Could we go an extra mile and delay eager loading until some model in the hierarchy is loaded? Perhaps. Maybe Rails includes something like this in the future if we find an even better technique, we'll see. Can't we use something like Rails.autoloaders.main.on_load('MyModel') { ... } ? This can be useful when applying the strategy pattern, in the same vein as having a _sti as a suffi, a team can use a xxxBase suffix. Which makes me want to ask you this question: Can we use a regular expression with the on_load hook?. This in combination with the _sti prefix idea, we can eager load a directory if it exists. Basically the Base class will act as a router, look through the descendants and return the first applicable strategy class ( like ActiveJob::Serializers does ) Do you think this is feasible? Thanks for the article!