"What I Thought I'd Already Built"

  • debugging
  • decision
  • ai

I sat down to test what I was sure was finished last week and found out it wasn't.

Week of July 20, 2026

Progress

  • Cart page laid out and styled, with click listeners attached for its controls
  • Cart line items switched from flex to CSS grid, cutting down on layout-only wrapper divs
  • A stepper/spinner control built for the quantity field, using SVGs for the buttons
  • A totals section added, shared by the checkout and continue-shopping buttons
  • laBoutique's /cart endpoint updated to return item_count directly instead of requiring a manual count on the client
  • A login-check bug fixed that was breaking every page load for logged-out users, surfaced while moving cart/store logic into page pre-processing

The Hard Part

I went to test the cart work from last week and discovered getCart() and checkOut() didn't actually exist yet — same situation as getStore() before it. Not a huge deal on its own, but implementing them surfaced a string of smaller problems. laBoutique's /cart endpoint didn't return an item_count, so instead of counting items client-side I had the endpoint provide it directly. Getting that count into the header at load time meant moving cart/store logic out of the store route and into the page's pre-processing step, which then broke every page for logged-out users — that logic needed to sit behind a login check, and didn't. I also ran into something I still don't understand: laBoutique has both a /cart endpoint served by cart.php and a separate /api/cart-api.php file. Why both exist is still an open question.

Decision Made

Retire the cart ID once a cart is purchased, instead of letting it get reused within its 24-hour window. Looking at how add/remove worked on the laBoutique side, I didn't like that a purchased cart's ID could still be picked back up later, since nothing was cleaning it up. Retiring it on purchase means the cart ID stored on the order record now actually means something.

Grid over flex for cart line items, SVGs for the stepper buttons. Grid cleaned up the markup — fewer wrapper divs just for layout — and made row alignment easier to reason about.

Learnings

Working through the cart ID lifecycle was a reminder that AI doesn't carry decisions forward on its own. Whatever reasoning led to the original cart-reuse behavior might have made sense to Claude in that conversation, but once other things changed around it, that reasoning wasn't visible anymore — to me or to it. I've started trying to capture decisions more deliberately as I go, rather than letting them live only in a chat history that's already scrolled past.

The Question That Appeared

Right now, cart updates would need to fire on every checkout or continue-shopping click. But a user can add, remove, and re-add items several times before doing either — which makes it hard to know for certain what actually needs to be saved by the time they click. Still working out whether to sync on every change instead, or find another way to reconcile it at the end.

Next Week

Wire up the stepper and the delete button, and settle the question of when cart updates actually get sent to laBoutique.