God Objects rarely start as God Objects. They grow into them, one "quick addition" at a time. A constructor that loads a few relationships. A method to check permissions. A helper for PDF generation. Before you know it, you have a 478-line class with six different responsibilities that gets instantiated in every controller action. I broke down a real-world example from a Laravel codebase and refactored it into DTOs, queued jobs, policies, and services — one step at a time.

Nakov's Blog

A real-world walkthrough of refactoring a 478-line Laravel God Object class into clean architecture. The `CategoryStatus` class had accumulated six responsibilities: status calculation, authorization, question tree traversal, PDF generation, display logic, and data queries. The refactor breaks it into a readonly DTO for view data, a queued job for score recalculation (eliminating expensive per-request DB writes), a Laravel Policy for authorization, a dedicated queued job for PDF generation, and a `QuestionTreeService` for domain logic. The post also provides a practical checklist of God Object warning signs and recommends an incremental extraction strategy rather than a full rewrite.

The God Object That Knew Too Much: Refactoring a 478-Line Class Into Clean Architecture

Meet CategoryStatus: A Real-World God Object

The Refactored Approach: Separation of Concerns

The Smell Checklist: Is Your Class a God Object?