A developer reflects on how overthinking and scope creep sabotage personal projects, using two concrete examples: researching structural/semantic diff tools instead of just building a minimal one, and over-engineering a fuzzy file search tool with LLM assistance. The post includes a detailed survey of structural diffing tools (difftastic, diffsitter, gumtree, mergiraf, weave, autochrome) and their tradeoffs, then outlines a minimal plan to build a treesitter-based entity-level diff tool for reviewing LLM-generated code in Emacs.
Table of contents
On sabotaging projects by overthinkingConservation of scope creepStructural diffingMisc. stuffSort: