Generate ER Diagrams from Your Database Migrations
Architecture diagrams are great, but when onboarding a new developer it's the ER diagram they actually want. Claude can generate one straight from your migrations in seconds.
Read the database migrations in database/migrations and generate a Mermaid erDiagram
showing all tables, column names with types, primary keys, and foreign key relationships.
Claude outputs a erDiagram block that renders natively on GitHub, in Notion, and in most documentation tools:
erDiagram
users {
int id PK
string email
timestamp deleted_at
}
orders {
int id PK
int user_id FK
decimal total
string status
}
users ||--o{ orders : "places"
Paste it straight into your README and it just works.
If your schema is large, scope it down:
Only include the core domain tables (users, orders, products, order_items).
Exclude audit logs, jobs, and pivot tables.
You can also ask Claude to update the diagram as part of your workflow whenever you add a new migration — or add it as a post-migration hook.
An up-to-date ER diagram in your README turns a new hire's first week into their first day.
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Set up Claude Code as an automated reviewer in your CI pipeline — on every pull request, it reads the diff, checks for bugs, security issues, missing tests, and convention violations, then posts its findings as a PR comment. Your human reviewers get a head start because the obvious issues are already flagged before they look.
Before deploying, tell Claude to read your project — migrations, environment variables, queue workers, scheduled tasks, caching, third-party integrations — and generate a deployment checklist that's specific to your app. Not a generic "did you run migrations?" list, but one that knows YOUR infrastructure and catches the things YOUR deploy can break.
Instead of writing a README from memory or copying a template, tell Claude to read your project and generate one that's actually accurate — real setup instructions from your config, real architecture from your directory structure, real API examples from your routes, and real prerequisites from your dependency files.