12 — The first MVP
Summary
The receipts. v1 was built in a day and was right about the spine — choices-only, same-origin, unsure-means-present, weakest-link, no score — and wrong in six instructive ways: a design vocabulary (“cases”) leaked into the interface and produced a defect that looked like a UI bug; categories answered nobody's question until products were named; the page made the visitor read before doing; risk acceptance sat where it did not belong; an effort label flattered the hardest control; and clicks looked inert because state lived in more than one place. Plus the three v2-era bugs now pinned by tests: escalation masking, the missing conversation node (asserted as correct by its own test), and wording that got ahead of the visitor. Ends with what was verified before each ship and what v2 still owes.
Key concepts
- The vocabulary leak — C25/decision 40 — the visitor's nouns are the interface's nouns
- A test asserting nonsense — a test that encodes the author's assumption verifies the assumption, not the behaviour
- The verification list — model suite, same-origin, five viewports, live-byte hashes, the redaction scan
Key ideas
- Several obvious improvements are listed here as the defects they turned out to be — read this before proposing one.
- “An hour” for a separate account was corrected by the person who had done it: hard — days, and it fights you.
- The correction cycle — ship, be corrected within hours, rebuild — is the working method, and this document is its record.