Systems and techniques for identifying performance issues and recommending actions during design-time application development include receiving a design-time user interface (UI) having multiple fields associated with data from a database, where the multiple fields including one or more types of fields. In response to receiving a trigger, the systems and techniques iterate through the multiple fields in the design-time UI by applying one or more rules related to the types of fields and cardinality of the data from the database. One or more recommendations are generated for one or more of the fields based on the applied rules to the multiple fields and the recommendations are output to a display. The systems and techniques may include changing the design-time UI without user input using the recommendations.