New "AI-Friendly" Laravel Installer: Two Reasons NOT To Use It

Hello guys. Recently I saw this tweet by Joe from the Core Laravel team. So a new feature of Laravel installer allows you to create a Laravel project without Laravel new, just prompting the agent, and it would do that for you in effective, efficient way, suppressing the output input. So, in theory, it would use fewer tokens. And I tried it out, and I will give you two reasons why I would not use exactly that feature. It looks cool on the surface that you can just prompt the agent and then go for coffee, but let's take a look what is the actual end result of that prompt, and I will do that twice before updating the installer and after updating that Laravel installer. And I will try to repeat Joe's prompt here. And kind of a disclaimer, I'm not trying to criticize Joe or Core Laravel team or installer itself. This is a cool feature, but this is more like a video about AI and how it works and why that non-deterministic behavior is pretty risky, at least for now. So, let's try to do exactly that. In the main hard folder, I will launch the prompt to Cloud Code, but before I do that, let's check the usage, and this is a Cloud Code tip. If you hit Ctrl S, it will stash the prompt, and you can do whatever, like usage, for example. So, current session is 4%, then you hit escape, and then the prompt is back. So, for example, you need to change a model or something along the way, Ctrl S is your friend. So, let's launch and see what happens. Okay, so it figured out the bash command with no interaction, exactly like Joe tweeted, and then, yeah, it is done in 35 seconds. And you would think that this should work, but not really. Next steps, CD, NPM install, because if you open it right now, it will not work. So, you still need to manually go and launch those commands, and also installer reported some pest failure. So, let's see, out of curiosity, what is that pest failure? PHP doesn't test. Okay, of course the failure is related to the same NPM being missing. So, the thing is with AI, it's non-deterministic. So, you're not sure what it will launch. Will it run NPM or not? It may be depending on your cloud MD or other global instructions or guidelines. So, you would probably have to have a more detailed prompt like create a new Laravel app and then run NPM run build. Make sure that the test pass and so on. Out of curiosity, let's check the usage. Is it still on 4%? No, it's taken 1% of 5-hour session. And it's not even about how many tokens it used. The thing is that it's not zero. When you run Laravel new, it takes zero AI tokens. It's deterministic. It's in terminal. It takes just network, but not AI tokens. And this was the prompt that I launched before the installer update. So, this was kind of the older way, the older output. And let's update the installer. In my Laravel herd, I see an PHP Laravel installer update button, which should download and installer updated. Now, I will relaunch Cloud Code just to make sure that it's catching that latest installer. Clear and relaunch Cloud Code. I have a separate CCC alias to have dangerously skip permissions. And let's try the same prompt. I just changed the name of the folder quiet again. And will it be some how different in terms of output? Let's see. Okay, so same Laravel new is going on. Running, timeout, and will it output somehow differently? So, in here the output isn't that different. What is different is the output for the agent. So, if we hit control O to expand, the output was this. So, it doesn't show unnecessary information to the agent. So, that was the new optimization in the installer. And if we check the usage, it's 7% used. So, in this case, I don't think we actually saved on any usage, ironically. And also, we'll probably have the same problem with NPM. Oh, it's even different problem. It's adding HTTPS automatically, which shouldn't. It's HTTP, but then again, NPM is not executed. But also, this is not the only problem. So, Laravel installer, when you run Laravel new, has a lot of options to choose from. And do you know which options were chosen when you do it quietly with AI agent? Let's open that folder, so quiet please, for example. And do you see any files like cloud.md or agents.md or folders like .agents or .cloud? They're all missing because Laravel boost was not installed. And this is the difference. So, when you run Laravel new manually, you may choose starter kit, which is fine, but then Laravel boost. You would think that if you perform no interaction, like in this case, it would default to, well, default values, which means yes. Not really. It will just skip the interactions, including boost. So, in this case, you would have to, again, CD to the folder, composer require Laravel boost, boost install, and all of that. And I would imagine in general, the use case for such prompt would be that if you ask to create a new Laravel app and then immediately create some functionality, right? But then, if AI agent proceeds with creating functionality based on this, you see the problem. Boost is not installed. Cloud.md is not there with Laravel best practices. So, yeah, the result will be accordingly, probably worse and probably even more expensive because AI agent will try to figure out on its own without well-prepared best practices by the Laravel core team. And again, of course, you can add that into prompt, run Laravel boost, run NPM run build, and so on. But then, it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? So, you have to basically provide all the possible options, and first you need to guess them or know them by heart. And the result is still unpredictable. That is probably the most important thing with AI, it's non-deterministic. So, you cannot guarantee that this exact bash command would be executed 10 times in a row. Maybe it will be nine times out of 10, but maybe one time it will fail miserably with missing one of the flags or adding some flag that you don't actually need. This is how AI works. So, that new feature is cool, less noise, more signal, and 200 people liked it. But in practice, I would not personally use that. What I would do is good old Laravel new, install boost, prepare the project for the AI, and then start prompting. This is actually the beginning of the process I described on Laravel Daily like a month ago. That was a premium tutorial, this one. My seven-step AI workflow for new Laravel projects. I probably need to reshoot it for small details upgrade in a few months. It changes so rapidly, but the core thing is still there. So, if you want to see that 29-minute video, I will link that in the description below. This is for premium members of Laravel Daily. But generally, what do you think about such Laravel project creation from scratch with agent? Have you tried it? Did it work for you? Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I'm missing something. Let's discuss in the comments below. That's it for this time, and see you guys in other videos.