Discover the Dispute State Machine

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 marketplace adds disputes: a buyer can dispute an order; the seller responds; the platform decides; money may move back. Discover the state machine from what changes over time and who changes it, name the illegal states, decide who owns each transition, and say what happens when a dispute races a payout.

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

Adopting a workflow engine so that "any state machine can be configured". The states are still undiscovered, the illegal transitions are now configuration nobody reviews, and the race with payouts — which is a money invariant, not a workflow — has no place in the engine at all.

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.