RELATED IDEAS
See what UI still needs to be built
The preview control panel should include a "scaffold overlay" toggle alongside other dev tools like user-type switching. When enabled, the overlay visually marks any UI element that is hardcoded, mocked, or not yet connected to a real data source or action. This gives developers an instant read on what is functional versus what is just a placeholder.
Most users would never think to prompt for this, so it should be a first-class feature in the panel rather than something you have to ask for. The overlay could use a simple visual treatment, like a colored border or badge, to flag unhooked elements without obscuring the UI itself. Clicking a flagged element could optionally show a tooltip with context, such as "static value" or "no action bound."
The goal is to make the gap between prototype and production obvious at a glance, so nothing gets missed when it comes time to wire things up for real.
Here's what it looked like when I told Elle do do this, but I dont want to have to tell Elle to do this every time.
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The practical way to do this is a simple attribute tagging system. During
development, any element that is mocked, hardcoded, or not yet wired gets a
data attribute, something like data-scaffold="true". The overlay toggle
then just queries for those attributes and applies the visual treatment. No
AI involved, no code analysis, just a DOM scan.
The discipline piece is that the developer (or the AI generating the
initial code) has to tag elements at the time they create them. If you're
using AI to build the app, you prompt it once to follow the convention and
tag anything unhooked as it writes it. From that point on, the overlay is
purely mechanical.
This also gives you a bonus: you can count scaffold elements, list them, or
even block a "mark as ready" action until they're all cleared. It becomes a
lightweight checklist, not just a visual.
The main failure mode is forgetting to tag something. That's a process
problem, not a technical one, and it's much easier to solve than asking AI
to re-read and re-evaluate the whole codebase every time someone toggles
the overlay.