u/ralph818

A research in 2024 has found that short stories written with the help of AI were individually rated as better, but were collectively more similar to each other. The argument of this article is that as more and more of us ask the same few AI models what to build, what to write and what to think, our ideas may slowly start to converge.

I'm building an app on Laravel + Inertia + Vue, and I wanted one small thing: star an item, and the star lights up instantly instead of waiting for the server.

Inertia v3's optimistic option makes that look like a one-liner. It isn't. The moment the screen stops waiting for the server, the app stops doing one thing at a time. Nothing broke badly, but things felt off, and it took six small fixes:

1. Clicks overlap. A new visit cancels the one in flight, so starring three items quickly made the first one flicker back. Fix: async: true so requests run side by side.
2. Feedback lags. The star was instant, but the "Starred · Undo" toast waited for the server. Fix: the page shows the toast itself with an id, and the server's flashed toast updates it by that id.
3. Users undo before the server has done anything. Fix: restore the screen at once, and send the real undo as soon as the original request returns its undo token.
4. Shared state races. With two requests in flight, a session flash meant for "the next request" got picked up by the wrong one and vanished. Fix: don't rely on next-request state; the page keeps what it needs.
5. SQLite complains. "database is locked" under parallel requests. Fix: busy_timeout, WAL, synchronous=normal and IMMEDIATE transactions in config/database.php.
6. The details. A progress bar for a change that's already on screen (showProgress: false), and crypto.randomUUID() failing on a plain-HTTP dev domain while the tests on 127.0.0.1 stayed green.

The takeaway: optimistic UI is an architectural decision, not a UX tweak. Decide early who owns the truth at each moment and how you roll back.

Full write-up with code (and a couple of comics): https://rulr.dev/blog/optimistic-ui-is-an-architectural-decision/