155: The PHPocalypse

Ian opens by explaining that he went to the World Series because the Milwaukee Brewers are his son’s favorite team, a preference Ian adopted himself, and because the trip coincided with his 50th birthday weekend. He had promised his son years earlier that they would attend if the Brewers ever made the World Series. Before buying tickets, Ian asked an AI what tickets historically cost. It estimated roughly $1,000 for an entry-level ticket and $1,500 for a better seat, and told him prices would fall closer to game day. Instead, demand pushed prices to about twice those historical levels, so Ian paid substantially more for tickets to two games. The trip required flying to Chicago and driving to Milwaukee, but Ian says it became a “storybook” father-son experience. Both games were close and the Brewers won. On Ian’s actual birthday, Brewers player Sal Frelick—who had hit only about two home runs all season and was not known as a home-run hitter—hit a game-tying home run. Ian joked that Frelick “did it for me,” and said he and his son were freaking out before the Brewers came back to win. Aaron, despite not caring about baseball, says the trip sounds like an ideal family memory and compares it to his own emotional investment in the World Cup. They briefly discuss whether Ian should travel to Tampa Bay for another game. Tickets there were reportedly one-fifth or one-quarter the Milwaukee price, and the Brewers could potentially clinch there. Aaron argues that Ian’s son will never again be 19 or 20 while the Brewers are in the World Series, but Ian says college obligations probably make another trip unlikely. They also note that Milwaukee is baseball’s smallest market and spends around the 19th-most money, while Tampa Bay spends even less; the unusual matchup and small-market scarcity helped drive prices.

Aaron describes a packed San Francisco trip that included three consecutive professional performances. On Tuesday night, he hosted a founders panel at Accel’s offices with Taylor from Laravel, Sam Lambert of PlanetScale, and Michael Greenwich of WorkOS. About 100 people attended. Aaron told the panelists not to answer in a rigid A-B-C sequence; he encouraged them to interrupt, ask one another questions, and make the discussion interactive. He says they followed that instruction and the panel went very well. He also got to see former colleagues and several PlanetScale and Laravel people. Wednesday was Resend Forward, where Aaron had to deliver a newly written talk. He normally thinks about a talk for two or three months, writes it only a few days before presenting, and practices it roughly ten times. This time, the PHP apocalypse was unfolding at the same time, so he spent much of Tuesday night in Slack helping Laravel communicate with employees and the public. He practiced the talk only once before leaving and once in the Uber. Although he felt less secure than usual, he had been thinking about the material for a long time and says the presentation came out polished. The talk was called “Being the Sin Eater.” Aaron’s central claim was that the more pain a company absorbs on behalf of its customers, the stronger its moat becomes, the more money it can make, and the better its product can be. AI makes this especially important because a feature that can be copied in a day has little defensibility. He used contemporaneous examples: Resend had built its own email infrastructure rather than leaving customers to handle that pain, while Laravel Cloud chose to patch vulnerable PHP workloads for customers instead of making them manage the crisis themselves.

The hosts connect Aaron’s “sin eater” argument to Laravel Cloud. Ian says organizations want a solution faster than becoming experts in software development or infrastructure; they want a provider to absorb the difficult, stressful work. Aaron argues that proactive security could become a major Laravel Cloud selling point, much as managed WordPress hosts promise to patch WordPress for customers even though WordPress is, in his phrase, a “Swiss cheese sandwich.” Ian contrasts Laravel Cloud with Laravel Forge. Cloud is centralized and hosts the workloads itself, while Forge is more of a command-and-control system in which customers bring and manage their own servers. Ian says he no longer wants servers that have names, IP addresses, or SSH access. He has several Forge servers, including accumulated side projects, and wants to move them to Cloud so that someone else handles monitoring, patches, and incidents. He says Laravel Cloud should hire more security staff and build the engineering systems needed to deploy patches into customer projects without breaking them; the promise must be a real operational feature, not merely marketing. Ian explains how he used an AI agent to migrate projects. He gave it repository access, SSH access to a Forge server, an authenticated Laravel Cloud CLI, and instructions to migrate data, update packages, move the deployment, compare the Cloud vanity domain with the old site, and leave a list of environment variables for him to update. The agent migrated one project from Heroku and Laravel 5.5 while Ian was away. Aaron’s requested improvement is narrower authorization for the Cloud CLI or API, because he does not want an agent authenticated into a critical Laravel organization to accidentally modify unrelated production systems. Ian suggests creating a separate organization for marketing and disposable sites as an immediate workaround.

Ian says the security incident dominated the San Francisco trip. Laravel staff were monitoring an incident channel and stepping out of meetings to manage it. The episode’s title comes from an Atlantic article that used Ian’s post as its headline: “If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed.” Ian had been referring to Suri, the maintainer who packages PHP for Linux distributions. The article reportedly interviewed him and confirmed that he has been doing the work for more than 20 years, has automated much of it, and remains one of the people who knows the necessary tricks. The alarming part, the hosts say, is that this critical distribution process depends so heavily on one person. Ian observes that Suri does not even run PHP himself, but still feels responsibility toward internet users. Aaron calls that an old-school open-source attitude based on responsibility and shared ethos, and wonders whether the internet is leaving that era behind. They question why Ubuntu or the PHP organization does not make the packaging process a reproducible, maintainable unit that another organization can operate. They discuss possible commercial responses. Red Hat-style distributions already sell faster, controlled security updates, and Chainguard was mentioned as another supply-chain-hardened package layer. Ian suggests that organizations benefiting from open source might need to fund maintainers directly, employ them, or contribute money to foundations. Aaron is less optimistic that the informal “trust and vibes” model can survive the volume of compute and vulnerabilities now involved. Both agree that relying on one person, even a highly capable one, is not a sustainable security model.

The hosts then examine stealmybitcoin.com, a challenge in which a server held a Bitcoin reward for anyone who could exploit it and execute a binary. Ian points out that the challenge was initially misconfigured: for roughly 16 to 18 hours, the site served only an index.html file through Nginx, so it was not actually serving PHP and the PHP vulnerability could not be exercised. After the creator was called out, the site was changed to serve a PHP file. The Bitcoin was eventually taken. Ian says the exploit was not a one-packet, script-kiddie attack that instantly provides a reverse shell, but it was genuinely exploitable through multiple steps. A proof-of-concept was then published on GitHub. The hosts say the challenge’s initial configuration gave some people false confidence because it appeared that the vulnerability could not be exploited, while attackers would simply use the published technique without announcing their success. Aaron argues that the response to the PHP incident was proportionate, even though other vulnerabilities quickly appeared. The next day brought a Brotli vulnerability affecting software including Python, FFmpeg, and Nginx, along with a GitLab level-10 issue that turned out to involve Ruby’s regex parser and could potentially lead to memory manipulation and control of Ruby. Aaron says the rapid succession of PHP, Brotli, Ruby, and other vulnerabilities shows that the underlying problem is broader than PHP. Companies need infrastructure teams, monitoring, and people available to respond; a side-project owner cannot reasonably maintain the same posture as a company with engineers on pager duty.

Aaron says he does not plan to change Laravel’s message into “PHP is bad.” Instead, he wants to market the higher-level service: companies need someone to maintain infrastructure, handle security incidents, and absorb the pain when vulnerabilities appear. The lesson from the PHPocalypse is not that customers should stop using PHP, but that customers should consider whether they want to manage the entire operational burden themselves. That leads to a broader discussion of side projects and pricing. Ian says many side-project customers have little pain and are increasingly likely to tell an AI to fix problems rather than pay for a service. Businesses, by contrast, have problems serious enough that they will pay for someone to take responsibility. Aaron says this is why companies should be the target customer when the product’s value is operational reliability and security. They mock what they call the “Indie Hacker brainworm”: the belief that every SaaS product is doomed because someone can build a one-time $39 alternative. Aaron objects that price is only one factor in a purchase. If price alone determined every decision, nobody would buy an iPhone instead of a cheaper Samsung or a Bentley instead of a Toyota. Ian compares the argument to selling a marketing course while believing that buyers choose only by price. They conclude that businesses pay for trust, reliability, responsibility, and service—not merely for code or the cheapest available implementation.

Aaron gives an update on an old accounting course he created. He did not perform the migration work himself; he instructed an AI agent to move the project, and the agent handled the work under Aaron’s subscription. After turning payments back on before the semester’s midterms and finals, the course had generated $2,998 in roughly one month. The first four chapters remain free, while students encounter the payment requirement later in the course. Aaron says the timing would have been disastrous if he had turned payments on during Christmas break, but the semester schedule made the launch effective. Historically, the course made roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per semester, with one particularly good semester producing about $13,000 or $14,000. The lifetime gross volume is approximately $125,000, though there is a long flat period in the chart when Aaron had stopped accepting payments. He calls the renewed revenue “found money” because the content and business already existed and AI handled the technical migration. The hosts compare this with Ian’s sports-gambling windfall. Ian says he and his son previously won a football survivor pool and split about $12,000 with another participant. This season they won a smaller $700 pool but are still alive in a Las Vegas pool that began with 25,000 entries, has about 600 remaining, and carries a $25 million prize. A secondary market allows participants to sell all or part of an entry, with the expected value estimated around $37,000 to $41,000 per remaining entry. Ian refuses to sell because he wants to win outright, even though Aaron calls that a gambler’s decision. If they win, Ian and his son have agreed to split the proceeds 50/50.

Aaron says he has printed and spiral-bound the first seven chapters of his AI-assisted book at FedEx Kinko’s. He enjoys reading it and is surprised by parts of it because he created the story arc and plot points but did not write every passage himself. He can recognize his own decisions in the manuscript while still discovering details as a reader. The prose remains somewhat “Claude-like,” so he reads with a pen, marks passages, and writes revision notes in the margins. He plans to scan the marked pages and give them back to an AI agent for another editing pass. Keeping the physical pages is important to him because they document the human part of the process. He does not intend to hide the AI assistance; instead, he wants to show how the human decisions, structural guidance, and AI-generated material fit together. Ian compares the process to AI-assisted programming: the AI performs much of the heavy lifting, but the human still chooses the direction, reviews the output, and prunes or revises it. Aaron’s original concept was not a conventional novel but a recovered-artifact encyclopedia describing competing civilizations’ accounts of a past catastrophe. Different official documents and historical perspectives would contradict one another, allowing readers to infer what really happened. Ian recommends George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood as a related example. They imagine turning the project into an interlinked app with optional Genius-style comments, reader theories, and possibly user-generated noncanonical stories. Aaron also considers AI-generated personalized stories, audio-drama versions with environmental effects, and multiple fictional universes. They joke that the podcast could eventually become a publishing and pop-culture show, but Aaron says the software platform may be the real opportunity.

The episode closes with Aaron preparing for a Laravel Holdings marketing offsite in Fort Worth. Around 14 or 15 marketing-team members are expected, including people flying in from Europe. The group has a major November launch to coordinate, so part of the event will involve getting everyone aligned and doing some focused work. Aaron says the equally important goal is building trust through several days of shared time, something remote work does not fully provide. Aaron calls his venue choice a stroke of genius. Instead of renting a hotel conference room, which would be a soulless space with long tables, a projector, and a fixed end time, he rented the hotel’s penthouse suite. Nobody will sleep there; it will be the team’s shared home base. They can work by connecting to the suite’s television, stock snacks and drinks, play board games such as Settlers of Catan, and continue informal conversations after dinner without crowding into a bar or someone’s private hotel room. He and coworker Sam plan to drive to Costco for snacks, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, tequila, and other supplies. The first evening will involve ordering pizza because people arrive at different times; later meals may include Fort Worth restaurants and possibly the stockyards. Ian endorses the idea, especially because the suite gives people a quiet place to talk and lets some team members go to bed while others continue hanging out. They note that hotel-key and elevator access could be the only logistical problem. Aaron expects the offsite to run from Tuesday through Thursday and says LaravelCon remains the larger company-wide event, while individual teams will generally hold their own offsites once a year.