The Cost of a "User-Driven" System with No Filters

Database without Primary Key, Foreign Key, Constraint
→ Spreadsheet + GUID cosplay

Project Owner without System Ownership, Product Vision/Direction, Accountability
→ A feature wishlist printer who doesn’t know how the app works

Business Engineer without Decision Confidence, Technical Understanding, Flow Awareness, Prioritization
→ A fear-driven feedback generator

Dev
→ Left customizing code and architecture based on reactive emotional fear

"Here, we do whatever the user wants."
That was the moment I realized: this isn’t product development — this is chaos management.

Here’s what that really means:

• No product ownership
• No logic gate between wishful thinking and production
• No pushback, no filtering, no prioritization
• Just BA/BE acting as human forward bots, dumping raw input on devs

What happens next:

• The system bends to every fear, every whim, every “what if”
• Business logic turns into duct tape
• Flow becomes an emotional rollercoaster
• And engineers?
  → We become the sanity firewall — rewriting backend code to accommodate feelings, not facts

Reality check:

• User-driven ≠ user-ruled.
  Building software is not the same as saying yes to everything.
• If no one protects the system, it will rot — no matter how many devs you hire.

Posted from the last stage of a glamorous AI project built on a low-code database with no primary key.