Laravel Boost now supports project rules: Markdown files committed to the repository that capture an application's own conventions, each scoped to the directories where it applies. An agent loads a rule only when it is about to work on a matching path. The feature came from Pushpak Chhajed via pull request #852, shipped behind a flag in Boost v2.4.12, and is enabled by default in v2.5.0, released August 4. Christoph Rumpel of the Laravel team published a walkthrough video, Keep Your AI Instructions Clean With Boost Rules.

While Boost's existing guidelines and skills teach agents how to write Laravel in general, rules hold the knowledge only your team has: past decisions, preferences, and pitfalls invisible in the code. Rules live in .ai/rules as Markdown files with a paths: frontmatter key listing the globs they cover. An example rule for app/Jobs/** states that reporting jobs must set $connection = 'reports' because the default connection shares workers with checkout.

Boost maintains an index at .ai/rules/index.md mapping globs to rule files, and agents are instructed to consult it before planning or editing. The directory should be committed so rules are reviewed in pull requests and shared by everyone, unlike an agent's local memory.

Rules are not written by hand: you ask the agent to remember something, and it calls Boost's record-rule MCP tool with a glob, title, and note. Boost files the note into the right area file, creates it if needed, and rebuilds the index — which is why manually dropped files stay unread until the index regenerates.

For established codebases, v2.5.0 adds an infer-conventions skill. The agent works through a checklist covering validation, controllers, authorisation, models, architecture, testing, frontend, database, and console code, plus an open-ended pass for base classes, shared traits, and module layouts. It records what the code actually does, skips framework defaults and anything Pint or Rector already handles, reports genuinely mixed patterns instead of recording them, and presents every finding with evidence for approval.

The motivation is the familiar CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md bloat: one ever-growing file fully loaded into every session. Directory scoping means only relevant rules enter context. After upgrading, run php artisan boost:update to regenerate the guidelines and install the skill. Setting BOOST_RULES_ENABLED=false disables the feature, removing the record-rule tool.