Laravel troubleshooting help needed!

Hello everyone!

I'm quite new to Laravel development, just dipping my toes into building a small internal tool, and I'm really enjoying the framework so far! However, I've hit a bit of a snag with what seems like a basic Eloquent relationship, and I've been stuck trying to figure it out for a couple of days now. I have two models, Project and Task. A Project can have many Tasks, and a Task belongs to one Project. I'm trying to eager load the tasks when fetching a project, but whenever I try to access project->tasks, I get an empty collection, even though I'm sure there are related tasks in the database. I've double-checked my foreign keys and model definitions, but I must be missing something fundamental.

Here's a simplified version of my setup and the output I'm seeing:

// Project Model
class Project extends Model
{
    public function tasks()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Task::class);
    }
}

// Task Model
class Task extends Model
{
    public function project()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Project::class);
    }
}

// Controller trying to fetch
$project = Project::with('tasks')->find(1);
dd($project->tasks);

// Output:
// Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1234
//   #items: []
// }

Could anyone skilled in Laravel debugging or Eloquent relationships offer some advice on what common pitfalls a beginner might encounter here, or how I can effectively troubleshoot this to see where the relationship is failing? I'm sure it's something simple I'm overlooking.

Any pointers would be immensely appreciated! Waiting for an expert reply.