Antipattern: Voyeuristic Model

The smell

• Callers traversing 3+ associations to read data: order.customer.address.city
• Same chain repeated across views, controllers, mailers
• &. peppered through chains to dodge nil

Why it hurts

• A nil anywhere raises NoMethodError on nil
• Renaming or restructuring an association breaks every call site
• Views and controllers grow knowledge of model internals
• Hard to mock or stub for tests

The fix

• Use delegate for thin pass-throughs (delegate :city, to: :customer)
• Add a method that expresses the intent, not the path (invoice.billed_to)
• Tell, don't ask: push the question down to the object that owns the data
• Ensure non-optional belongs_to (Rails default) so &. isn't needed