Developer builds save panel five ways to benchmark statechart value

A developer built the same UI save panel five times using different approaches to evaluate the practical worth of statecharts, particularly XState. The panel involves five boolean flags — spinner, error banner, dirty marker, confirm dialog, and closed state — producing 32 possible combinations. Each implementation was tested as a pure state-transition function against eight shared rules, ensuring consistent and objective comparison. The first version failed on the very first event, while the final statechart-based version produced the longest code file of all five. The experiment deliberately excluded XState's async features like invoke and cancellation to focus solely on state shape and transition correctness.