Why This System Looks the Way It Does — Recoverflow's 6-Day Design Journey
The day after submitting to the hackathon I finally had a moment to look back at the whole system. Turned out something surprising — across those 7 days we spent more time thinking about architecture than writing code. Days 9-12 were 4 solid days of talking to my mom, my aunt about real collections scenarios, listing D-001 through D-022 design decisions, drawing drawio v1/v2/v3. Days 13-15 were the only code days. This post is the full design journey — why I picked ‘outstanding balance’ over ‘gross invoice,’ why 9 agents in 3 layers, the 4 hidden cases nobody talks about — all from imagining real conversations with real people on bad days.