What Step Are We On?

A friend opens a trip that was shared with them and reads it top to bottom. “Day 1: Planning…” “Day 2: Planning…” “Day 3:” and then nothing at all. The trip was still being generated when it got shared, but your app let it go out anyway, so it looks broken to the exact person it was meant to impress. That is the first bug report of the morning. Two more are right behind it, and all three turn out to be the same bug wearing different clothes.

Then another bug report. A user was looking at their completed trip and decided to regenerate Day 3, they didn’t like the restaurant suggestions. But they accidentally clicked “Regenerate Day 3” twice. Now two background jobs are generating different versions of Day 3. When both finish, one overwrites the other. The user ends up with a Day 3 they never approved.

Then another. A user archived an old trip and then somehow still received a notification that said “Your trip to Paris is ready!”, the background job finished after the trip was archived, overwriting the archived status with “ready.”

Here is what ties them together. Your app doesn’t know what stage things are in. It treats every trip the same, whether it’s a rough draft, actively generating, fully complete, shared with friends, or archived. A generating trip can be shared. A completed trip can be overwritten by a late-arriving background job. An archived trip can be resurrected by a notification.

The app has no rules about what’s allowed to happen when. And when there are no rules, chaos fills the gap.