Hey guys, welcome to Laratips. In this video I’m showing you 3 different ways to get the authenticated user in a Laravel app, because one of the developers who just joined my office asked me this exact thing. The first two ways are the common ones: using the auth() helper and calling auth()->user(), and then using the Auth facade (Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth) and calling Auth::user(). Both will return the currently authenticated user, so if you’re logged in (like I was as admin), you’ll see that user coming back. But here’s the real reason I made this video: with those two approaches, you don’t always get the best developer experience when you want to call your custom methods on the User model (like a short_name accessor/method). So I show you the third option I personally use: creating an app/helpers.php file with an auth_user() helper that returns User|null. Then you register that file in composer.json under autoload -> files, run composer dump-autoload, and now you get proper autocomplete for your User model methods. It’s a small setup, but it makes day-to-day Laravel work cleaner and faster.