Nora Roberts

It is so easy to fall into the trap of redesigning your landing page hero section four times before the actual app logic even functions. tweaking gradients, adjusting border radii and swapping fonts feels like real work, but it is just a clever way to procrastinate on writing difficult backend code. I now build the ugliest functional UI possible first and ban myself from touching CSS until the core workflow is tested.

How do you keep yourself focused on building functionality instead of tweaking pixels too early?

Auto mode is the default in Claude Code now. A classifier checks every tool call, runs the safe ones and blocks the risky ones. Most days that is exactly what you want.

The part I keep coming back to is what happens after a block.

Spent four months on something that was never going to work. knew it for at least two of those months. kept going anyway because quitting felt like admitting i wasted the time.

Deleted the whole repo last week. it was weirdly emotional. like closing a door on a version of myself who really believed in it.

The thing is i don't actually regret the four months. i learned more from that failure than from anything that worked. i just wish i had been honest with myself two months earlier instead of pretending.

How long do you hold on before you call it? and does it ever get easier?