Let Claude Implement the Repository Pattern in Your Codebase
Direct Eloquent calls scattered across controllers make code hard to test and even harder to swap out later. The Repository pattern fixes this — and Claude can retrofit it onto existing code without breaking anything.
Show Claude a controller that's doing too much and ask it to extract a repository:
Refactor this controller so all database access goes through a repository.
Create a UserRepositoryInterface and an EloquentUserRepository implementation.
Bind the interface in a service provider. Keep the controller thin.
@app/Http/Controllers/UserController.php
Claude will generate the interface, the Eloquent implementation, update the service provider, and inject the repository into the controller via the constructor — complete with updated tests that mock the interface rather than hitting the database.
For bigger refactors, ask Claude to do one model at a time and generate the full set of files:
Create a repository for the Order model. Include methods for:
findById, findByUser, findPendingOlderThan(Carbon $date), and save.
Write a mock in tests/Fakes/ that I can use in unit tests.
Repositories are most valuable as seams for testing — having Claude generate them means you get the interface, implementation, and test fake in one go.
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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.