Something You Have Never Built: The Marketplace

Work from the brief alone. Write what you would produce — actors, requirements, data, a first slice, your unknowns — before opening anything below it; the exercise stops working if you read the reality first.

The brief you were given

The store becomes a marketplace: many sellers, each with their own products, orders split across sellers, payouts to sellers, disputes. You have never built one. Without any tool, produce: what changes in every stage of the store's design, the new invariants, the unknowns as questions, and which Engineer Atlas domains each unknown sends you to. Then say what you would ask an AI, and what you would not.

Your attempt

Nothing here is checked. It exists so that the reveal below is a comparison rather than a reading.

The trap — the move that looks like progress and is not

Asking an AI to design a marketplace and then reviewing the output. The design will be plausible, generic, and impossible to evaluate, because the person reviewing it has not yet formed the invariants and unknowns against which a design could be judged — so the review is reading, and the exercise, which was to build the ability to judge, has been skipped.

Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the move most people actually make, it produces things that look like a project, and its cost arrives when the first hard requirement has nowhere to go.