[Dove]

I'm not quite this bad, but here's one of the things that happens to me:

Very early during the programming process, I'll create a debugging console -- an arbitrary, ugly GUI that lets me control the values in the data structure. For testing.

Weeks later, when I want to design an intuitive interface, that debugging console seems very intuitive to me. It's hard to ask, "Where would a user who wants to do X look?" since I've done it hundreds of times and know where to look.

[d_r]

I've been there but found that having a debugging console (or generally, using any UI over and over to repro some steps while you're developing) ends up being a huge time sink. It's often much more sensible to invest time into building a unit test to guide your development instead. As a result, now I don't create much debugging UI but try to unit test, which gives me more time/inspiration to build actual UI.

(Borrowing words from the article) Warning sign: During the development, dozens of times, I have to go through step 1 in my UI, select a person, go to step 2, enter an address, select a state, go to step 3, and so on.

[mahmud]

That's very sensible actually, but how do you explain the free cost of automatically generated CRUD and admin panels?