[rmdashrfv]

> It can reveal “unknown unknowns”. Often, prototypes uncover things I couldn’t have anticipated.

This is the exact opposite of my experience. Every time I am playing around with something, I feel like I'm experiencing all of its good and none of its bad ... a honeymoon phase if you will.

It's not until I need to cover edge cases and prevent all invalid state and display helpful error messages to the user, and eliminate any potential side effects that I discover the "unknown unknowns".

[skrebbel]

I think you're talking about unknown unknowns in the tool/framework/library. I think the author is talking about unknown unknowns in the problem space.

[rmdashrfv]

I was talking about both. Sometimes even in a problem space time constraints demand that you utilize something off the shelf (whether you use part of it or build on top of a custom version of it).

Tools aside, I think everyone who has 10+ years can think of a time they had a prototype go well in a new problem space only to realize during the real implementation that there were still multiple unknown unknowns.

[nasretdinov]

Yeah, typically when you start thinking something through and actually implementing stuff you can notice that some important part of the behaviour is missing and it might also be something that means that the project is no longer feasible

[astrobe_]

Yes. I wanted to warn about a rough draft being too rough. There are corners one shouldn't cut because this is where the actual problems are. I guess that rally pilots do their recon at a sustained pace, otherwise they might not realize that e.g. the bump there before the corner is vicious.

[rightbyte]

Ye it is something like how making tools just you yourself use is so smooth. Like, they can be full of holes and be a swaying house of cards in general but you still can use them sucessfully.