, give Paddle a shot at paddle.com.
[00:01:07.520 --> 00:01:13.840] They're supremely good at making your founder life easier so you can build your business on solid foundations.
[00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:16.160] So, let's talk about foundational frameworks.
[00:01:16.160 --> 00:01:19.760] Here's Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel.
[00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:25.040] Congrats, Taylor, on half a million deployments on Laravel Cloud.
[00:01:25.040 --> 00:01:26.080] That is amazing.
[00:01:26.320 --> 00:01:31.280] How does it feel to see people building on your own platform at that scale already?
[00:01:31.280 --> 00:01:33.280] A couple months after you release the thing?
[00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:34.160] Yeah, wow.
[00:01:34.800 --> 00:01:36.320] It's pretty surreal.
[00:01:36.320 --> 00:01:45.680] And it's especially surreal thinking back to how it all started, which is basically like a casual conversation in Amsterdam by a few of us at Laravel.
[00:01:45.680 --> 00:01:47.760] There were not many of us at Laravel at the time.
[00:01:47.760 --> 00:01:50.880] There were probably only nine or 10 of us.
[00:01:50.880 --> 00:01:53.040] And now there's like 70.
[00:01:53.040 --> 00:02:00.120] So just thinking back to that conversation where Laravel Cloud was just an idea and we hoped we could build it.
[00:01:59.680 --> 00:02:06.600] You know, we hoped we could figure it out and crack it to now where it's live and thousands of people are using it.
[00:02:06.920 --> 00:02:10.840] And there's, you know, so many people deploying on it is really, it's pretty mind-blowing.
[00:02:10.840 --> 00:02:13.400] But I'm super happy with where we're at.
[00:02:13.400 --> 00:02:15.800] And honestly, I think we're just kind of getting started with it.
[00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:18.760] So I'm even more excited about where we're heading with it.
[00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:19.400] Yeah, I bet.
[00:02:19.720 --> 00:02:21.240] That is such an accomplishment.
[00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:27.320] I think like just seeing you develop both the idea and then teasing it a little bit at the Laricons and all of that.
[00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:32.680] It felt like it was a concerted effort, but it also felt very natural in the way that it was built.
[00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:33.720] That's really cool.
[00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:48.040] And looking at the Laravel ecosystem in particular, like the products that existed prior to cloud, I can't help but feel like you worked your way, you iterated your way to cloud, to Forge and Voya, where hosting and deployment.
[00:02:48.360 --> 00:02:52.280] Did this make it easier to actually build a full cloud system?
[00:02:53.400 --> 00:02:55.000] Yeah, that is kind of interesting.
[00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:03.560] Like Laravel Cloud and fully managed Laravel deployment and hosting is something I've danced around for like the last 10 years, it feels like.
[00:03:03.560 --> 00:03:12.760] And when I first built Forge in 2014, I really would have built it more like cloud as like a fully managed platform if I was able to.
[00:03:12.760 --> 00:03:16.040] It was just me, you know, like hacking on this idea in my free time.
[00:03:16.040 --> 00:03:21.480] And I didn't want the risk of managing all of this infrastructure as like a solo bootstrapped founder.
[00:03:21.480 --> 00:03:25.400] So I built Laravel Forge where people could bring their own cloud account.
[00:03:25.400 --> 00:03:31.960] Hey, if there's something happens with the servers that they're running the apps on, that's sort of like DigitalOcean's problem, you know what I mean?
[00:03:31.960 --> 00:03:34.200] It's not, or AWS's problem.
[00:03:34.200 --> 00:03:42.600] But yeah, we have been kind of working our way towards this with things like Forge and Envoy and Vapor for a long time.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:50.480] And, you know, building something like cloud just takes a much bigger team and much bigger risk, honestly.
[00:03:50.640 --> 00:03:55.840] You know, you're just taking on, you're biting off a lot more when you take on a problem like this.
[00:03:55.840 --> 00:03:59.920] So we finally got here, you know, in 2025, all these years later.
[00:03:59.920 --> 00:04:01.680] And, you know, it's an exciting time.
[00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:05.760] It sounds like you unlocked something inside your founder brain for this, right?
[00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:06.640] Like, how did that happen?
[00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:07.440] Like, what did you do?
[00:04:07.440 --> 00:04:11.520] Because honestly, I would be so scared to lead a team of 70 people, let alone seven people.
[00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:14.960] Like, how did you massage that into your mind?
[00:04:14.960 --> 00:04:22.880] I mean, as you may know, I bootstrapped Laravel from 2011 until 2024.
[00:04:23.200 --> 00:04:39.840] And in that time, I launched, you know, five commercial products: Forge, Envoy, or Vapor, Nova Spark, and something like 27 or 28 open source packages, in addition to the framework itself, which is like the core of the whole thing.
[00:04:40.160 --> 00:04:54.640] And in 2024, or really, I guess, 2023, I felt like I was sort of like at this crossroads with Laravel of like, man, I've really built almost everything I wanted to build, every idea I had.
[00:04:54.640 --> 00:04:59.760] The whole idea for Laravel was only to create a tool to help me build startups faster.
[00:04:59.760 --> 00:05:04.560] And then that became like the meta business that ended up becoming my career.
[00:05:04.560 --> 00:05:10.880] And so it was almost like I can either coast and be like, okay, that was a solid run, you know, like an open source.
[00:05:10.880 --> 00:05:16.000] Few people are able to enjoy that level of open source success.
[00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:29.760] Or there's like sort of a next level that we could go to, which is building something much more ambitious, also much more risky, but maybe a much higher reward with things like Laravel Cloud and Laravel Nightwatch, which is coming out soon as well.
[00:05:29.880 --> 00:05:49.480] And, you know, that was just kind of what I wrestled with for a long time and obviously decided to sort of swing for the fences with Laravel Cloud and try building a business with investment money, you know, to build these much bigger, more ambitious things that I couldn't build on my own without great personal risk and liability.
[00:05:49.800 --> 00:05:52.280] So, and I basically felt like I owed it to the community.
[00:05:52.280 --> 00:05:59.960] Is what it boiled down to, I felt like if I just sort of coasted, it was like, okay, guys, that's sort of the peak.
[00:05:59.960 --> 00:06:03.880] You know, that's that's where it sort of tops out.
[00:06:03.880 --> 00:06:11.400] I felt like that would be just such a bummer for like the tens or hundreds of thousands of Laravel developers in the world that have been along for the whole thing.
[00:06:11.400 --> 00:06:14.760] And so that's ultimately what led to deciding to pursue cloud.
[00:06:14.760 --> 00:06:15.240] Interesting.
[00:06:15.240 --> 00:06:19.240] Yeah, there's this concept of the benevolent dictator for life, right?
[00:06:19.240 --> 00:06:21.480] That always exists in the open source world.
[00:06:21.480 --> 00:06:23.880] And that can go either way, right?
[00:06:23.880 --> 00:06:29.960] Either you can just do whatever you want as a dictator, or you can try to be the benevolent part and serve your community.
[00:06:29.960 --> 00:06:30.840] That's an interesting one.
[00:06:30.840 --> 00:06:32.840] I do wonder, like, how do you balance this?
[00:06:32.840 --> 00:06:40.360] Because, particularly with cloud being a very much for-profit enterprise and having investment, having funding.
[00:06:40.360 --> 00:06:50.440] And on the other side, you have this open source community of people who often have the expectation that things should be free and things should be, you know, like designed by open source contributor committee.
[00:06:50.440 --> 00:06:53.960] How do you balance expectations between these kind of groups of people?
[00:06:53.960 --> 00:06:57.800] We really just try to let, I think, our behavior do the talking.
[00:06:57.800 --> 00:06:59.800] You know, I think that's really the best way to do it.
[00:06:59.800 --> 00:07:10.600] So, like, we have full-time staff working on open source, and we release open source every week and honestly at greater frequency than we did before, just because we have more resources behind it.
[00:07:10.600 --> 00:07:18.000] I think Laravel is also in this really unique position with cloud and Forge to where we almost have like both sides of the coin.
[00:07:18.160 --> 00:07:25.440] You know, like we have this fully managed platform for people that just want to kind of deploy and they never want to think about servers.
[00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:29.120] And if they pay a little bit of a premium for that at the end of the day, that's fine.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:40.240] And then we also have Forge, which is like this kind of semi-managed server management platform, which we're rebuilding entirely for Laricon this summer, which is going to be cool.
[00:07:40.240 --> 00:07:51.120] And people can bring their own cloud provider or whatever they want and, you know, throw 50 sites on a single server and really like get a lot of juice out of that server for the amount of spend they're putting into it.
[00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:53.520] And, you know, I think Laravel is unique to like offer both.
[00:07:53.520 --> 00:08:01.520] Like whatever's better for you, we're just trying to help you deploy your application and enjoy using this framework and you can kind of take either path.
[00:08:01.520 --> 00:08:12.320] So open source, like we know, and I know, and I think the company knows, if we don't have Laravel and we're not committed to open source in the community, like no one's going to be using this stuff.
[00:08:12.320 --> 00:08:16.640] So we have to be more committed to that than ever, basically.
[00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:20.320] Yeah, I've always admired the strategy that you have just laid out, right?
[00:08:20.320 --> 00:08:25.680] You build products that help people use the tool that you also build, and then you use the tool to build the products.
[00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:28.800] Like there's a lot of synergistic effects between these.
[00:08:28.800 --> 00:08:29.520] That makes sense.
[00:08:29.520 --> 00:08:33.360] And that to me is something that is, well, not completely unique.
[00:08:33.360 --> 00:08:39.840] Like other open source communities try to emulate this, but it is very efficient in the Laravel world.
[00:08:39.840 --> 00:08:41.760] Like you just mentioned five products.
[00:08:41.760 --> 00:08:44.880] I use four out of these for my software stack.
[00:08:44.880 --> 00:08:46.800] So you said you built five products.
[00:08:46.800 --> 00:08:49.600] You had like a five for five success with these products.
[00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:53.520] Like, were there any along the way that you kind of tried to build and they didn't work?
[00:08:53.520 --> 00:08:57.840] Or is it all like Vapor, Forge, and Voyer, and you know, like the other things?
[00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:00.440] Like, did that all work like from the beginning?
[00:08:59.440 --> 00:09:06.360] Like, that is such a, such a rare thing in the serial founder world for that to actually happen.
[00:09:06.360 --> 00:09:08.120] Yeah, it is pretty crazy.
[00:09:08.120 --> 00:09:12.680] Um, there was one product that I built all the way through that I never actually launched.
[00:09:12.680 --> 00:09:14.760] So I don't know if it would have succeeded or failed.
[00:09:14.760 --> 00:09:26.120] And it was actually called Laravel Cloud at the time, but it was more like a Laravel Forge reimagining that helped you deploy like load-balanced VPSs and you had like a YAML config file.
[00:09:26.120 --> 00:09:30.600] It was just a little bit different, but I got it all the way to completion.
[00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:36.280] It had a UI built by Steve Shoger, I believe, from Tailwind, because he worked for Laravel at the time.
[00:09:36.280 --> 00:09:42.040] And at the end of the day, I was like, this just isn't different enough from Forge to actually be compelling.
[00:09:42.040 --> 00:09:44.200] It's actually like sort of confusing.
[00:09:44.200 --> 00:09:48.520] There's no clear difference between the two products besides a few like minor things.
[00:09:48.520 --> 00:09:50.200] And I just like didn't even launch it.
[00:09:50.440 --> 00:09:54.920] I just tabled it, which is crazy because the whole thing was built, the back end, the front end, everything.
[00:09:54.920 --> 00:09:57.320] But, you know, I just think it would have kind of confused things.
[00:09:57.320 --> 00:10:00.360] So other than that, you know, everything kind of worked.
[00:10:00.360 --> 00:10:02.840] But the whole way, though, I was just solving my own problems.
[00:10:02.840 --> 00:10:07.000] I wasn't really trying to like, in many ways, I wasn't even trying to build products.
[00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:33.600] I was just like, especially with something like Vapor, I was just personally interested in AWS Lambda and could I get Laravel running on it and could I like build a deployment platform on it and I just I went down that road for like six months or whatever and I was like well I guess I'll ship this thing and you know it just kind of worked out so a lot of kind of happy accidents some pre-planning and masterful thinking but a lot of happy accidents as well yeah that that's that sounds like coding to me.
[00:10:33.600 --> 00:10:36.400] Yeah, that's for sure and and software entrepreneurship for that matter, right?
[00:10:36.400 --> 00:10:38.240] Like trying to figure things out as you go.
[00:10:38.280 --> 00:10:53.120] I do wonder now that you have cloud, now that you have these massive numbers of deployments, and probably also other kinds of products that people are trying to deploy than you may have seen before on Forge or whatever, how does that impact the actual framework?
[00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:58.320] Like, how does your experience with this at scale impact your plans for the framework in the future?
[00:10:58.320 --> 00:11:00.000] Yeah, there's been a few things.
[00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:09.040] I wouldn't say they're major things, but like when we start thinking about the scaling systems in cloud, we need maybe more insights into what's happening in the queue.
[00:11:09.040 --> 00:11:12.000] For example, like how long are jobs sitting on the queue?
[00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:13.200] How long are they running on the queue?
[00:11:13.200 --> 00:11:14.400] What's the oldest job on the queue?
[00:11:14.400 --> 00:11:19.520] Like that kind of info that we haven't exposed before, maybe unless you're using something like Laravel Horizon.
[00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:25.040] But for all queue drivers, we need that information to like intelligently auto-scale.
[00:11:25.280 --> 00:11:31.280] There were a few other minor things we added to the framework to make like, you know, file storage easier with cloud or something like that.
[00:11:31.280 --> 00:11:35.440] But honestly, we didn't change any major pieces of the framework.
[00:11:35.440 --> 00:11:52.080] I think what's interesting for me on cloud, though, that I didn't expect in terms of like the types of applications we're seeing or maybe customers is when we first built cloud, I kind of wondered like, or at least one of the fears I had was everyone's already kind of deployed their Laravel apps on Forge.
[00:11:52.640 --> 00:11:54.960] So why come to cloud?
[00:11:54.960 --> 00:12:16.960] But I think what we're discovering is there actually was this like contingent of a little bit larger applications that maybe were rolling their own Kubernetes at some company and they're having headaches with it all the time because it's complicated and they would love to run something fully managed, but they felt like Forge was not quite enough for them and cloud kind of hits that sweet spot.
[00:12:16.960 --> 00:12:24.720] So we are seeing customers like that that I didn't expect, which is really cool to hear their stories and to talk to them and to try to get them on cloud and help them be successful.
[00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:28.800] Yeah, that sounds like you're getting into a new segment of customers here.
[00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:29.440] Yeah, right.
[00:12:29.440 --> 00:12:30.000] A little bit.
[00:12:30.200 --> 00:12:34.680] That's really fun and probably like highly promising for the success of the platform.
[00:12:34.680 --> 00:12:36.200] Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about it.
[00:12:36.200 --> 00:12:36.840] It's fun.
[00:12:36.840 --> 00:12:43.160] Has people using Laravel on the cloud surfaced something about Laravel that you didn't expect to see?
[00:12:43.160 --> 00:12:45.160] Like, is there any surprise in there?
[00:12:45.160 --> 00:12:46.040] Or has there been?
[00:12:46.040 --> 00:12:46.600] Oh, gosh.
[00:12:46.600 --> 00:12:49.320] You know, we see all sorts of things both on cloud and forge.
[00:12:49.320 --> 00:12:51.000] You know, we see things.
[00:12:53.000 --> 00:13:02.840] We see things like the typical stuff you might expect with a web framework, like a web request that's firing off 500 database queries and the page is slow.
[00:13:02.840 --> 00:13:09.080] And depending on what database or cache setup they're using, that adds up to a lot of latency or whatever.
[00:13:09.080 --> 00:13:13.800] So we see things like that, maybe more so than we expected, honestly.
[00:13:13.800 --> 00:13:17.800] So, you know, there's a temptation to want to be like, okay, well, you should fix your application.
[00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:18.920] That's not our problem.
[00:13:18.920 --> 00:13:21.000] But that's going to continue to happen.
[00:13:21.720 --> 00:13:25.480] We have to make it fast, even if the app is not ideal, you know?
[00:13:25.720 --> 00:13:34.280] So that's one thing we're focusing on right now is like, how do we make it as fast as possible, even if the app's running 400, 500 database queries in a single request?
[00:13:34.680 --> 00:13:35.480] That's interesting.
[00:13:35.480 --> 00:13:40.520] Yeah, I guess that is also a problem that you will never be able to get rid of, right?
[00:13:40.520 --> 00:13:41.480] You always have beginners.
[00:13:41.480 --> 00:13:51.480] You always will have like AI written code that is super weird and pretty and non-performant that will be deployed probably automatically because there's some weird auto PR merger or whatever.
[00:13:51.480 --> 00:13:52.200] Interesting.
[00:13:52.200 --> 00:13:56.760] I guess that you have to solve on the hardware level or on the optimization level.
[00:13:56.760 --> 00:14:03.480] But I wonder, because now with Nightwatch in particular, you get more introspection into like how this works.
[00:14:03.480 --> 00:14:15.680] So, is this going to be something that you're going to try, I don't want to say to push, but to suggest heavily to users to kind of use by default just to see their performance and be able to optimize it.
[00:14:15.680 --> 00:14:17.200] Yeah, I think you should.
[00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:20.400] We've discovered so much, honestly, about our own apps.
[00:14:20.720 --> 00:14:31.520] We've been running Nightwatch on Forge, and to give context, Nightwatch is like a application observability tool for Larawall that shows you all your performance metrics for requests, queries, all that.
[00:14:31.520 --> 00:14:35.360] We've been running it on Forge, and we immediately saw things we didn't know about.
[00:14:35.600 --> 00:14:47.040] Whether it was like these outlier requests that are super long for certain customers, and many times those are your most important customers because they have the most servers and data and all of that, or pages that were doing more queries than we expected.
[00:14:47.040 --> 00:14:52.640] We actually had a situation the other day on cloud where we were having trouble debugging a problem, I believe.
[00:14:52.640 --> 00:15:01.360] And so we actually put them on Nightwatch early to help figure this out and were able to like immediately see what was going on, which was super cool.
[00:15:01.360 --> 00:15:04.160] Nightwatch should be coming out in early June.
[00:15:04.160 --> 00:15:12.080] It is going to have a free plan, actually, a totally free plan where you can kind of kick the tires and see the entire product without really any feature gating or anything.
[00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:16.560] So, everyone will be able to kind of get a taste of it and see like if it works for them or if it's helpful.
[00:15:16.560 --> 00:15:20.160] I think it's pretty crazy helpful in my opinion.
[00:15:20.160 --> 00:15:21.840] Um, so I'm excited to get it out there.
[00:15:21.840 --> 00:15:33.520] Yeah, like and some kind of observability tool, APM, whatever you want to call it, is for me at least something that I try to get in as soon as possible, just to avoid these kind of scale issues because it tends to be a scaling issue, right?
[00:15:33.520 --> 00:15:37.200] Like, things are slow, that's fine in the beginning, but they get slow and aggregate.
[00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:38.400] Well, that's a problem, right?
[00:15:38.400 --> 00:15:40.720] So, that's that's really cool to see.
[00:15:40.720 --> 00:15:48.240] Um, and also been something that I've been personally having trouble with in the past, like just even to get Accentury or whatever integrated into a PHP application.
[00:15:48.240 --> 00:15:49.600] Well, that's hard.
[00:15:49.600 --> 00:15:56.560] Like, there's a lot of work that needs to be done that has very little to do with the actual application and a lot to do with the server management side of things.
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:15:59.360] And that's what you guys probably do much better than I, right?
[00:15:59.440 --> 00:16:01.320] So, for that reason, I'm looking forward to it.
[00:16:01.480 --> 00:16:11.880] I can't wait to get my invite because I'm really looking forward to not having to deal with this and also knowing that the people who deal with this actually know what they're doing.
[00:16:11.880 --> 00:16:15.560] That to me is that's the great thing about the Laravel ecosystem to begin with.
[00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:17.160] Like you mentioned Spark earlier.
[00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:19.720] I process all my payments through Spark, right?
[00:16:19.720 --> 00:16:21.560] Through the billing system.
[00:16:21.560 --> 00:16:28.600] And Nova is also my backend that I use for administrative stuff because that is just the best way to integrate into a Laravel application.
[00:16:28.600 --> 00:16:38.920] I think you've been doing a really good job at finding the next thing that people use something else for right now because there isn't anything, but actually want something done by you.
[00:16:38.920 --> 00:16:45.800] Do you think this is going to change like with cloud in terms of that you're not going to have like standalone products anymore and it's all going to be part of cloud?
[00:16:45.800 --> 00:16:53.560] Because that's, I think, a fear that a lot of open source people might have that it's all going to be bundled into this and then not be able to extract it into a standalone deployment anymore.
[00:16:53.560 --> 00:16:56.280] Like, what's the strategy for you there for future products?
[00:16:56.280 --> 00:16:59.240] I mean, I don't think we would try to force anything like that.
[00:16:59.560 --> 00:17:04.680] I think we'll honestly have our hands full with just the core feature set of cloud for a long time.
[00:17:05.240 --> 00:17:11.160] So to be honest, we haven't thought a lot about like future products that might be standalone or built into cloud.
[00:17:11.160 --> 00:17:14.200] It's just sort of too far out there on the timeline.
[00:17:14.520 --> 00:17:30.360] But even Nightwatch is a good example of like, we could have sort of built the observability stuff into cloud and said, if you want all of this good observability stuff, you need to run on Laravel Cloud because that's most commercially advantageous to us.
[00:17:30.600 --> 00:17:31.560] But we didn't do that.
[00:17:31.560 --> 00:17:39.000] Obviously, it's a whole separate product that you can use, whether you're on Forge or Cloud or even just rolling your own AWS deployment.
[00:17:39.560 --> 00:17:44.120] You just run the Nightwatch agent wherever you are, and we start pulling in the data.
[00:17:44.120 --> 00:17:46.560] So, you know, I've already been conscious of that.
[00:17:46.560 --> 00:18:05.920] And it's something I want to avoid is sort of like, I think it's very obvious when companies like artificially force you into certain things that are only that way so that they can get the maximum amount of money from you instead of like what's actually good for the user or the most users or you know what's going to be good for us long term.
[00:18:05.920 --> 00:18:09.760] Yeah, I think we'll have our hands full with these two new products for a while anyway.
[00:18:10.080 --> 00:18:10.880] Oh, for sure.
[00:18:10.880 --> 00:18:18.400] And I think they are probably the most ambitious and most like nuanced products that you've built like ever since you started with all of this.
[00:18:18.560 --> 00:18:19.200] I love this.
[00:18:19.200 --> 00:18:31.920] Like when I when I heard that the Nightwatch announcement at Laricon, like I was watching it through the stream because, you know, you're busy at another conference, but I love just the idea of you finally tackling this because it always has been something, I want this.
[00:18:31.920 --> 00:18:32.880] I hope they're going to make it.
[00:18:32.880 --> 00:18:39.360] And then it's just going to naturally happen because you also have the other system that needs the observability to be performant.
[00:18:39.360 --> 00:18:39.600] Right.
[00:18:39.600 --> 00:18:40.320] Yeah, me too.
[00:18:40.320 --> 00:18:54.400] Like even just like one screen of Nightwatch, like for me, like the log screen of Nightwatch, anytime I'm starting up a new Lariba project, I would always just almost kick the can down the road of setting up proper logging because I knew it was just going to be a pain and I didn't want to mess with it.
[00:18:54.400 --> 00:18:58.080] But just even if I only had logs in Nightwatch, I'd be happy with that.
[00:18:58.080 --> 00:19:01.360] Like that's just so much better and a level up of the experience for me.
[00:19:01.360 --> 00:19:03.040] Yeah, you should see what I'm using.
[00:19:03.280 --> 00:19:10.080] I use like an SSH connection that has a tail on the Laribo logs file in the storage directory.
[00:19:10.080 --> 00:19:10.960] That's my logging.
[00:19:10.960 --> 00:19:11.920] Like that's running right here.
[00:19:11.920 --> 00:19:13.280] Like it's my terminal somewhere.
[00:19:13.520 --> 00:19:15.920] That's nicer looking than a lot of solutions I've seen.
[00:19:16.240 --> 00:19:18.400] Right, but that's not how it should be, right?
[00:19:18.600 --> 00:19:27.600] Like, there should be like from the start a way for you to opt into something that works for you, has data retention and searchability, that kind of stuff that matters a lot to me.
[00:19:27.920 --> 00:19:29.440] And I'm glad you're building this.
[00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:41.000] I do wonder, and this is probably something that is a very recent thing: how much AI in terms of like in all kinds of ways Laravel will have in the future.
[00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:54.040] Like right now, AI and Laravel to me is really just I ask my chat GPT and my clauds to build me Laravel stuff, and it is good enough to build this and understand like what Eloquent is, what the Laravel like directory structure, and what jobs are, queues are and that.
[00:19:54.040 --> 00:19:57.400] Like AI can build Laravel apps pretty well.
[00:19:57.400 --> 00:20:06.200] But I wonder what your perspective is on both using AI to code with and AI as a part of the larger Laravel ecosystem.
[00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:07.960] What are the thoughts there at the moment?
[00:20:07.960 --> 00:20:08.440] Yeah.
[00:20:08.760 --> 00:20:15.400] So I'll start with my view on AI coding in general, which I'm really bullish on.
[00:20:15.400 --> 00:20:20.360] I think that probably all programmers will use AI assistance in the future.
[00:20:20.360 --> 00:20:22.600] I think that's pretty inevitable at this point.
[00:20:22.600 --> 00:20:25.720] And it feels like we're almost already there, basically.
[00:20:26.040 --> 00:20:27.480] And I think it's great, honestly.
[00:20:27.480 --> 00:20:28.840] Like, I think it's awesome.
[00:20:28.840 --> 00:20:31.720] I wish I had those kind of tools when I was first learning to program.
[00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:39.000] I think it's awesome for writing the language you know, but I think it's also awesome for learning new languages and spiking out something in something you're not familiar with.
[00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:45.320] So very bullish on that and think that will continue to get better and more pervasive in the future.
[00:20:45.320 --> 00:20:49.160] As far as AI and Laravel, I mean, I think about it in a couple different ways.
[00:20:49.160 --> 00:21:01.080] One thing we're kind of kicking around now is I think you're right that like the current tools actually write Laravel pretty adequately and it's totally pretty much fine every time I use it.
[00:21:01.080 --> 00:21:02.840] This kind of stuff is changing every day.
[00:21:02.840 --> 00:21:06.920] Like, even just yesterday, I saw like the cloud code SDK and the new GitHub action stuff.
[00:21:06.920 --> 00:21:09.000] So it's just like a constantly changing thing.
[00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:19.200] I think I'm interested in like seeing how we can teach the AI sort of like that final level of polish that you might put on a Laravel app.
[00:21:14.600 --> 00:21:28.800] Laravel has been around a long time, which is great for the AI stuff because there's lots of stuff out there for it to be trained on and code and all of that and material.
[00:21:28.800 --> 00:21:32.480] But like, how can we get it to write Laravel?
[00:21:32.480 --> 00:21:40.160] How maybe we would write Laravel as a company or be a little bit more opinionated with the latest sort of like best practices and how we would write things cleanly.
[00:21:40.160 --> 00:21:41.760] So we're interested in that.
[00:21:41.760 --> 00:21:46.080] I'm also interested from like a tooling perspective.
[00:21:46.400 --> 00:21:54.880] I think it's going to be really important for Laravel to be the easiest full-stack framework to integrate AI with, whether that's like an AI SDK.
[00:21:55.040 --> 00:22:07.360] So in PHP, the most popular one right now is probably Prism PHP, which is like a back-end agnostic AI SDK, very similar to Vercel's AI SDK, where you can use OpenAI or Anthroopic or all these other providers.
[00:22:07.360 --> 00:22:14.880] So that another thing we're kind of working on right now is the fastest way to build MCP servers with Laravel.
[00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:18.160] So many people are writing those these days and we'll see if that continues.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:33.520] It's hard to say because things change so fast, but that's something we're actively working on right now, trying to get to 1.0 is basically an MCP server framework for Laravel that feels very easy to get started with and quick to spin up these ideas and deploy them as well.
[00:22:33.520 --> 00:22:38.880] So I mean, overall, yeah, I think there's going to be more AI-related stuff in dev and Laravel.
[00:22:39.120 --> 00:22:41.280] I think it's overall a good thing.
[00:22:41.520 --> 00:22:43.680] I think it's really cool and really helpful.
[00:22:43.680 --> 00:22:49.120] And I want Laravel to be the best way and fastest way, most productive way to build AI-powered apps.
[00:22:49.120 --> 00:22:52.400] And I think Laravel's always been an opinionated full-stack framework.
[00:22:52.400 --> 00:22:57.840] And it makes sense for us to have an opinion and a clean way to integrate this stuff into your apps.
[00:22:57.920 --> 00:23:01.320] I think we'd be kind of like burying our head in the sand if we didn't do that.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:07.240] Yeah, it would be like missing just the point of conversation that is happening right now in the community.
[00:23:07.960 --> 00:23:09.560] Like everybody's trying to figure it out.
[00:23:09.560 --> 00:23:11.080] Like people have opinions, obviously.
[00:23:11.080 --> 00:23:14.440] They always have opinions and in all different kinds of ways.
[00:23:14.440 --> 00:23:20.200] But yeah, I like what you're saying because you're not saying we need AI in our product because so many people do.
[00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:23.880] You say we should facilitate people using AI to build products.
[00:23:23.880 --> 00:23:25.000] That is a very different thing.
[00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:25.560] And I love it.
[00:23:25.560 --> 00:23:33.560] I love the fact that it's not about hyping or using the hype train, but actually building reasonably useful things with a new technology.
[00:23:34.280 --> 00:23:35.720] That is most appreciated.
[00:23:35.720 --> 00:23:36.440] And I agree.
[00:23:37.480 --> 00:23:44.200] Making it easy to build things with AI and through AI, that should be the angle for a framework right now.
[00:23:44.440 --> 00:23:59.640] My big dream is that a framework and Laravel should could maybe the first ships, the Laravel installer ships with a really, really small language model that is purposely and intentionally trained just on writing extremely good Laravel code.
[00:23:59.640 --> 00:24:00.920] And you can run it locally.
[00:24:00.920 --> 00:24:02.040] It runs in the IDE.
[00:24:02.040 --> 00:24:07.320] I mean, I look at my PHP storm and they have some weird internal little code completion things now.
[00:24:07.320 --> 00:24:11.240] I don't know what it is, but I assume it's a really small language model.
[00:24:11.240 --> 00:24:21.000] If that would be something a framework can provide, and then all frameworks could provide something like this for their code bases, that would be so cool and so helpful.
[00:24:21.080 --> 00:24:23.480] I think we're like not far from that, honestly.
[00:24:23.480 --> 00:24:43.960] You know, with like this isn't local, but with things like the Cloud Code SDK that I was talking about that I saw yesterday, the ability to interact with it non-interactively, like they announced, and feed it prompts and context and things gets us close to having like these artisan commands or local things that I actually know how to write good Laravel code, which is, I think, super cool.
[00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:44.800] Me too.
[00:24:44.360 --> 00:24:49.520] Like, obviously, like, I yesterday was a moment for me too, where I used Juni.
[00:24:49.600 --> 00:24:54.480] I think that's the internal agent that PHP Storm offers now.
[00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:57.280] And I used it for the first time, and it was bizarre.
[00:24:57.280 --> 00:25:04.320] Like, I'm not much into agentic coding because I still want to do my own coding, which is probably a traditionalist perspective at this point.
[00:25:04.320 --> 00:25:07.040] But I gave it a task, I wrote a spec.
[00:25:07.040 --> 00:25:08.960] I took 20 minutes to write the spec.
[00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:11.520] And then I just walked upstairs to get a coffee.
[00:25:11.520 --> 00:25:13.600] I came back down and the thing was implemented.
[00:25:13.600 --> 00:25:18.480] And I was like, this is crazy in the best and worst way at the same time.
[00:25:18.480 --> 00:25:20.400] Because now the thing is doing my job.
[00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:22.080] All I'm doing is instruct.
[00:25:22.080 --> 00:25:23.840] Interesting, to say the least.
[00:25:23.840 --> 00:25:28.320] Like, how much AI coding do you use for developer Gerald features at this point?
[00:25:28.320 --> 00:25:31.760] Like, how does that work for you and the team, I guess?
[00:25:31.760 --> 00:25:36.000] So, a lot of the work I do on Laravel is reviewing PRs.
[00:25:36.320 --> 00:25:42.880] And a lot of the changes I have to make are relatively minor and don't require assistance, but some of them end up being pretty big.
[00:25:42.880 --> 00:26:02.240] And what I'm really interested in, and what I thought about yesterday when I read about this new GitHub Actions integration with Claude and stuff, is like a lot of times if I get a PR that's sort of non-trivial and I have some feedback to give to the author, and then I just kind of have to sit around and wait for that to be implemented.
[00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:03.360] If it ever is, right?
[00:26:03.360 --> 00:26:15.200] Like if they come back, if we're able to unlock that and like PRs as an open source maintainer, if I could just at the agent, hey, this PR is 90% good.
[00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:17.600] Here's the things I don't like and kind of want to change about it.
[00:26:17.600 --> 00:26:18.480] Can you implement that?
[00:26:18.480 --> 00:26:21.920] And I can go downstairs and get a snack and come back and it's kind of done.
[00:26:21.920 --> 00:26:24.800] That's like insane, you know, unlock.
[00:26:25.440 --> 00:26:26.960] So, yeah, I'm curious to see.
[00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:28.960] I'm curious to see how that develops.
[00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:35.240] Yeah, I see the same thing for security testing or even for just trying to do background improvements.
[00:26:35.400 --> 00:26:50.520] Like when you were just saying that the thing about how people on cloud build these weird apps that have 500 database queries, well, what if you could spin up a complete clone of the repo, like have an agent try to fix it and suggest it to them automatically because you're linked to their GitHub account anyway, right?
[00:26:50.520 --> 00:26:53.800] That to me is smart AI usage inside a product.
[00:26:53.800 --> 00:26:56.440] Yeah, and I think we're super interested in that for Nightwatch.
[00:26:56.440 --> 00:27:05.160] And so some of the ways we're using AI on Nightwatch right now are pretty basic, like summarizing exceptions or issues or things like that.
[00:27:05.160 --> 00:27:07.640] But you could imagine where we could do something like what you're saying.
[00:27:07.640 --> 00:27:12.840] We know pretty much exactly why the request was slow, either which middleware it was, which query it is.
[00:27:12.840 --> 00:27:15.720] We can see if there was an index on the query, all of that stuff.
[00:27:15.720 --> 00:27:21.240] If we're integrated with cloud, then we can just, we know what repo is, we can send you a PR, we can deploy it for you on cloud.
[00:27:21.240 --> 00:27:25.240] So it's kind of the whole story could be covered, which I'm very interested in exploring.
[00:27:25.240 --> 00:27:26.040] Yeah, for sure.
[00:27:26.040 --> 00:27:28.520] Yeah, that's going to be a really fun time.
[00:27:28.520 --> 00:27:29.400] It's already fun.
[00:27:29.560 --> 00:27:36.600] It's already fun to have these things do things for you, but to have that done in the background and have problems be fixed before you even notice them.
[00:27:37.640 --> 00:27:41.400] It's going to be a weird future for people who are traditionally trained software engineers.
[00:27:41.400 --> 00:27:42.280] That's how I feel.
[00:27:42.280 --> 00:27:45.480] Yeah, it's different, but I think it's exciting.
[00:27:45.720 --> 00:27:51.320] I don't feel threatened by it at all, you know, like some people seem to.
[00:27:51.320 --> 00:27:57.960] I think it's really an exciting unlock in productivity for developers and just gives you so much more power.
[00:27:57.960 --> 00:28:12.760] Honestly, as a single founder as well, like if you're bootstrapping a company and it's just you working on something, you can just be so much more productive, especially on maybe the boilerplate work that is pretty boring, that often is where a product kind of gets stuck.
[00:28:12.760 --> 00:28:19.920] You know, like if you've done a lot of side projects, you know, it's basically a joke at this point, how many unfinished side projects people, everyone has, right?
[00:28:20.240 --> 00:28:25.840] And they usually fizzle out because you lose excitement during the non-boring parts of the development cycle.
[00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:29.520] And being able to kind of push through that with AIs is pretty exciting.
[00:28:29.520 --> 00:28:38.240] Yeah, I heard a lot of people are now doing vibe coding on the side on their old projects just by throwing them into cursor or windsurf or whatever and like finish this.
[00:28:38.480 --> 00:28:39.680] That's really how that works.
[00:28:39.680 --> 00:28:40.400] And I love this.
[00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:43.760] I love that code gets like reactivated, resurrected even.
[00:28:43.760 --> 00:28:45.840] And then some agent takes, maybe takes care of it.
[00:28:45.840 --> 00:28:49.680] Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it goes to a point where people can actually deploy it.
[00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:52.160] And then something is built that wouldn't have been built before.
[00:28:52.160 --> 00:28:53.040] That's really cool.
[00:28:53.360 --> 00:28:56.880] Do you think you're ever going to hire like a full-time AI employee?
[00:28:56.880 --> 00:28:57.840] I can see that happening.
[00:28:58.480 --> 00:28:59.840] I wouldn't be surprised, honestly.
[00:28:59.840 --> 00:29:02.640] I'd almost be more surprised if we didn't eventually.
[00:29:02.640 --> 00:29:03.200] Yeah, right?
[00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:05.200] Like it's going to be a cyborg team at some point.
[00:29:05.200 --> 00:29:06.400] Yeah, pretty wild.
[00:29:06.560 --> 00:29:07.680] That's bizarre.
[00:29:07.680 --> 00:29:11.120] Well, I'm glad you have a very sensitive approach to AI.
[00:29:11.120 --> 00:29:19.520] One thing that when I think about like AI, existing AI systems, like platforms that help you build code, I want to mention one thing.
[00:29:19.520 --> 00:29:26.560] I asked my Twitter feed a question recently about what the number one thing is that stops them from using Laravel for the next indie business.
[00:29:26.560 --> 00:29:30.560] Because my audience is a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of software people at the intersection.
[00:29:30.560 --> 00:29:34.800] And I just wanted to see what's the vibe around Laravel and why do people not use it?
[00:29:34.800 --> 00:29:36.880] Because the people who do use it, there's a lot of them.
[00:29:37.120 --> 00:29:40.720] They are very happy with it and they understand that the ecosystem is really cool.
[00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:42.000] The integrations are easy.
[00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:45.760] If I want payment, I just do one composer require and I'm kind of done.
[00:29:45.760 --> 00:29:48.320] Like that kind of stuff is just extremely powerful.
[00:29:48.320 --> 00:29:49.760] So, I wanted to see the other side.
[00:29:49.760 --> 00:30:00.920] And besides all the people saying, well, PHP sucks, what you will find those people still like that are kind of left in the PHP 4.0 world of 2005 or whatever.
[00:30:01.240 --> 00:30:07.480] And people who still use JavaScript or they use JavaScript for everything because that's also like from the server to the front end to mobile.
[00:30:07.480 --> 00:30:09.000] You can use it on every platform.
[00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:09.720] Fine with them.
[00:30:09.720 --> 00:30:14.600] The interesting ones were, and I'm going to quote this verbatim because I want to see what you think about this.
[00:30:14.600 --> 00:30:20.680] I don't use Laravel because the fact that neither cursor nor replit ever suggests Laravel as an option.
[00:30:20.680 --> 00:30:21.720] I found that interesting.
[00:30:21.720 --> 00:30:22.840] Like, what are you going to do about that?
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:26.520] Like, how can you actually get your framework into these tools?
[00:30:26.520 --> 00:30:33.960] I mean, I think that's something we are working on that internally, even with the AI providers, you know, trying to improve this.
[00:30:33.960 --> 00:30:35.400] I think it's like a valid point, right?
[00:30:35.640 --> 00:30:40.920] And it goes for all new frameworks that will ever be created, right?
[00:30:40.920 --> 00:30:52.360] Like, it has created this weird situation where if I were to write Laravel today, it would like the AI would have no idea how to write it.
[00:30:52.840 --> 00:31:00.360] It feels like almost so much harder to launch an open source web framework today than it was 10 years ago because of this very problem.
[00:31:00.680 --> 00:31:42.400] And I'm very interested to like solve it because I think Laravel is uniquely suited to I think it's the most like expansive and cohesive full stack ecosystem you can write a web application in in the sense that there's a solution for pretty much every problem you're going to have more or less and so for AI just to be able to write all of that and you can deploy it and you don't have to go sign up for eight different SaaS services to sort of build your your full stack app is really cool um so yeah, we're aware of this and like very interested in trying to solve this as best we can um but because I think it's totally valid, like it's like the new, it's the new SEO, basically you know it really is.
[00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:45.040] AIO or something, right?
[00:31:45.040 --> 00:31:46.400] Like, that's that's where we are.
[00:31:46.400 --> 00:31:50.240] Yeah, I think Stripe has been doing something really interesting with their docs.
[00:31:50.240 --> 00:31:55.120] Like, it's almost like now native markdown, and a copy to markdown button is everywhere.
[00:31:55.120 --> 00:32:01.200] And even like, open this in ChatGPT is a button, like a button that's bigger than other buttons in their documentation.
[00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:12.320] I think they've understood that they need to feed these things into the systems, either by usage or by asking ChatGPT to crawl it so that it gets ingested into the next batch of training data for the model.
[00:32:12.320 --> 00:32:16.480] Like, that's the AI optimization stuff that we are still all just trying to figure out.
[00:32:16.480 --> 00:32:23.520] Like, LLMs.txt that describe a full website somewhere, and then all documentation with code examples to just ingest.
[00:32:23.760 --> 00:32:31.920] It's a bizarre world we're in because I didn't have this on my menu for 2025 that I have to export all my docs as a markdown file for some computer to eat, right?
[00:32:31.920 --> 00:32:32.720] No, I know.
[00:32:32.720 --> 00:32:33.600] It's crazy.
[00:32:33.600 --> 00:32:36.000] I never would have expected it, honestly.
[00:32:36.240 --> 00:32:47.120] It's been a wild couple of years, but I can already feel like personally how my software development experience is completely alien to what it would have been like two or three years ago.
[00:32:47.120 --> 00:32:49.040] And that's not even with agentic stuff.
[00:32:49.040 --> 00:32:57.200] Just even being able to take a piece of code, throwing it into some window and telling it, hey, fix this, and it does fix it, that is magical.
[00:32:57.200 --> 00:33:06.880] I laugh sometimes because over the years, you know, six or seven years ago, I would routinely ask like on Twitter, what should we build next for Laravel, you know, just to get feedback.
[00:33:06.880 --> 00:33:10.640] And there was always these like joking responses of like, can it build my app for me?
[00:33:10.640 --> 00:33:11.840] Can it like code for me?
[00:33:11.840 --> 00:33:16.000] And now that is like 100% reality, which is so mind-blowing.
[00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:19.440] And at the time, it just felt like a joke, you know, and that was not that long ago.
[00:33:19.440 --> 00:33:19.680] Yep.
[00:33:19.920 --> 00:33:24.400] I'm not surprised that people are afraid for their jobs or just even for stability.
[00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:27.680] I hear it from investors too, people who are investing in SaaS businesses.
[00:33:27.680 --> 00:33:29.680] They don't know, like, where is this going to go?
[00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:33.480] Are we investing in something that somebody could build in 20 minutes, like a couple years from now?
[00:33:33.480 --> 00:33:34.440] Or is there a mode?
[00:33:34.440 --> 00:33:35.240] What is the mode?
[00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:35.400] Right?
[00:33:35.480 --> 00:33:37.560] Like, that is problematic.
[00:33:37.960 --> 00:33:54.360] I think what you're doing in building the whole system, like from the framework to the tools used to deploy it, to the place where it's deployed, and the service, like the customer success teams that help you deploy this, I think that's the mode is to have control over the whole channel from start to finish.
[00:33:54.360 --> 00:33:57.480] But I can see how other people don't have that luxury, right?
[00:33:57.560 --> 00:33:59.800] Like, that's a real problem to them.
[00:33:59.800 --> 00:34:00.280] Yeah.
[00:34:00.280 --> 00:34:03.480] And for many people, the ideas were the hard part, in my opinion.
[00:34:03.480 --> 00:34:10.040] Like, you can build apps that have no product market fit faster than you could before.
[00:34:10.040 --> 00:34:11.160] You know what I mean?
[00:34:11.160 --> 00:34:12.520] Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:12.520 --> 00:34:15.240] That's the one thing that never changes, right?
[00:34:15.240 --> 00:34:19.080] Like, there's a lot of bad ideas that are now just executed faster.
[00:34:19.080 --> 00:34:20.040] That's, yeah, that's pretty much.
[00:34:20.200 --> 00:34:21.000] Yeah, which is fine.
[00:34:21.000 --> 00:34:29.240] Better to like fail fast, you know, than to waste a lot of time and fail after years of develop hand coding onto the next idea.
[00:34:29.240 --> 00:34:31.160] Yeah, I wonder where the balance is.
[00:34:31.320 --> 00:34:37.800] I do wonder where the balance is here because sometimes failing fast is like what two days of no customers and the idea is bad, right?
[00:34:37.800 --> 00:34:42.040] Like, should I take a month to see if I can actually do some marketing?
[00:34:42.440 --> 00:34:43.640] It might be too fast.
[00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:49.080] And a lot of people have like AI FOMO and they just feel like they need to add AI features and whatnot.
[00:34:49.080 --> 00:34:51.960] And they fail to see what the actual value is.
[00:34:51.960 --> 00:35:01.160] Yeah, maybe it's screwing up our entire business founder attention span of like, I didn't hit 100K a week in the first 24 hours.
[00:35:01.160 --> 00:35:01.720] This is done.
[00:35:02.120 --> 00:35:04.680] Honestly, if you look at Twitter, that's exactly what's happening.
[00:35:04.920 --> 00:35:13.640] Because the algorithms then also amplify these totally outlandish messages of people who had a kind of fluke success or just random chance.
[00:35:13.640 --> 00:35:15.040] Yeah, that's going to be a problem.
[00:35:14.600 --> 00:35:16.800] But I guess that's a problem for another day.
[00:35:17.520 --> 00:35:21.760] I think we talk about the stuff that's happening right now here, right?
[00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:23.840] And I think Laravel is happening right now.
[00:35:24.080 --> 00:35:32.480] To anybody who thinks PHP is outdated in 2025, what is your perspective as somebody who's built an empire on top of that language?
[00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:52.000] You know, I think PHP has such an interesting history from being created in a very similar way to how Laravel was, of just like a guy's personal collection of tools to build his own ideas faster, to powering Facebook.com and many other, you know, very notable startups.
[00:35:52.000 --> 00:36:03.680] I think PHP is like one of the few languages that was built specifically for the web and only for web programming in its original inception.
[00:36:03.680 --> 00:36:11.200] And it's honestly just still such a fast, productive, no-nonsense kind of language that anyone can learn.
[00:36:11.200 --> 00:36:16.800] It's very quick to learn, even in just like a week, you know, especially with AI assistance.
[00:36:16.800 --> 00:36:23.920] It's not a very complicated language, but yet it's fast and there's tons of documentation.
[00:36:23.920 --> 00:36:28.160] There's tons of educational material about PHP, about Laravel.
[00:36:28.160 --> 00:36:44.080] And I still think it's really like the most productive way to build a web app, especially paired with tools like LiveWire or Inertia, where you can pair like a modern React or View front end with your Laravel backend in a way that just doesn't make you want to pull your hair out.
[00:36:44.240 --> 00:36:46.640] I think it's a great way to build applications.
[00:36:46.640 --> 00:36:51.840] And so that's why I still like, if I was starting a new business today, it's, I'm not even thinking about anything else.
[00:36:51.840 --> 00:36:57.120] And obviously, I built Laravel, but I just think it's just the fastest, most productive way to build things.
[00:36:57.120 --> 00:37:09.720] And I hear so many times of like, I'll hear developers venture into other ecosystems, whether it's like full stack JavaScript or something else, and then come back and be like, oh my gosh, like.
[00:37:10.200 --> 00:37:13.240] I'm so much more productive on this stack.
[00:37:13.240 --> 00:37:27.400] My team is more productive because we're not, you know, it's nice just to have a structure and a set of opinions on how to build things and not have to like reinvent the wheel for every possible thing you need to build, which I think is one area that Laravel excels.
[00:37:27.400 --> 00:37:27.560] Yeah.
[00:37:27.560 --> 00:37:35.560] And I think our community, and I'm just saying our because I feel like I'm part of the Laravel community, is not as fragmented and doesn't have as much inflating, right?
[00:37:35.800 --> 00:37:38.520] There's not this kind of framework versus framework stuff.
[00:37:38.520 --> 00:37:42.440] Like you literally have Vue.js and React and whatever you want to put there.
[00:37:42.440 --> 00:37:43.480] So sure, why not?
[00:37:44.040 --> 00:37:48.040] You can find a way with Inertia to get all of these things working together.
[00:37:48.040 --> 00:37:54.120] I think Laravel is an integrated framework and not like an excluding kind of framework.
[00:37:54.120 --> 00:37:56.920] I think it's very integrated and very cohesive.
[00:37:56.920 --> 00:38:15.640] And I think what separates Laravel from maybe other, let's say, more traditional full-stack frameworks is we're also, I think, an open-minded community in terms of as developer taste and practices change, we adopt them in a way that is not like reactionary, but like considered.
[00:38:15.640 --> 00:38:25.160] And I think Inertia is like a great example of that of like, look, it's just unrealistic to expect people to write their front ends using PHP echo tags forever.
[00:38:25.160 --> 00:38:31.240] React in a large way is kind of one, let's say, front end mind share among developers.
[00:38:31.240 --> 00:38:33.000] And we would be silly to ignore that.
[00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:36.440] Similar, we would be silly to ignore AI and say, oh, that's for the kids.
[00:38:36.440 --> 00:38:37.400] That's stupid.
[00:38:37.400 --> 00:38:40.160] We only handwrite artisan code over here, you know.
[00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:47.040] So I've always been one to not reject where things are heading or not like blind myself to it.
[00:38:47.360 --> 00:38:57.840] And we've tried to just kind of embrace, you know, as the web development landscape evolves, we evolve with it as best we can and continue to try to build the most productive way to build apps.
[00:38:58.000 --> 00:38:58.800] I'm not surprised.
[00:38:58.800 --> 00:39:01.120] I think that's that's what PHP was too, right?
[00:39:01.120 --> 00:39:13.200] PHP was this collection of things, and then it got better and better with every version and integrated object-oriented stuff and it moved away from these weird, like arbitrarily named things to a better internal structure, right?
[00:39:13.200 --> 00:39:18.080] The first time I built PHP was 4.0 somewhere in 2002 and 2003.
[00:39:18.080 --> 00:39:24.720] Like it was, I was doing typo 3 backend extensions, and it was a horrible thing to do, but it worked.
[00:39:24.720 --> 00:39:29.120] And that's the last time I used PHP prior to getting into Laribo, like a couple of years ago.
[00:39:29.120 --> 00:39:38.560] So I had all this stuff still in my mind about how unusable it was, but I find myself not even using any of the functions that I used back in the day.
[00:39:38.560 --> 00:39:40.240] That's how much the language has changed.
[00:39:40.240 --> 00:39:41.440] Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
[00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:46.640] And it's easy to like, I mean, you can download like a Reactor Viewer LiveWire starter kit and just kind of look at the code.
[00:39:46.640 --> 00:39:48.320] And it is pretty different.
[00:39:48.480 --> 00:39:51.040] It's very different than how PHP used to be written.
[00:39:51.040 --> 00:39:51.920] Yeah, for sure.
[00:39:51.920 --> 00:39:53.920] And I think that's the great part.
[00:39:53.920 --> 00:39:58.880] Like you, it's a thing that adapts to the reality in which it operates.
[00:39:58.880 --> 00:40:04.800] That is the opposite of having this kind of very agenda-driven framework development.
[00:40:04.800 --> 00:40:05.760] I don't want to hate on anybody.
[00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:06.720] Like, do whatever you want.
[00:40:06.720 --> 00:40:16.080] I just love that this is the choice that I can now make and build my own monetized applications faster and more reliable than I ever could before.
[00:40:16.080 --> 00:40:19.680] So I really appreciate you spending like your whole life building this.
[00:40:19.680 --> 00:40:21.200] So thank you so much.
[00:40:21.200 --> 00:40:22.080] It's really cool.
[00:40:22.080 --> 00:40:29.760] And I also appreciate all the products you built along the way, because not only are they helpful to me as a developer, they are inspirational to me as a founder.
[00:40:29.960 --> 00:40:33.000] That's that is something, and to a lot of people out there, right?
[00:40:33.000 --> 00:40:40.040] Like the way you approach business and the way the decisions that you make along the way, what you've just voiced over the last half hour or so.
[00:40:40.040 --> 00:40:41.800] That is why this is successful.
[00:40:41.800 --> 00:40:45.880] So thanks so much for sharing all these very amazing insights.
[00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:48.760] I can't wait to see what the future holds for Laravel.
[00:40:48.760 --> 00:40:54.120] Where can people follow you and the businesses that you run and the journey that you're on if they want to see more?
[00:40:54.120 --> 00:40:58.440] Yeah, so they can follow me personally on xx.com slash taylorotwell.
[00:40:58.600 --> 00:41:03.720] You can follow Laravel at x.com slash laravelphp or just at laravel.com.
[00:41:03.720 --> 00:41:08.280] And cloud.laravel.com is where you can check out our latest cloud platform.
[00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:10.920] And nightwatch.laravel.com will be coming soon.
[00:41:10.920 --> 00:41:12.680] So you can get on the waiting list for that.
[00:41:12.680 --> 00:41:13.560] That is amazing.
[00:41:13.560 --> 00:41:15.560] Well, thanks so much, Taylor, for being on.
[00:41:15.800 --> 00:41:18.440] That was great insight into a framework that I love.
[00:41:18.440 --> 00:41:20.280] So thanks for everything, man.
[00:41:20.280 --> 00:41:21.800] Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:41:21.800 --> 00:41:23.000] And that's it for today.
[00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:25.240] Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder.
[00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:28.760] You can find me on Twitter at AvidKal, AIV-ID, K-A-H-L.
[00:41:28.760 --> 00:41:41.640] And if you want to support me in this show, please share podscan.fm, my SaaS business, with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, and names on podcasts out there.
[00:41:41.640 --> 00:41:46.120] PodScan is a near real-time podcast database with a stellar API.
[00:41:46.120 --> 00:41:49.240] We have 32 million podcast episodes in the back now.
[00:41:49.240 --> 00:41:51.160] The database is humongous.
[00:41:51.160 --> 00:41:55.480] Please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem.
[00:41:55.480 --> 00:41:56.840] Thank you so much for listening.
[00:41:56.840 --> 00:41:59.400] Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.
[00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:00.240] Mm-hmm.