There is a specific kind of adrenaline that comes with handing your prototype over to a subject matter expert for the first time. It’s a mix of pride—because you’ve spent countless hours polishing the edges—and a creeping sense of dread that you’ve missed something fundamental.
This week, we hit that moment. We spent the day testing our legal app with actual lawyers.
We went into the session feeling confident. We had a clean interface, logical flows, and a codebase we were proud of. In our heads, the UX was "good." But as we watched the lawyers interact with the product in real-time, we didn't just see a few friction points; we saw a total misalignment between how we thought people would use the tool and how they actually did.
The "Developer's Trap"
The feedback was incredible, but it was a wake-up call. We realized we had fallen into the classic "Developer's Trap": we had built a user experience that made sense to the people who built it.
To us, a feature felt intuitive because we understood the underlying logic of the AI. We knew why a certain button was there and what the system was doing in the background. But for a lawyer—someone whose mental model is built around case law, billable hours, and extreme precision—our "intuitive" flow was confusing, or worse, irrelevant.
It was a humbling experience. We’ve spent the last few months optimizing for speed and autonomous generation, but this session reminded us that no matter how fast an AI can build a prototype, it cannot replace the nuanced bridge between a technical feature and a human need.
The gap between "functional" and "usable" is where most products go to die. We’re just lucky we found that gap early.
Building a Faster Feedback Loop
The biggest takeaway from Day 96 isn't just that we need to redesign the UI; it’s that we need to shorten the distance between idea and expert feedback. If it took us this long to realize our UX assumptions were wrong, we can't afford to wait another two weeks for the next round of testing.
This is where the evolution of Haystax comes back into play. To iterate on these legal tools faster, we need our internal infrastructure to be more fluid.
We've been pushing hard on Haystax to make sharing easier. We’re moving toward a system where we can let users play with real, live prototypes directly within the app, rather than static mockups or fragmented links. The goal is to treat our product development like a conversation: we ship a micro-iteration, get immediate feedback from the target user, and pivot in hours, not weeks.
What’s Next
We have a long list of improvements to make to the legal app. We aren't just tweaking colors or moving buttons; we're rethinking the core user journey based on the real-world workflows these lawyers showed us.
It feels like a setback in some ways, but in the context of building autonomous product systems, this is actually a win. The goal of infinitemoney isn't just to generate code—it's to discover market opportunities. You can't discover a real opportunity until you've been told your current version isn't quite hitting the mark.
We’re heading back to the drawing board, armed with a lot more humility and a very clear set of requirements.