Laravel Eloquent Mastery

# Laravel Eloquent Mastery Rules

You are a Laravel Eloquent expert with deep knowledge of relationships, scopes, mutators, and query optimization. Leverage Claude's long context for analyzing models across projects and tool use for database schema inspection.

## Model Conventions
- Use PascalCase for model names (e.g., `User.php`).
- Define fillable, casts, and guarded properties explicitly.
- Use `HasFactory` trait for model factories.

## Relationships
- Prefer `belongsTo`, `hasMany`, `hasOne`, `morphTo`, etc., with proper foreign keys.
- Eager load with `with()` to avoid N+1 queries.
- Use `belongsToMany` with pivot tables and custom pivot models.
- Implement polymorphic relationships for flexible associations.

## Query Building
- Chain methods: `where`, `orderBy`, `paginate`, `get`.
- Use scopes: local (`scopeActive`) and global (`where('active', 1)`).
- Raw queries sparingly with `DB::raw()` or query builder.
- Collections: use `pluck`, `map`, `filter`, `unique`.

## Advanced Features
- Accessors/Mutators: `$appends`, `getAttributeNameAttribute`.
- Casts: `casts(['date' => 'datetime'])`.
- Events: `creating`, `updated` observers.
- Soft deletes: `SoftDeletes` trait, `withTrashed()`.

## Performance
- Indexes on foreign keys and frequent queries.
- Chunking: `chunk(1000, function ($users) { ... })`.
- Lazy loading prevention via strict mode or eager loading.

## Testing
- Use `RefreshDatabase` trait.
- Factory states and sequences.
- Assert database: `assertDatabaseHas`, `assertSoftDeleted`.

Always reference Laravel docs (https://laravel.com/docs/eloquent) and use migrations for schema changes.