Starter kits are good at making the first 30 days feel easy. They scaffold auth, resources, tests, and routing so a Laravel API can ship before the team gets lost in bikeshedding. Then month six arrives. A mobile app depends on response fields you wish you had named differently. An integration partner cached enum values you thought were internal. A once-harmless endpoint now drives billing, dashboards, exports, and webhook workflows. Someone proposes a breaking cleanup, everyone agrees it is technically correct, and then nobody wants to own the consumer fallout. That is the hard part starter kits hide. They help you launch an API. They do not automatically make future breaking changes survivable. And if your starter project does not force versioning discipline, migration paths, and deprecation behavior early, you are not building a foundation. You are building tomorrow’s political problem.…