local AI guidelines

Level 58

Certainly! Here’s a solution to your Laracasts question regarding local AI guidelines for Copilot/Boost with Laravel development environments, especially where one developer uses Lando and another does not.

Problem Recap:
You want Copilot/Boost to use lando artisan on your machine and php artisan on your teammate's, without having to constantly change shared documentation/guidelines, and ideally, you want a way to have local guidelines that only affect your environment.

Solution

Currently, Boost/Copilot relies on the contents of guidelines files (like .github/guidelines or AGENTS.md) that are typically committed to the repository, so they're shared among all developers. There isn’t official support for per-developer guidelines as part of the sync process.

However, you can handle this scenario with a combination of convention and automation, so both use their own commands seamlessly.

1. Use a wrapper script (`artisan`)

Create a shell script called artisan at your project root (add it to .gitignore so it's not committed):

#!/bin/bash

if command -v lando &>/dev/null && lando info &>/dev/null; then
    # If lando is installed and project is started
    lando artisan "$@"
else
    php artisan "$@"
fi

Make it executable:

chmod +x artisan

Update your guidelines and AGENTS.md to always use:

./artisan <command>

Now, on your Lando setup, it will use lando artisan ...; on your teammate's, it'll use php artisan ..., with no manual changes needed.

2. Dynamic AGENTS.md/guideline generation (optional)

If you want to get fancy, you can generate your guidelines with a snippet in your project (in, say, a composer post-install script, Makefile, or similar), and inject the correct prefix automatically per environment. Example using a simple script:

// scripts/generate-guidelines.php
$prefix = file_exists('/usr/local/bin/lando') ? 'lando' : 'php';
$template = file_get_contents('guidelines.template.md');
file_put_contents('AGENTS.md', str_replace('{{artisan}}', "$prefix artisan", $template));

Your guidelines.template.md would use {{artisan}} migrate etc.

3. Document the approach

Document for your team that all local artisan commands should use ./artisan, not php artisan or lando artisan directly.

Summary

There is no native way in Boost/Laravel to have per-developer AI guidelines. The recommended approach is:

Use a project-root artisan wrapper script, committed to .gitignore
Write all shared guidelines using ./artisan as the command prefix
Optionally automate guideline generation with a local script/template system

This approach ensures both developers (Lando or not) can use the same Copilot skills, with no friction!

Example artisan script:

#!/bin/bash

if command -v lando &>/dev/null && lando info &>/dev/null; then
    lando artisan "$@"
else
    php artisan "$@"
fi

Example guideline entry:

To run migrations, use:
./artisan migrate