Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.

In one of his speeches, Obama said "Better is good". I think about this a lot. It feels like better compounds over time, too. Small improvements add up. From experience, nothing new is perfect the first go round, so sitting around trying to come up with a perfect design is counterproductive because there's no such thing.

"impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

Our CEO at Rec Room put this a way I really like, "Teams are always telling me they wish they did shorter projects. I've almost never heard a team say, 'we wish we delayed launch, did something more complex, polished more'"

I don't think it holds in 100% of situations but I do think if you're going to make an error one way or the other, I'd rather do something smaller and release too early than do something bigger and waste time.

I'm _exactly_ in this situation right now with a side project.

It's in a field that I have little experience with (Information Retrieval). So there is obviously prior art that I could learn from or even integrate with.

This article motivates me further to learn things by focusing on building my own and peek into prior art as I go, when I'm stuck or need ideas.

Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time.

However, he also mentioned that he made other languages before. So the larger story starts earlier, by making things and learning from practice.

Maybe that's also the bigger lesson: Don't overthink, start by making the thing. But later when you learned a bunch of practical lessons and maybe hit a wall or two, then you might need that deeper research to push further.

I think the author is really just getting at the fact that humans are by nature intelligent and by nature tend to think of similar ideas. So you can either unknowingly complete a project which is inevitably in some sense a replication of another project, or you can do the research first and realize it's partially a replication which is a bit disheartening. I think the solution might lie in realizing that completing a project for the sake of your own learning might be the most important factor. (This is easier said than done is when you are trying to complete novel academic research or when you are trying to make a profit off of your unique project.) But those, too, are more than forgiving to research that seem only to slightly tweak something that already exists.

I found that setting deadlines solves most scope creep problems. Anecdotally, I am more likely to complete a project for a game jam or programming contest (which come with hard deadlines) than finishing an open-ended project.

See also "Why does the C++ standard ship every three years" (as opposed to ship when the desired features are ready):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20428703 (2019-07-13, 220 comments)

For someone who says they are overcome by scope creep, they sure do seem to get a lot done — so many linked articles on all sorts of topics at the end of the post.

I think the author is indeed someone who just really enjoys learning and doing all sorts of things, so the rabbitholing is part of the fun that tickles their brain.

Interesting read but the author's thoughts were all over the place.

I am a solo builder and one thing that helped me a lot was this: most of what looks like a "necessary abstraction" is actually scope creep with a different name. I was adding a flag for every new feature and I noticed the pattern in my own code, so I made one rule: a feature can not land until its flag-off behavior has a test. That changed how I see flags. The flag is part of the product, not an escape hatch. Three features in my backlog died by themselves when I started thinking like this.

Over planning and scope creep are a problem, but let's not swing the pendulum to far the other way. Some of my most successful projects were projects where I planned out and worked through most of the features ahead of time through the process of modeling my data without any working software to try out. When I'm in that phase, I often don't really know what is too much. If I leave out features I think I or the users will probably want, I spend a lot of time with significant redesign of core aspects of the code. If I'm wrong, the project gets too big and we chalk it up to scope creep.

My ability to get this right is often a matter of how well I know the domain. If I don't know the domain as well I think I do, I fall into a lot of rework. If I know the domain more than I imagine then I waste my time with a baby step process when I could have run. All of this is a big judgement call, and I have "regrets" in both directions.

Firstly - Greetings! It’s so rare to see a Clojure person in the wild! and secondly, I really resonated with this! it feels like we, computer programmer, typically overthink too much to begin with, and then LLMs come along and actually help us overthink even more!

This is a pretty common failure mode in engineering too.

You start with a simple goal → then research → then keep expanding scope → and never ship.

The people who actually finish things do the opposite: lock scope early, ignore “better ideas”, ship v1.

Most projects don’t fail due to lack of ideas, they fail because they never converge.

Difftastic can even diff plaintext by treating it as Elvish! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49278577/how-to-improve-...

Sabotage is intentional, but the problem is unintended excursions, which is endemic to any scouting.

The real problem is avoidance, when cuts are warranted and you don't want them, so you ... hide, often by working hard on something else.

The solution is to value your time. Most don't, so (self-) managers instead need to dangle other opportunities: finish this so you can do that. You can't take candy from a baby without trouble; instead, you trade for something else.

> Perhaps there’s some kind of conservation law here: Any increases in programming speed will be offset by a corresponding increase in unnecessary features, rabbit holes, and diversions.

This resonates hard. LLMs enable true perfectionism, the ability to completely fulfil your vision for a project. This lets you add many features without burning out due to fatigue or boredom. However (as the author points out), most projects' original goal does not require these complementary features.

The newest structural diff tool is RefactoringMiner, there's a paper and a Github repo that works out of the box which is rare for this space. Excellent results but mainline is limited to Java IIRC with a couple ports for other languages.

I think this should've been two separate blog posts.

Definitely have found myself in a similar situation in fact most of the times option 2 happens. I too have caught myself just thinking rather than building and glad I am not the only one who repeatedly tells himself I should just build it rather than enter the rabbit hole of what is out there.

My answer is both #1 and #2

Prototype a minority of the time. Research a majority of the time. At some point the ratio flips as research fades out and producing increases.

I feel for this a lot, but it's because I don't want to actually write code or build something if there is something workable already out there.

Maybe I lack imagination or curiosity, but it makes it difficult to come up with an idea and follow it through.

Funnily this aligns perfectly with the WW2 era CIA Sabotaging handbook https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

Organizations and Conferences:

1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

2. Make “speeches,” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

3. When possible refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration”. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.

4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

7. Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision – raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Managers and Supervisors:

1. Demand written orders.

2. “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.

3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of the order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until its completely ready.

4. Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.

5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.

6. In making work assignments, always sing out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers with poor equipment.

7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products send back for refinishing those which have the least flaws. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.

8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.

9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.

10. To lower moral and with it production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

11. Hold meetings when there is critical work to be done.

12. Multiply paperwork in plausible ways. Start duplicating files.

13. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, making payments, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

14. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

also if youre in a large organization, this is a great way to sabotage other peoples projects while elevating your stature. Require that they go evaluate alternatives and prior art, and write a slew of analysis and decision documentation

I mean if you don't reconsider the foundation of computer science, mathematics or what even is information, can you truly be building a cool CRM?

i feel a lot are missing the point here of identifying the "why" in why you want to build a project.

do you want to learn a new skill? do you want to scratch a very specific personal itch for just yourself? do you want to solve problems for others as well? do you want to build a startup/business around the idea?

all of these necessitate different approaches and strategies to research and coding. scratching an itch? maybe fully vibe coding is fine. want to learn? ditch the vibes and write by hand and ignore prior art. want to build a business? do some actual market research first and decide if this is something you actually want to pursue.

this post was a good reminder for me to identify the why as early on as possible and to be ok with just building something for myself without always having to monetize a side project which, for me, just zaps all joy from it.

Scope creep is scary when you have the wrong pretext: to "just" implement a small feature or a project, when in reality the prerequisites to do so are enormous.

As usual it's not so black and white and is all about balance.

Project where the sole user is you in your kitchen? Sure, hack it together.

Project where you actually want other people to use the product? A research phase matters and helps here.

Consider what the goal is and the amount of effort to invest typically becomes more evident.

Just code using c++ (or in a language with a similar syntax complexity or a massive runtime, java, microsoft rust, etc). It gets even better with ISO regular feature creep: you'll find always a dev to manage to make hard dependent on the latest "standard".

Basically, you will end up dependent on the massive complexity of a compiler due to the syntax complexity, and the cherry on top, thanks to ISO, you'll get feature creep creating a cycle of planned obsolescence around 5 to 10 years.

Oh, sorry, "they" called that "innovation".

Scope creep is scary when you have the wrong pretext.

I think the ideal solution is to spend a lot of time in the analysis phase to load your brain up with the correct context, but then be ready to throw out the overengineered solution and just build what feels right.

Don't fall prey to sunk cost fallacy. Just because you spent hours researching a PhD level topic doesn't mean you now have to use it in your project, if it's not quite the right application.

You worry too much about being wrong. Just try something and adjust as needed.