by dchftcs 3 days ago
This is analogous to the fundamental problem of better automation in programming - eventually, the complexity and correctness of of the spec takes over, and if we don't manage that well, creating the spec is not that much less work than the programming part. If your program was for the wrong thing, a proof of it is also wrong.
Fully agree. I started hitting this bottleneck when I combined a low-code backend I built with Claude Code to generate web applications.
I can build applications rapidly but the requirements and UX are the bottleneck. So much so that I often like to sit on a concept for multiple days to give myself the time to fully absorb the goal and refine the requirements. Then once I know what to build, it snaps together in like 4 hours.
There are a lot of ambiguities which need to be resolved ahead of time. Software engineering becomes a kind of detailed business strategy role.
I'm curious about your learning experience, but what was the nature of your bottleneck, exactly? Was the backend perfectly fine as a backend, but Claude struggled to wire it to a frontend gracefully?
Claude does a great job generating the code. The hard part was the UX like if the app gets complex, then I want a new feature which adds more complexity on top; because of the way the application/UX is designed, it's hard to integrate that feature in a way that's not confusing to the user.
Like for example, I used check boxes to mean "include the records in the result set" but in a different section later in the flow, I have a different but similar looking view/list of records but I just want to use the check boxes to do batch delete but don't want the user to think that this means "include in the result set" in this case. So maybe instead I need a different single checkbox at the top which says "Don't ask for confirmation" so the user can just click on the normal "delete icon" on each row to delete the entries quickly without being prompted... But on the other previous view/list I allow the user to use the check boxes to both include the record but also batch delete using a single small cross at the top... But in the later section I mentioned, I don't want to do this because of the way I designed the flow, it would confuse the user and make it hard for them to track what they're doing and where they made the change (I want the selection step to be in a single place, the current page serves a different purpose). So maybe I need to change the other page as well for consistency... And use the "Don't ask for delete confirmation" approach everywhere? But there's not enough space to fit that text on those other pages...
When you solve all the hard problems, this is what coding gets reduced to. Not a hard problem but it's like lots of small ones like that which keep coming up and your interface ends up with a complex URL scheme and lot of modals and nested tabs.
everybody also ignores that even hello world isn't deterministic anymore. It just doesn't matter to execution if something broke unless it kicks back an error.
although, this is the best example of how quickly a trivality can knock so called "correct" programs over.