Internalized success criteria is the only reliable defense against overthinking, scope creep, and LLM-assisted rabbit holes consuming side projects.
Key Takeaways
Projects succeed when success criteria are concrete upfront: a weekend shelf project finished because the goal was “jam on woodworking with a friend”, not “build the perfect shelf”.
Researching prior art before building often triggers scope creep: broader existing solutions create pressure to incorporate their scope or build on top of them, killing momentum.
LLM-assisted coding has a conservation-of-scope-creep property: speed gains get offset by unnecessary features; an anchor-search feature for a fuzzy file-path tool took hours before being deleted as useless.
Structural/semantic diff tooling is a genuinely hard open problem: difftastic (treesitter-based) mismatches renamed structs; semanticdiff.com uses a Dijkstra cost-minimization approach after finding GumTree unreliable; treesitter context-sensitive keywords cause parse failures.
Commenters broadly agreed that deadlines are the most reliable scope-creep antidote; open-ended projects stall while game jams and contests force completion.
The structural diffing section drew the sharpest practical consensus: comparing architectures you have against ones you imagine produces more comparison, not decisions, and leaves no commits.
Several builders noted that doing research before building is double-edged: Rich Hickey’s deep-research approach works at language-design scale, but for most side projects it drains motivation before a line of code ships.
Notable Comments
@tyleo: Rec Room CEO framing – teams always wish they had done shorter projects; erring small and shipping early beats erring large and stalling.
@omoikane: Hard deadlines (game jams, standards cycles) solve scope creep structurally; links C++ three-year release cadence as a concrete example.
@laughing_abder: Structural diffing is the costliest trap because “it feels like work” while producing no commits and no decisions.
