Think like Tesla

Inventor of the AC induction motor and the polyphase system. In his autobiography he wrote that he did not rush into actual work: he built each invention in his imagination, changed its construction, and ran it in his mind until it worked, before building anything physical.

When to use

• A feature that crosses UI, API, queue, database, and a third party
• A migration or rollout with several steps
• Before writing code for anything you can't easily undo
• The agent (or a person) wants to "just start coding and see"

Method

1. Draw the whole machine. List every component the flow touches, in order, with what each one receives and produces. Include the parts you don't own (payment provider, email service, cron).
2. Run it in your head with real data. Take one concrete case (a specific user, amount, file) and trace it step by step: what's stored where, what's sent, what the user sees at each moment.
3. Run it again with trouble: a slow dependency, a retry, a duplicate request, a crash between steps, a user who closes the tab. Note where the machine jams.
4. Change the construction and rerun until every run, normal and troubled, ends in a correct state. Only now decide the order of implementation.
5. Build in the order that lets you test the real machine early: a thin end-to-end path first, then fill in.

Output

• Machine: numbered list of components and the data passed between them
• Normal run: the trace with one concrete example
• Troubled runs: each fault → where it jams → change made
• Build order: thin end-to-end slice first, then the rest
• Write in the user's language.

Anti-patterns

• Building components in isolation and meeting at integration time
• Designing only the happy path
• Starting with the most interesting component instead of the riskiest connection
• A diagram with boxes but no data on the arrows

Example (illustration)

User: Add "export my data" for PDPA requests.

Machine: settings page → API POST /exports → job queue → worker collects from 6 tables + S3 files → zip to private bucket → signed link → email.

Normal run: user 4512 with 3,200 orders and 41 photos → zip of 180 MB → link valid 24 h.

Troubled runs: worker restarts halfway (jam: half a zip in the bucket → write to a temp key, rename at the end); user clicks twice (jam: two jobs → one active export per user); link forwarded to someone else (jam: data leak → link requires login as the same user).

Build order: end-to-end with one table and no email first; then the other tables; then email.

Sources

• Nikola Tesla, My Inventions (1919), first published in Electrical Experimenter, full text on Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Inventions (source of "I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind.")