The Great Stagnation

Designing with code is a recurring discussion, and it's flared up again. I've written about it twice now. Design as a search, not a pipeline. How tools carry opinions, and how those opinions shape what feels "reasonable" to attempt.

Why constraints that arrive too early can close off possibilities before you've had a chance to explore them. In the Jira ecosystem, we see this constantly. Vendors build what the Atlassian API makes easy, not what the customer actually needs to solve their workflow bottleneck.

At Vectanex, we try to invert this. We start with the query—what is the builder trying to prove?—and work backward to the data structure, even if it means building a custom indexer from scratch or reversing private APIs.

The Fidelity Gap

When you design in Figma, you are simulating a state. When you design in code, you are defining a state. The gap between these two is where "implementation drift" happens.

We built our Intelligence Tool to close a similar gap in market data. Most analytics tools show you a snapshot (simulation). We show you the commit history of the ecosystem (definition).