The first version of Flude's intermediate representation was built quick and dirty. We shoved classes, interfaces, enumerations, and variables into a single bottomless template. This universal model had a basic text field. It simply dictated what the object was pretending to be at any given moment.
The leak nobody knew about
Class fields were stored as a flat list of strings. We lost types, documentation, and access specifiers, keeping only the bare variable names. The parsers honestly extracted all this rich information from the source code. Our supermodel grabbed the name and trashed the rest. There were no exceptions and absolutely zero warnings in the logs. The renderer downstream physically couldn't show the type in the documentation. It received a string and manipulated a string.
Generation ran successfully, and files were created. Developers read the reference and tried to guess the data types. Silent degradation is the worst possible scenario when building developer tools. The system lies to your face, pretending everything is completely fine.
Strict models
We trashed the old code. Separate structures emerged for classes, methods, enumerations, and parameters. A class field became a fully typed object that guaranteed the presence of its name, specific type, and documentation. The transition hurt. Any legacy code that habitually accessed fields as text crashed immediately. The system finally started screaming about mismatches. We scrubbed out old string-based access patterns and rewrote the generation templates. In return, we got a solid guarantee: if the parser finds a complex type, it will absolutely make it to the final page intact.
Typing kills an entire layer of silent bugs. Strict contracts force you to write predictable code and free up mental space since you stop memorizing custom formats. Speaking of cleaning up technical debt. In the next post, we'll show how our AI audit dug into the orchestrator code and found an absolute masterpiece—a stale if not 0: condition left over from a local debugging session.
Originally published on our blog: https://blog.flude.guide/blog/typed-entity-models
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