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@ vinney
2025-05-08 17:08:33
We're all somewhere on the journey. I'm happy to answer questions any time if I happen to be further along a particular branch of the path.
In case it's interesting to you, what I meant in non-dev speak is:
Say I have some new Event Kind I want to introduce. I have in mind a handful of ways the kind might be used in an **eventual** app. I want to check that the design of the kind I have in mind will support those features. nak is basically a bare-bones nostr client - simple requests and simple responses all in text only - so if I have a relay running that understands my new Kind, I can use nak to make sure that the kind of requests I would send to the relay do what I hope.
Since it's a CLI tool, once I have a little collection of interactions tested out in nak, I can basically write those commands into a script (with a bit of extra diagnostic printout, etc.) and now when I run that script it either goes well: "okay great, the Kind makes sense, the relay handles it properly, and the user interactions work like I thought" or things fail and I can look into it further.
That "happy path" (the minimal actions a user might take in order to basically use the new features. not yet taking into account errors or weird edge cases, etc.) then acts as a kind of proof and assurance that "upgrading" those features into a client app UI is worthwhile and will work well.
In a nutshell: that "prototype with nak first" approach is like 1,000x faster to whip up than going straight from Idea -> UI. And sometimes you falsify some hypothesis you had really early and don't waste your time determining which color your buttons should be :)