Writing code is easy. Figuring out what to code is the real nightmare.

by Lily

Hey IH,

I studied Computer Science, but spent the last 10 years working as a UI/UX designer. Because of this weird hybrid background, I get to see the worst habits of both worlds in our startup team.

When we get a new idea:

My designer brain says: "Let's open Figma and make it look beautiful!"

My developer teammates say: "Let's open VS Code and set up the database!"

But after a painful launch recently, I realized both instincts are completely toxic.

We are so obsessed with the "craft" (designing and coding) that we completely ignore the "market." We spent months building a highly polished product, only to realize our core positioning was completely wrong. We built a beautiful solution for a problem nobody wanted to pay for.

It's the ultimate maker's trap: We use coding/designing as an excuse to avoid the hard, boring work of market research.

We recently forced our team to stop writing code. We built an internal rule: No Figma, no VS Code until we have a data-backed PRD and competitive analysis. (We actually ended up building an AI agent just to automate this boring research phase so we could get back to coding faster lol).

For the devs and makers here: How do you physically stop yourself from jumping into the code? Do you have a strict validation checklist you force yourself to finish before writing the first line of code?