Laravel: How does the query builder handle ->first()?

The first() method will always return one result or null if no results are found. Here's all it does:

public function first($columns = array('*'))
{
    $results = $this->take(1)->get($columns);

    return count($results) > 0 ? reset($results) : null;
}

The difference to just using take(1) (or limit(1)) is that it actually just returns one result object, by calling reset(). (Also, first() obviously executes the query. The others don't)