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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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