Products · Product
Flow type checker
Raised as a usability problem by 23 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Error messages often not intuitive, about a third of the timeUnreviewed
20122026- Error messages take weeks for many users to understand and get used to2019-01-24
- Cryptic, gibberish error messages and huge meaningless stack traces waste developer time2017-11-09
- Error messages are cryptic and unhelpful, and it misses obvious mistakes2017-11-09
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- First test of the tool is described as very confusing to use2025-05-21
- Production staff have to work through a horrible UI to manage assets2025-03-19
- Adding a property to typed data objects is blocked, forcing verbose workarounds2022-11-05
- Issues in OCaml-based Flow were difficult to debug, unlike JavaScript tools with stack traces and breakpoints2021-04-20
- Upgrades throw many new errors with incoherent messages, forcing work on already-working code2019-09-09
- Flow upgrades can be nightmarish, needing non-trivial codemods that don't fully work and cause cascading errors2019-09-09
- Flow's Windows support is buggy and painful for developers using Windows2019-06-20
- Error messages take weeks for many users to understand and get used to2019-01-24
- Tooling has many bugs, undocumented config options, and Windows workarounds2019-01-15
- Cryptic, gibberish error messages and huge meaningless stack traces waste developer time2017-11-09
- Error messages are cryptic and unhelpful, and it misses obvious mistakes2017-11-09
- Needs constant babysitting, and adding dependencies breaks it confusingly2017-09-13
- Error messages are not intuitive and hard to understand2017-09-13
- Error messages are often not intuitive, about a third of the time2017-09-13
- Type errors are incredibly confusing to understand2017-09-13
- Flow's developer tooling is not good enough, so the user keeps failing to adopt it2017-07-31
- Type checker ignores errors without warning, and IDE integration is horrible2016-12-31
- Flow is painfully slow to use on Windows and its tooling lags far behind2016-09-20
- Flow tooling doesn't work on Windows, so the commenter can't use it2016-04-27
- Type errors appear at the wrong places, making it hard to trace the real bug2016-01-29
- Hard to find help and docs; couldn't tell why React prop validation failed2015-11-30
- Editor integration is buggy, so type checking is harder to use in the editor2015-09-24
- Flow borderline unusable because it doesn't support const and let declarations2015-08-07
- Ignoring a dependency file makes Flow pretend it doesn't exist, breaking the build2015-07-20
- Autocomplete rarely gives suggestions, so other tools are needed2015-01-05
- Back button leads to slow repopulating list, scroll position jumps, and scrolling is hard2012-05-01