The most common failure mode I see in technically capable builders (including in myself, regularly) is jumping to implementation detail before settling the objective. I catch myself doing this within the hour when a new idea shows up. Grammar sketched, build order roughed out, module structure drafted. Meanwhile the objective, the "what does success actually look like here", is still hand-wavy.
When the objective clarifies later, and it always does, half the technical work turns out to have been wrong. Not wrong in the sense of buggy. Wrong in the sense of solving a subtly different problem than the one that actually mattered.
Implementation is the seductive part. It feels like progress. It has visible artifacts. It gives you the pleasant sense of momentum without the discomfort of ambiguity. Objectives are the hard part, precisely because settling them means closing options. Once you commit to a specific "who this is for" and a specific "what success means", a lot of interesting-looking directions become no.
The rule of engagement I try (and repeatedly fail) to follow:
- Before any design work, write down what problem you're solving and for whom. In one sentence each.
- Write down what success looks like. Not aspirational, operational. What would you need to observe to say the thing worked?
- Write down what you're willing to trade off. Every objective implies a set of things you're not doing. Name them.
- Only then touch the grammar, the schema, the framework choice.
A related failure worth naming is the post-hoc objective. You built something, and now you're constructing a story about why. This is worse than no objective, because it hides the mistake behind a plausible narrative. The technical work looks purposeful. It wasn't.
The way to catch yourself doing this: if you can't state the objective in a sentence a non-technical friend would understand, you don't yet have an objective. You have a preference. There's a difference, and the difference is expensive.
Start with objectives. Grammars come later. This is the discipline I'm still learning, publicly, in the hope that saying it out loud will make me follow it more often than I do.
Drafted in January 2023
Updated for site in 2026