🐥 Customizing the Laravel Boost guidelines

In my current project, I'm using Laravel Boost to injects contextual guidelines into your AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) by composing a set of named rule blocks — foundation, boost, php, laravel/core, deployments, and version-specific blocks like laravel/v13 — into the CLAUDE.md file at the root of your project.

One of the things that annoyed me is that this PR added marketing info from Laravel promoting their Laravel Cloud solution for deployment. As I'm not using it (and have no intentions to do so), after each update of the Boost guidelines, I needed to manually remove this part:

# Deployment

- Laravel can be deployed using [Laravel Cloud](https://cloud.laravel.com/), which is the fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications.

It turns out there is another PR that offers a solution for this, PR #774.

It adds a small but useful quality-of-life improvement: the deployment guideline has been extracted from laravel/core into its own named block (deployments), and you can now exclude any named guideline block from being injected via a config option.

To exclude these guidelines, first start with publishing the Boost config if you haven't already:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=boost-config

Then add the guidelines key to config/boost.php:

return [
    // ...

    'guidelines' => [
        'exclude' => [
            'deployments',
        ],
    ],
];

After the next boost:update run, the === deployments rules === block will no longer appear in your CLAUDE.md.

AI coding assistants consume every line of your guidelines as context on every request. Irrelevant rules waste tokens and can subtly steer the model toward unhelpful suggestions. If your team deploys to a custom pipeline, Kubernetes, or anything other than Laravel Cloud, the default deployment hint is pure noise — and now you can cleanly remove it without patching vendor files.

The same exclude mechanism works for any named guideline block, so as Boost gains more optional sections (versioned package rules, framework-specific hints), you'll be able to keep your injected context lean and project-relevant.

If you want to keep deployment guidance but tailor it to your stack, the PR also documents the override path: create .ai/deployments/core.blade.php in your project root and write your own instructions there. Boost picks up local overrides before falling back to its own templates, so your custom block replaces the default without needing the exclude config at all.