As much as I love working with state machines in the frontend side of the UI, the most hard thing to do with it is to convince your team that they are great and they solve most of the problems in terms of logic, feature iteration and confidence in the code you push to production.
One of the worst scenarios I am right now is when some app logic is inside the state machine and some is outside. Is really hard to follow what is actually happening when there's this mix of state logic in the same app/feature.
what about you? Do you love/hate state machines? what is your current opinion of them?
Related:
State machines to visualize the work of agents — using state machines to make LLM agent behavior more deterministic and observable
Modeling resizable panels using State Machines — a concrete example of state-machine-driven UI for resizable panel layouts
Notes about how the document machine should work — applying explicit state transitions to the Seed document editing lifecycle
UI with State Machines — external hub with practice guides, patterns, and case studies on state-driven UI
Why aren't we using state machines more in our complex application? — same problem from a product-team angle: state machines are proven but still underused across complex app scenarios
Agents and State Machines — formal state machine model for Pi-sdk-based agents (Lamport + Kay style), extending the state machine concept beyond UI to agent orchestration
Our distributed objects are state machines — Lamport's foundational interview reveals that the state machine idea in his most cited paper was "almost completely ignored," mirroring this post's adoption challenge
State Machines — Knowledge Map — hub page collecting all state-machine-related documents across the repository
Split Logic Detector (Opportunity #24) — ESLint plugin detecting when logic leaks outside the state machine, addressing the #1 blocker named in this post
State Machine Adoption Kit (Opportunity #25) — convince-your-team playbook: audience briefs, before/after metrics, counter-arguments, migration plan
Do you like what you are reading? Subscribe to receive updates.
Unsubscribe anytime