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Laravel Boost — Your AI-Powered Coding Starter Kit

During the Day 1 keynote at Laracon US, Taylor Otwell introduced Ashley Hindle, the newest member of the Laravel team, who is leading Laravel’s AI initiatives. Ashley explained that the team has been talking with developers to explore ways AI can better assist with Laravel development—enhancing your workflow without replacing it.

The first result of this work is Laravel Boost — a Composer-installable package designed to improve how AI integrates with Laravel, keeping you in the zone and guiding AI to work more effectively alongside you.

Main Features

Laravel Boost offers three key capabilities:

  1. Laravel-Specific MCP Server
    • Includes 15 tools tailored to daily Laravel development tasks.
    • Enables your AI agent to query the database, run code via Tinker, or search documentation directly.
  2. Version-Specific Documentation
    • All Laravel ecosystem documentation—Inertia, Livewire, Flux, Filament, and more—has been ingested and vectorized for accuracy.
    • Reduces AI hallucinations by ensuring responses are based on the exact version you’re using.
  3. Laravel-Maintained AI Guidelines
    • Generates ready-to-use AI configuration files such as Cursor rules, Junie guidelines, GitHub Copilot instructions, and Claude.md files.
    • Guidelines are manually curated by the Laravel team, with version-specific variants (e.g., tailored rules for Inertia 1 or 2).

Ashley showcased these features using the ping-crm demo app. Installation is straightforward with an interactive installer that:

  • Lets you choose what to install (Boost MCP server, AI guidelines, Laravel style rules, Herd MCP server).
  • Detects your IDE automatically (Claude Code, Cursor, PHPStorm Junie, or VS Code).
  • Allows you to pick the AI guidelines best suited for your project.

Laravel Boost aims to make AI a powerful coding partner—streamlined, Laravel-aware, and always in sync with your workflow.

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During the demo, Ashley prompted the AI: “Create a new contact using the default contact factory, for a new organisation called ‘Laracon is Cool.’”
The AI agent examined the relevant files to understand the models and database schema, queried the database to see if any accounts already existed, and then used the Tinker tool along with the contact and organisation factories to create the requested record.

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At one point in the demo, a “white screen of death” appeared. Ashley asked the AI agent to help diagnose the issue. The agent retrieved the latest error from the logs, reviewed the preceding entries, and checked the streamed browser console output using the browser-logs tool. The cause turned out to be a simple typo in the app.js file.

Next, Ashley showcased how Boost’s access to up-to-date Laravel ecosystem documentation can make AI assistance more accurate. For example, when implementing a Deferred component in Vue.js with Inertia, the AI initially offered a general solution that didn’t fully match the “Inertia way.” By using the search-docs MCP tool and targeting Inertia v2.0 documentation, the AI refined its approach and implemented the solution correctly.

The Laravel team has committed to keeping Boost stocked with the latest documentation for the entire Laravel ecosystem—and you can even chat directly with the docs.

The final demo highlighted how Boost encourages better development practices. Ashley asked the AI to add per-second rate limiting to the app. The agent used the search-docs tool to implement the feature in AppServiceProvider. Guided by Laravel Boost’s curated AI rules, it didn’t stop there—it also wrote automated tests for the new functionality. Without Boost, tools like Cursor might not have taken that extra step.

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Boost’s guidelines also include core rules that apply to every project, no matter the tech stack, while still respecting Laravel’s established conventions.

The team has also developed an MCP server package, with version 1.0 launching soon. This package lets you build your own MCP server and integrate it into your application with just a single line in routes/ai.php. Special thanks go to Peter Suhm for his contributions to this feature.

For Laravel developers, Boost promises to be a game-changer—making AI integration simple to set up while significantly improving the quality of AI-generated code. Best of all, Laravel Boost will be open source and released for free within the next two weeks, with the code hosted on GitHub for community contributions.

The official release can’t come soon enough, and we’re eager to put it through its paces.