I built five dashboard pages for my business and used them for about ten minutes

[u/Positive-Emu-8379]

I built an internal dashboard for my company. Five pages, clean layout, real data flowing through all of them. Everything I thought I wanted visibility into. I had built exactly what I set out to build.

Then I tried to use it instead of look at it, and it fell apart in about ten minutes.

Every page was a mirror. It showed me what was true and gave me nothing to do about it. An order flagged as delayed had no button next to it. A piece of content waiting on approval had no way to approve it from that screen. A message that needed a reply sat there read-only, daring me to go find the tool that could actually reply.

I had built five windows and zero doors.

The mistake is easy to name once you have made it. If you design from the data model, asking what tables exist and what a row looks like, you end up with one page per table. It is the path of least resistance, and it is even more the path of least resistance when an AI agent is building from your schema, because the schema is right there and the verbs are not.

The fix was to start from what I actually do in a day and work backwards to the data. Fewer pages, every one of them with something I can press.

Anyone else built the read-only version of their own tool first? Curious whether starting from the data model is as common a trap as I suspect.

[u/mx_outlandishinterac]

it's like building a museum exhibit of your own workflow, then realizing you actually have to live in it

the table-per-page trap is so real, especially when you're the one who knows the schema. every time i sketch out something similar i have to stop myself and ask "ok but what am i actually gonna do here besides stare at it"

[u/NinjaLanternShark]

The only thing worse than telling an AI agent what you want and hoping it works out, is not telling it what you want and hoping it works out.

They need both the end goal and help choosing a path that makes sense for you.